Caravaggio

• 1. Introduction

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  Caravaggio died on the 18th of July 1610 in Porto Ercole, near Grosseto in Tuscany, alone and on the run, with three paintings in his possession intended as gifts for a cardinal who might have saved him. He was thirty-six years old. He had killed a man four years earlier and never returned to Rome. He had been expelled from the Knights of Malta as "a foul and rotten member." His face had been disfigured in an ambush. Rumours had already circulated in Rome that he was dead.

  And yet the question that haunts his story is not how he died but what he left behind. A 20th-century art historian declared that what begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting. Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Bernini: all of them shaped, directly or indirectly, by one violent, restless man from Milan. How did he do it? And what kind of person does it take to transform centuries of tradition in just a handful of years?

• 2. Light and Shadow

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  Chiaroscuro, the play of light against dark, had been practised long before Caravaggio arrived in Rome. He did not invent the technique. What he did was take it somewhere no one else had dared: darkening the shadows until they swallowed nearly everything, then transfixing his subjects in a blinding shaft of light. The result was a style that came to be called tenebrism, from the Italian word for darkness. Artists working in this mode were known as tenebrists, or tenebrosi, "shadowists."

  The effect was not merely decorative. Caravaggio used light as a kind of psychological instrument. He worked directly on the canvas from live models, skipping the preparatory drawings that were standard practice in central Italy. He scored basic compositional guides into the canvas with the end of his brush handle. He preferred the Venetian habit of painting in oils straight from the subject, a method that gave his surfaces an immediacy his contemporaries found startling.

  His earliest known paintings, including Boy Peeling a Fruit and Boy with a Basket of Fruit, already show the physical particularity that would define his career. A professor of horticulture who examined the produce in Boy with a Basket of Fruit was able to identify individual cultivars, right down to a large fig leaf bearing a fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose. The specificity was not accidental. Caravaggio believed that art should involve the viewer in an emotional, visceral, and personal way. He painted what the eye actually sees, flaws and all, rather than the idealised forms that classical tradition demanded.

• 3. Rome and Reputation

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  In 1592, Caravaggio arrived in Rome "naked and extremely needy, without fixed address and without provision, short of money." He had left Milan after "certain quarrels" and the wounding of a police officer. His first months in the city were spent doing hack-work for Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Clement VIII's favourite artist, painting flowers and fruit in a factory-like workshop. He changed addresses roughly ten times between 1592 and 1595.

  The city he had landed in was hungry for art. New churches and palaces were going up across Rome, and the Church was actively looking for a visual language to counter the spread of Protestantism. Caravaggio's radical naturalism answered that need, even as it repeatedly troubled the people who commissioned him.

  Three friendships formed during these early years proved decisive. Prospero Orsi, an established painter, introduced him to influential collectors. Onorio Longhi introduced him to Roman street brawls. And Mario Minniti, a sixteen-year-old Sicilian artist with what one later source called a "moon-shaped" face, became both a frequent model and a lifelong ally. Minniti would later, from Syracuse, help Caravaggio secure major commissions during his exile in Sicily.

  The Fortune Teller, showing a Romani girl removing a ring from a boy's hand while pretending to read his palm, was Caravaggio's first composition with more than one figure. He sold it for practically nothing. But The Cardsharps, a psychologically sharper study of a naive youth being fleeced at cards, attracted the patronage of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, one of Rome's leading connoisseurs. More than fifty copies of that painting survived. For del Monte and his circle, Caravaggio produced a series of intimate works including The Musicians, The Lute Player, and Boy Bitten by a Lizard, most featuring Minniti and other adolescent models.

  By 1599, presumably through del Monte's influence, Caravaggio was contracted to decorate the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi. The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and The Calling of Saint Matthew, delivered in 1600, were an immediate sensation. After that, he never lacked for commissions.

• 4. Rejection and Controversy

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  The Grooms' Madonna was painted for a small altar in Saint Peter's Basilica. It hung there for exactly two days before being removed. A cardinal's secretary wrote that the painting contained "vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust" and that it seemed the work of a painter "of a dark spirit, and who has been for a lot of time far from God."

