The Caravaggio Conspiracy Read Online Free Page A

years old, forced by papal decree to witness the excecutions, buried his head in his mother’s skirts.
    Attempting to escape his dream, Caravaggio tried to rise out of his seat. He knew what was going to happen: he had seen it in his dream many times before. But he couldn’t move. His legs were paralyzed. The Cenci, hand in hand, were being led past him towards the steps leading up to the scaffold. Behind, in the piazza, the crowd fell silent, as if struck dumb in contemplation of the horror to come.
    Everyone in Rome was familiar with the story. The Cenci were one of the greatest noble families of Italy. But Don Francesco was a monster. No woman, nor any girl approaching puberty, was safe from his predations. As well as a rapist, he was a murderer three times over, and a thief whose brutality and greed had landed him in prison several times. In the past, he had always bought his freedom with ‘generous’ donations to the Church. It was his rape of Beatrice, his step-daughter, in front of her mother that convinced the family that it was time to act. Giacomo, with the support of one of his servants, confronted his father and in the midst of a violent argument stabbed him to death, throwing his body into the street from an upstairs window. Everybody in Rome knew the circumstances of the murder. Nobody doubted the righteousness of the act. What Giacomo and his family failed to take into account was the extreme rapaciousness of Pope Clement VIII, the former Ippolito Aldobrandini.
    The Aldobrandini, with their roots in Florence, had profited hugely from their Vatican connections. The Pope’s younger cousins, pushed forward by their uncle, had married into the Pamphilj and Farnese families, becoming at a stroke key members of the ruling class. But no one joined the nobility without bringing something to the table. Power and influence were commodities like anything else, traded on the open market. Thus it was that Clement, dismissing pleas for mercy from every corner of Europe, pronounced that the Cenci must pay with their lives for the death of Don Francesco. Their estates, according to a codicil buried in the text, would be forfeit to the Aldobrandini.
    No one was surprised by such a display of greed. That was how things were done in the Eternal City. It was the way they had always been done. To the victor the spoils. But the executions themselves were regarded as exceptional. Not since classical times had one entire family been sacrificed in cold blood to serve the interests of another.
    By a convention dating back to the time of Leonardo, artists, including the 28-year-old Michelangelo Merissi, had been invited to record the final minutes of the condemned. Meanwhile, from the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo, raised above the multitude, the Pope would have an uninterrupted view of the proceedings.
    Looking up at the scaffold, locked into his nightmare, Caravaggio watched, appalled, as Beatrice, her hands tied in front of her, halted next to his chair. He had been sketching the headsman and she glanced down, then caught his eye. He turned away. ‘Will you sketch me, too?’ she asked him. But he didn’t – couldn’t – reply. One of the Decollati took her gently by the elbow and urged her forward. She mounted the steps behind her mother and older brother. Young Bernardo was held back for a moment, then compelled to follow.
    What ensued would never leave the artist, not even for a single day. It haunted his nights. It infused his art. Now, as he turned over and over in his sleep, he saw it all again, as red and bloody as the morning on which it happened.
    The mother, Lucrezia, was first to be led to the block. She fainted, and was revived with cold water. Afterwards, she stood tall and unwavering, saying the rosary along with her assigned Decollato while unfastening the top of her bodice so that the axe would not become entangled with her clothing. As she knelt down and forward, the executioner looked up towards the