The Context of Caravaggio's 'Beheading of St John' in Malta

• Autores: David M. Stone
• Localización: Burlington magazine, ISSN 0007-6287, Vol. 139, Nº 1128, 1997, págs. 161-170
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • ON 1st December 1608, some two months after his escape from a Maltese prison and flight to Sicily, Fra Michelangelo da Caravaggio was defrocked in absentia by his fellow brothers of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta.' Stripped of the honorary knighthood 'd'Obbedienza Magistrale' that the Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt had granted him on 14th July, the artist had now greatly diminished his chances of receiving a papal pardon for the homicide he had committed in Rome in 1606. The knights' tribunal performed the privatio habitas in the recently constructed Oratory of S. Giovanni Decollato in the Conventual Church of St John in Valletta. Thus the absent painter suffered the indignity of being degraded directly in front of his freshly completed masterpiece, the Beheading of St John the Baptist (Fig. 7). t At the conclusion of the trial, as the court minutes state, Caravaggio was 'expelled and thrust forth' from the order 'like a rotten and fetid limb'.