M, p.42
M, page 42
What the interdiction caused in Rome in the spring of 1606 was a new flareup of the factional violence in the streets. Cardinal Bellarmino was abused in the street and his retinue beaten up. Scipione Borghese’s staff were attacked. Sunday 28 May 1606 was the first anniversary of the Borghese regime. The solemn processions to the French and Spanish churches, the firework displays over the castel Sant’ Angelo and the boats on the river, Paul V’s cavalcade, all took place in a volatile city full of disturbances, brawls, insults in the streets. One episode that day was of particular violence. In the confusion, excitement and the gang brawls that were sputtering all over the city that Sunday afternoon, it seemed like another projection of the slightly panicky excitement that shows of power always elicited in a people highly practised in reading the signals. So the event was reported the next day, and over the following days, in a series of letters and avvisi that were dispatched to various smaller capitals around Italy. The event got a certain coverage, caused a certain flurry in various circles, because of the intensity of the violence and the relative notoriety of those involved. Like every death, though, this one happened at the intersection of lines that were drawn from way back, and had been converging inexorably for years. Not much was known about exactly what happened or the identities of everyone involved, and the reports fell into a series of contradictions and uncertainties that were never, later, fully resolved. There was enough to see that more’d been at stake than a small bet, and more’d driven the main opponents together than a fault at tennis.
The tennis fields were in the campo Marzio. The via della Pallacorda ran outside the Tuscan ambassador’s residence, villa Firenze. Along the other side of the palazzo di Firenze was vico San Biagio, where M’s old house was. Pallacorda was the forerunner of Wimbledon lawn tennis, and the street went on being called after the playing field long after it’d been built over. It was a couple of minutes’ walk from the Tomassoni house in San Lorenzo in Lucina. It was an habitual hangout. You played and you bet on other people’s games – this was where, five or six years earlier, the witness in one of Onorio Longhi’s court appearances remembered seeing him play tennis, and remembered seeing him talking with Ranuccio Tomassoni at the Pantheon nearby. In those days, prosecutors had been convinced Longhi had assaulted Tomassoni, but Longhi denied it, claimed him as a friend, said they’d lately dined together. In 1600 Ranuccio Tomassoni was barely twenty. In 1606 he was a married man who still hadn’t found a stable profession but he knew his way around the households of several cardinals and had extensive experience as a protector of prostitutes and had lately been flexing his muscle on the streets as a political gangster with his military brothers.
One of the very first reports caught the moment.
28 May 1606. The celebration of the pope’s coronation began, which was on May 29 of last year 1605, and the same day on the grand bank [of the Tiber], celebrating the occasion and fighting and competing with each other in the boats, somebody took a swing at someone else and the other hit back and inflicted a wound that killed him. That same evening in campo Marzio the painter M wounded and killed Ranuccio from Terni with a blow to the inside of his thigh – he was hardly confessed before he died and was buried next morning at the Rotunda – and then his brother captain Giovan Francesco pulled his sword and killed another soldier – former captain – from castel Sant’ Angelo, and in the same fight Giovan Francesco wounded M and another.
Late that Sunday night the surgeon barber on duty at the Tor di Nona prison noted that he’d operated on a Petronio Troppa from Bologna – the soldier who’d taken M’s part – for sword wounds in the left arm, thigh, shin and heel, removing seven pieces of bone. The patient, he noted tersely in Latin, was likely to die or remain crippled. With equal brevity the church recorded Ranuccio Tomassoni’s death and burial next morning as the avvisi had it. A private letter sent to Modena a couple of days later, on May 31, offered what became the current account of what happened, slightly exaggerating the deaths and injuries.
Two evenings ago the celebrated painter M, accompanied by a captain Petronio from Bologna, clashed with Ranuccio from Terni and after a brief fight the painter was fatally wounded in the head and the other two were dead. The fight was over a fault call while they were playing tennis, by the grand duke’s ambassador’s place.