  This pattern repeated itself. Death of the Virgin, commissioned in 1601 for a private chapel in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala, was rejected in 1606. Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini recorded that the Carmelites objected because he had used a well-known prostitute as the model for the Virgin. A fellow contemporary, Giovanni Baglione, said the problem was Mary's bare legs. The Caravaggio scholar John Gash has suggested a deeper theological objection: Caravaggio's Virgin is simply dead, failing to affirm the doctrine of the Assumption. The replacement altarpiece by Carlo Saraceni, showing the Virgin not dead but seated and dying, was itself rejected. A third version, showing her ascending into Heaven, was finally accepted.

  Death of the Virgin was taken out of the church and immediately purchased by the Duke of Mantua, on the advice of Rubens. It later passed to Charles I of England before entering the French royal collection in 1671.

  The Conversion of Saint Paul was also rejected. A second version, accepted under the title Conversion on the Way to Damascus, placed the saint's horse's haunches more prominently than the saint himself. An exasperated official of Santa Maria del Popolo demanded to know why there was a horse in the middle and Saint Paul on the ground. Caravaggio's reply was: "Is the horse God?" "No, but he stands in God's light!"

• 5. Violence and Flight

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  On the 29th of May 1606, Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni at Campo Marzio in Rome. Whether it was a brawl or a formal duel with swords remained unclear. Tomassoni was a gangster from a wealthy family, and the two men had argued and fought repeatedly before. Contemporary avvisi reported a quarrel over a gambling debt and a pallacorda game, a form of tennis. Other rumours claimed the confrontation grew from rivalry over Fillide Melandroni, a Roman prostitute who had modeled for Caravaggio in several important paintings, and whose pimp Tomassoni was.

  Caravaggio was sentenced to death by beheading, with an open bounty decreed that allowed anyone who recognised him to carry out the sentence legally. His patrons, who had shielded him through years of brawling and arrests, could not protect him this time. He fled south.

  This was not the first time trouble had driven him from a city. In 1605, he had fled to Genoa for three weeks after seriously injuring a notary named Mariano Pasqualone di Accumoli in a sword attack during a dispute over his model and lover Lena. His patrons had managed to cover that incident. Earlier still, according to the biographer Bellori, he had fled Milan around 1590-1592 after committing a murder. In Rome, his police record and trial transcripts filled many pages. He had been arrested for illegal weapons, for insulting the city guards, for throwing a plate of artichokes at a tavern waiter. In 1603, he had been jailed for a month after being sued for defaming the painter Giovanni Baglione with offensive poems.

  After the killing of Tomassoni, Caravaggio's paintings began, as the sources note, to depict severed heads with obsessive frequency, often his own.

• 6. Malta, Sicily, and the Final Years

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  Caravaggio arrived in Malta in 1607, apparently hoping that the patronage of Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights of Saint John, could help him secure a pardon for Tomassoni's death. Wignacourt was so impressed that he inducted Caravaggio as a Knight of Malta. The early biographer Bellori records that Caravaggio was well pleased with his new standing. Wignacourt reportedly gifted him slaves in recognition of his services.

  His most significant work from this period was the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, housed in St John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta. It was his largest painting and the only one to which he ever put his signature. Measuring 370 by 520 centimetres, it was completed in 1608 and is widely regarded, according to the scholar Andrea Pomella, as one of the most important works in Western painting.

  By late August 1608, he was in prison again, likely after a brawl in which a knight was seriously wounded and a door battered down. He escaped from the Knights' prison at Valletta and by December had been formally expelled from the Order. He made his way to Sicily, where his old friend Minniti was now married and settled in Syracuse. Together they toured from Syracuse to Messina, winning prestigious commissions along the way. His Sicilian altarpieces, including Burial of St. Lucy, The Raising of Lazarus, and Adoration of the Shepherds, show a new stylistic direction: shadowy, pitifully poor figures isolated against vast empty backgrounds.

  Contemporary reports from this period describe a man unravelling. He slept fully armed and in his clothes. He tore up a painting at a slight word of criticism. He mocked local painters. Bellori writes of "fear" driving him from city to city across the island.

  Back in Naples by late 1609, he survived a violent ambush that left his face seriously disfigured. He painted a Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, showing his own face on a platter, and sent it to Wignacourt as a plea for forgiveness. He also painted what may be a David with the Head of Goliath, showing a young David gazing sorrowfully at a severed head that is again Caravaggio's own. That painting he may have sent to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V, who had the power to grant or withhold the pardon.

