Caravaggio in Syracuse: the Burial of St Lucy, 1608
I spent quite a lot of last year thinking about Caravaggio, and took folk around the major exhibition at Palazzo Barberini on several occasions. Here is the first of three posts I wrote about that super show.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been in Sicily with a delightful group of folk travelling with Learn Italy who organise charmingly unhurried study tours. While staying on Ortygia we made a foray to the Syracusean mainland to the fabulous archeological site of Neapolis and on the way paused at the Basilica of Santa Lucia al Sepolcro, there to admire the altarpiece by Caravaggio. The painting, much damaged and subject of major restoration work, only returned to the church for which it was painted in 2020 after two decades spent mostly on Ortygia. There is something especially moving about seeing a painting in the context for which it was painted.
Caravaggio arrived in Syracuse from Malta where he had hoped entering the Order of Saint John would have led to a papal pardon for the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni, the reason for which he had fled Rome. He was received into the Order a month or so before his vast altarpiece of the Beheading of St John the Baptist was completed for the cathedral at Valletta by late August 1608.
However what Caravaggio’s biographer Bellori describes as an “ill-considered quarrel with a noble knight” followed. Presumably physical in nature it led to his defrocking and imprisonment in the forbidding bastions of Fort St Angelo, jutting craggily into the great harbour of the Città Vittoriosa. A provocative jibe from a swaggering nobleman; swift offence taken; his hot temper rising: all entirely avoidable and yet one can see exactly how Caravaggio found himself in yet another seemingly impossible circumstance. After all part of his great appeal is that he is so very, humanly, fallible.
According to Bellori the tale became ever more rocambolesque: Caravaggio escaped his captors, scaling the vast walls of the prison with a rope, and fled to Sicily. Whether this cinematic tale of derring-do is exactly accurate, or whether the sympathetic intervention of, perhaps, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna facilitated the escape is uncertain. Either way Caravaggio arrived at Syracuse in October 1608, where he was reacquainted with a local painter called Mario Minniti. Minniti was a few years his junior and they had been friendly and had possibly shared lodgings in Rome (Minniti is often thought to be the model for the boy with a basket of fruit now in the Borghese, and is sometimes posited to have been his lover).
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