In fact only Ranuccio Tomassoni was dead, as other reports soon made clear. M was badly wounded in the head, but he disappeared from the scene. Petronio, near death, was imprisoned and treated and would eventually pull through. Three days later the always well informed informer and agent Francesco Maria Vialardi sent an avviso to Maffeo Barberini in Paris that filled out the details more accurately.
The same day [May 28] there was an argument over a bet near the grand duke’s palace between a son of the late colonel Luca Antonio Tomassoni from Terni and M the famous painter. Tomassoni died from a wound inflicted when he fell down while he was retreating. Then captain Giovan Francesco his brother and M’s friend captain Petronio from Bologna joined the fight and Giovan Francesco fatally wounded capt. Petronio and hit M in the head. He and M got away and Petronio was jailed, where he still is.
A more detailed report sent to Ferdinando I in Florence the same day, maybe by Vialardi himself as Tuscan informer, added the detail about M’s hit to the thigh and said that Ranuccio’s brother had held Petronio prisoner – and the very pertinent further fact ignored by others that M and Ranuccio had quarrelled two days earlier.
If this were so, the story that went down in history – of the dangerously impulsive and murderously quarrelsome painter lashing out at some near unknown, or even a young friend, over the utter triviality of a point in a tennis match – needed some radical revision. The idea that M’s killing of Tomassoni might’ve had antecedents recalled the letter the duke’s ever hopeful ambassador Masetti had sent to Modena three days earlier, in an exasperated mood of relief and cynicism.
The painter M has left Rome badly wounded, having on Sunday evening killed another who provoked him to a fight. I’m told he’s heading for Florence and maybe he’ll come to Modena as well, so he can make them happy doing as many paintings as they want.
He was wrong about where M was headed, but the story of the provocation further queried the version of a spontaneous flareup over the score in the tennis match. Del Monte’s old childhood playmate, namesake and patron Francesco Maria II Della Rovere the duke of Urbino also got an avviso sent by his own informant – who was maybe Del Monte himself – on May 31 about the killing and M’s flight. This presented the fight as bigger, fiercer and more protracted than the other reports suggested, in fact
… a very notable conflict with four on each side, the leader of one band being a Ranuccio from Terni who died soon after a long fight … they say the cause of it was a question of a gambling debt, of ten scudi that the dead man had won from the painter.
Who were the others? They all fled, but they were identified in the warrants issued by the investigating magistrate exactly a month later. Ranuccio Tomassoni was dead and Petronio Troppa was near death in jail. Warrants went out for Giovan Francesco Tomassoni and two brothers of Ranuccio’s wife of three years, Ignazio and Giovan Federico Giugoli. On the other side, for M and Onorio Longhi. That left one unaccounted for. There were reasons for thinking the fourth on M’s side was Mario Minniti.
What happened? And why? Another avviso of May 31, little known, longer than the others and kept in the Vatican’s secret archive, tried to recount the event and its cause differently but only raised more questions. It evoked a major street fight, remarked that nothing like it had happened in Rome for a long time and estimated that maybe twelve men had been involved on each side. It confirmed the story that M already owed Tomassoni ten scudi, said he’d delayed paying the debt out of contempt, and in an opaque phrase added that
to avenge some offence, M had put together six hundred scudi … in preparation for flight.
That M was planning to run made no sense. Rome was the only place M wanted to be. It sounded like an explanation after the event. The phrase used might’ve meant to guard against contingencies. In any case, the report added, M had been passing the Tomassoni house with friends – actually a couple of blocks from where the fight was reported – when Ranuccio Tomassoni came out armed and confronted him. The two had fought alone and M had been wounded, at which point captain Petronio had come to M’s aid and Giovan Francesco had intervened on his brother’s side. The brawl then became general.
