ABSTRACT
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, for all the violence of the life he led in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily, was a painter of extraordinary compassion, and compassion is what most Romans, if not the Pope, felt for Beatrice Cenci. Caravaggio saw Giordano Bruno's execution, he understood the tragic overtones of any death at the hands of authority. In many ways, Bruno presented a more complex and potentially a more dangerous case for Pope Clement's Jubilee than Beatrice Cenci, whose death was enacted in public in order to uphold the rights of a paterfamilias over the rest of his family. Bruno's first prison, in Venice, was a section of the old thirteenth-century Dominican convent of San Pietro in Castello — another prison that no longer exists. Bruno's trial seems to have proceeded with scrupulous attention to legal procedure, though someone information about the trial is incomplete.