  In summer 1610, news from Rome encouraged him that the pardon was imminent. He took a boat northwards carrying three last paintings intended for Borghese. He never reached Rome. An anonymous report to the ducal court of Urbino dated the 28th of July recorded that Caravaggio was dead. Three days later, another account said he had died of fever on the road from Naples to Rome. A poet friend later gave the 18th of July as the date. A recent researcher claims to have found a death notice placing that death in Porto Ercole, in Tuscany. In 2010, archaeologists using DNA analysis and carbon dating announced they believed with a high degree of confidence that they had identified his remains in the San Sebastiano cemetery of Porto Ercole. Research published in 2018 concluded he died from sepsis caused by Staphylococcus aureus, the result of a wound sustained in the Naples brawl.

• 7. The Caravaggisti

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  The installation of the Saint Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Chapel sent an immediate wave through the younger generation of painters in Rome. Caravaggism became the defining ambition for every serious young artist. Among the first wave were Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Baglione. Baglione's embrace of the style was brief; his feud with Caravaggio was not. Baglione, having accused Caravaggio of defaming him with offensive poems, eventually wrote the first biography of the man he had sued.

  Orazio Gentileschi lasted longer in the movement than most. He outlived nearly all the early Caravaggisti and ended his career as a court painter to Charles I of England. His daughter Artemisia Gentileschi was close to Caravaggio's style and, by the sources, one of the most gifted artists of the movement.

  A group of Catholic painters from Utrecht, including Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen, travelled to Rome in the early decades of the 17th century. They absorbed Caravaggio's approach and brought it home, producing a short-lived but influential style that came to be called Utrecht Caravaggism. Through them, the effects of Caravaggio reached the next Dutch generation: Vermeer and Rembrandt, neither of whom ever set foot in Italy.

  Rubens encountered Caravaggio's work during a stay in Rome in 1601 and later recommended the Duke of Mantua purchase Death of the Virgin. Caravaggio's death scene of the Virgin had been judged unfit for a church; it ended up in the hands of the King of England and then the French royal collection. In Spain, the connection ran through Naples, which was a Spanish possession. The Neapolitan school of Caravaggisti, including Battistello Caracciolo and Carlo Sellitto, passed Caravaggio's influence into the Spanish tradition until a catastrophic outbreak of plague in 1656 ended that Neapolitan movement.

  In Rome itself, however, it was not Caravaggio but his rival Annibale Carracci who ultimately prevailed. Caravaggio had never established a workshop or written down his artistic philosophy. Without a school to propagate his methods, his reputation became exposed to hostile critics. Within decades of his death, his works were being ascribed to less scandalous artists, or simply overlooked.

• 8. Rediscovery and Legacy

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  For nearly three centuries after his death, Caravaggio was, in large part, forgotten. The Baroque he had helped to create absorbed his drama but discarded his psychological realism, and fashions moved on. His earliest biographers had done him no favours. Giovanni Baglione was a rival painter with a personal vendetta. The influential 17th-century critic Gian Pietro Bellori, who had never known Caravaggio, preferred the classical-idealist tradition of the Carracci school. Baglione played a significant part in constructing the legend of Caravaggio as an unstable, violent man incapable of drawing, a reputation that outlasted most of his actual work.

  In the 1920s, the art critic Roberto Longhi brought Caravaggio back into focus and argued for his place at the centre of the European tradition. Longhi's assessment was direct: Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour, and Rembrandt could never have existed without him, and the art of Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet would have been utterly different. The influential scholar Bernard Berenson agreed, placing Caravaggio second only to Michelangelo in his influence on Italian painters.

  The account of his epitaph, composed by his friend the jurisconsult Marzio Milesi, gives a human measure of the life. It notes that Michelangelo Merisi, son of Fermo di Caravaggio, was in painting "not equal to a painter, but to Nature itself", and that he died in Port' Ercole on his way from Naples back to Rome, having lived thirty-six years, nine months, and twenty days.

  In 1969, two thieves entered the Oratory of Saint Lawrence in Palermo and cut the Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence from its frame. Experts valued the painting at twenty million dollars. Former members of the Sicilian Mafia have since stated the painting was displayed at important mafia gatherings before being damaged and destroyed. Its whereabouts remain unknown. A reproduction hangs in its place today. That absence, a painting present now only in photographs and testimony, stands as its own kind of ending for an artist whose work kept slipping from the walls, getting rejected, re-assigned, looted, and lost, only to be recovered again by the people who needed it most.