M seemed to have been bailed up and fought his way out. The report confirmed the earlier bad blood between M and Tomassoni. Its mention of an earlier offence against M recalled his obscure wounding seven months earlier, about which he’d obstinately refused to say a word when investigators found him convalescing in Ruffetti’s house. The Tomassoni gang would’ve been a formidable enemy – the whole episode made sense in the light of their intimidation of the police and their political violence in the street a year earlier and the lesser episode the year before that. And the evidence of hostility between M’s close friend Onorio Longhi and Ranuccio Tomassoni went back for years. The idea that M was being menaced and stalked by the Tomassonis was strongly confirmed by Mancini’s couple of lines on the incident. Mancini, telegraphic as ever, said of M – not mentioning Tomassoni by name at all – that
finally, as a result of some events that meant he was running the risk of being murdered, in self defence he killed his enemy. He was helped by Onorio Longhi to defend himself against the massive aggression.
A picture was beginning to form. M had made the mistake of owing Tomassoni money at a time – the time of Lena, legal problems, flight to Genoa, loss of his house and property, the need to offer sweeteners to the new papal family – when his finances were in a bad way. The little painting he did was free offerings or work already paid for long before. M’s repeated and humiliating requests for small advances from Masetti confirmed the need. That wasn’t his style and he reddens whenever he sees me. The debt was an occasion for the Tomassoni brothers to hassle and intimidate M, who was also on the other side, now the losing side, of the political divide. Ranuccio Tomassoni may have nursed an old resentment of M’s friendships with the prostitutes, from the days when Tomassoni had been trying to turn an honest penny as a courtier pimp, before he married a friend’s sister and found a new outlet in his brother’s control of local government in the campo Marzio. On May 28 M was attacked or goaded into fighting.
First they fought with racquets and then he took up arms and killed the youth,
wrote Bellori gracefully and inventively of M and a young friend of his, long after the event. Giovanni Baglione, who like Mancini was in a position to know, gave an incidental hint about what happened afterward. Baglione’s line – twisted as usual by old rancour – was that M went looking for trouble. A reluctant respect for M’s courage nevertheless seeped through what the epigone of prudence had to say.
In his overly passionate nature, M was a bit wild and sometimes he used to look for a chance to break his neck or put someone else’s life in danger. He spent a lot of time with men who had quarrelsome characters themselves. Finally he clashed with Ranuccio Tomassoni, a young fellow with a very good style, in a difference over a tennis match. They challenged each other, took up arms, and when Ranuccio fell M wounded him in the prick with the point of his sword and killed him. They all fled Rome …
There was clearly more to the story, when they all fled at the end of it. The phrase that mattered in Baglione’s account was his description of Tomassoni as having a very good style. The style – as the theatrically self important language and gestures Ranuccio used in his 1604 clash with the police showed – was the formal and obsessively dignified Spanish manner the young Tomassoni was clearly cultivating, in line with his family’s proSpanish allegiances. That Baglione was impressed enough to mention it meant more than point scoring. M had killed a comme il faut young man. It meant Tomassoni had a social standing that impressed the socially anxious and insecure Baglione and compared very impressively with the social nonentity M’s total lack of status. Ranuccio Tomassoni, as various avvisi recalled, was the son of the late colonel Luca Antonio who was very well remembered by the proSpanish aristocracy for his miltary services to the house of Farnese. The death of a Tomassoni would be particularly displeasing for the new Spanish aligned pope. The Tomassonis now had political clout. Maybe the still recent memory of a subtly pisstaking portrait stung his beatitude afresh when he heard of the killing.
Baglione seemed to know too how the fight ended. Several avvisi referred to a wound in the thigh, which was to say groin, but Baglione’s specificity made clear that the final blow was a gesture that went disastrously wrong – not a thrust in the fight, but a humiliating little parting flick with the tip of his sword at the fallen Tomassoni’s dick, an insulting denial of Tomassoni’s ever so valued manhood. Unfortunately for both Ranuccio Tomassoni – whose bravo style, lately mutating into hidalgo pomposity, had seemed an overcompensation on the part of the youngest son in a family of soldiers and thugs, the boy too young to have proven himself in the field against infidels and heretics like his father and his elder brothers – M’s flick severed an artery and Tomassoni soon bled to death. Did the boy pimp, the street bully, the child father, the political gangster, the unproven youngest son, the would be sgherro and hounder of the greatest painter of his age, feel, as consciousness faded and his blood drained out through his penis, that this was a man’s death he was dying? It didn’t look like that to family and friends. Death administered with contempt was another reason for a moralizing pope to harden against M, and for Tomassoni’s family to remain implacable in wanting M’s skin.
* * *
ONE DEAD, BLOOD spilt into the ground, one near death. The fighters scattering as word spread and police asserted their presence. The women of the Tomassoni clan – the dead man’s mother Olimpia, his wife – appearing to reclaim Ranuccio’s body and prepare it that Sunday night for a hasty burial next morning. His widow arriving as her two brothers fled into the late spring evening. Her small daughter crying. Giovan Francesco Tomassoni reverting from street fighter to his role as district head of the campo Marzio, taking charge of Petronio’s barely living body, a sack of bones, broken within – and then realizing that he too had to take flight. Badly wounded in the head – some at the scene thought fatally – M making his way or being helped to where he took refuge in someone’s house. The news passing along the nerves of Roman power. In some way, in some sequence, these events followed the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni by M’s hand.
M holed up somewhere for a couple of days while his wounds were dressed and he recovered some strength and the network of his friends and protectors was activated again. It was less than a year since he’d run to Genoa, but he was in a far more desperate need now, wanted for the infinitely graver crime of homicide, and a compromising presence in even the most powerful person’s household. There was a gap between the first news of the killing on Sunday and the avvisi of the following Wednesday, which implied he’d only just left Rome that day. Many years later, Sandrart wrote that M first took refuge in the palazzo Giustiniani – a less likely hiding place than others nearby and the marchese himself was away from Rome on his European journey at the time. Past history made Del Monte’s over the way a tested and more likely refuge. It was most likely of all that while Ranuccio Tomassoni lay bleeding to death M staggered or was dragged into the grounds of the palazzo di Firenze. The Tuscan ambassador Giovanni Niccolini’s residence was part of Del Monte’s domain, and the fight’d happened right outside it.
They all fled from Rome, wrote Baglione succinctly, and M went to Palestrina … Bellori said that
He fled from Rome under pursuit and without money and found refuge at Zagarolo in the kindness of the duke, don Marzio Colonna,
and Bellori was confirming what Mancini had noted earlier, that
he was forced to flee from Rome and his first stop was in Zagarolo, where he was given secret refuge by that prince, who knew him very well,
and it fitted what Baglione remembered and ambassador Masetti’s report four months later, that M was at Paliano. Zagarolo, Palestrina and Paliano were all neighbouring feudal territories belonging to the Colonnas. They were all within striking distance of Rome, about fifty kilometres west of the city and slightly to the south.
Once again, it looked as though Del Monte saved M’s skin. Del Monte was tied to the Colonnas by more than his cousin’s son in the Colonna household in Rome, more than his Sforza descent. The marchesa of Caravaggio, Costanza Colonna Sforza and her brother cardinal Ascanio Colonna had another sister, Giovanna, who’d been married to Carlo Del Monte. Carlo, killed in battle a very few years earlier, commanding an infantry company at the siege of Ostend in the low countries, had been the son of the mathematician Guidubaldo Del Monte. Del Monte’s nephew, that is, when family ties counted for everything, had been a war hero married to the prince of Paliano’s daughter, son in law of the victor of Lepanto. And Del Monte was close too to Marzio Colonna, the duke of Zagarolo – some years later he mentioned Marzio’s son the new duke in a letter to the duke of Urbino as my relative and very special friend. He must’ve arranged for Colonna – who apparently already knew M well – to take M into initial hiding on his Zagorolo territory. Don Marzio’s wife’s family were the lords of nearby Palestrina, where M moved on later in the summer, still under the protection of the Colonna family network. Ascanio Colonna, as it happened, was appointed bishop of Palestrina a week after M killed Tomassoni. Later still that summer M moved on to Paliano, a little beyond Palestrina to the west.
