Caravaggio

To trace the life and art of Caravaggio, the painter who transformed European art at the turn of the seventeenth century, is to follow one of the most violent, brilliant, and consequential careers in the history of Western painting. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived only thirty-eight years, painted for fewer than two decades, left behind no school in the formal sense and not a single securely attributed drawing, and died a hunted fugitive on a malarial stretch of the Tuscan coast. Yet in that short and turbulent span he changed the way human beings would be shown on canvas for generations to come. He took the saints and apostles down from their golden heavens and set them in the dark rooms and dirty streets of ordinary life. He made light itself a moral instrument, a blade that cut figures out of blackness and forced the eye to the exact instant of revelation, terror, or grace. He painted the bottoms of dirty feet, the wrinkled brows of laborers, the calloused hands of fishermen, and he insisted that these were the faces through which the sacred entered the world.

Caravaggio's contemporaries did not know what to do with him. Some called him the greatest painter in Rome and competed savagely for his work; others accused him of destroying painting itself, of dragging a noble art into the gutter. He was admired and feared in roughly equal measure, and the fear was not only aesthetic. He carried a sword through the streets of Rome with a special license, brawled with waiters and rivals and policemen, was arrested again and again, and finally killed a man, an act that turned the most sought-after painter in the city into a condemned criminal with a price on his head. The last four years of his life were a desperate flight across the southern Mediterranean, from Rome to Naples to Malta to Sicily and back to Naples, a fugitive painting masterpieces in the cities that sheltered him while he hoped against hope for a papal pardon that arrived, if it arrived at all, too late.

The story of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is therefore two stories braided into one. It is the story of an artistic revolution, the birth of the style later ages would call Baroque naturalism, achieved by a man whose pictures still stop visitors cold in the churches and galleries of Rome four centuries later. And it is the story of a violent, proud, restless temperament that could not be governed, that ruined the career it had built, and that drove its owner into exile and an early grave. The two stories cannot be separated, because the same intensity that made the paintings unbearable to look away from also made the man impossible to live beside. Anyone who wants to understand why Caravaggio is considered one of the most influential painters who ever lived must reckon with both.

For roughly two and a half centuries after his death Caravaggio was nearly forgotten, dismissed by critics as a coarse and dangerous talent, mentioned in histories of art mainly as a cautionary example. It was only in the twentieth century, through the patient scholarship of the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi and the great exhibition he organized in Milan in 1951, that Caravaggio was restored to the front rank, where he has remained ever since. Today his surviving paintings, fewer than seventy in number, are among the most studied and most fiercely contested works in the entire canon of European art. This is the life behind those paintings, told from a plague year in Lombardy to a death notice on the Tuscan shore.

The World of Lombardy and the Question of Caravaggio's Birth

The painter the world knows as Caravaggio was christened Michelangelo Merisi, and the name by which he became famous is not a surname but a place. Caravaggio is a small town in Lombardy, in northern Italy, set on the plain between the great city of Milan and the smaller city of Bergamo. The painter's family belonged to that town, held property and standing there, and it became the custom, both in his own lifetime and ever after, to identify the artist by the place his people came from. He signed himself, when he signed at all, simply as Michelangelo, and contemporaries wrote of him as Michelangelo da Caravaggio or Michelangelo Merisi. To later centuries he became, by a kind of universal shorthand, simply Caravaggio, the town swallowing the man.

Where exactly he was born has been one of the most stubbornly debated questions of his biography, and for centuries the answer was assumed to be the town itself. The matter was settled, or as nearly settled as such matters can be, only in 2007, when archival researchers identified a baptismal record in the registers of the Milanese parish of Santo Stefano in Brolo. The document indicates that the future painter was baptized in Milan, which means he was almost certainly born in that city rather than in the country town whose name he carries. Scholars place his birth in the autumn of 1571. The most widely accepted date is the twenty-ninth of September 1571, the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, the saint after whom the boy was named, which is precisely the kind of detail that makes the date likely without making it certain. The exact day of his birth was never recorded; the feast day of his name-saint is the best inference available.

His father was Fermo Merisi, a man of solid artisan standing rather than nobility. Fermo worked as a master mason, and the surviving records describe him in terms that suggest something closer to a builder, decorator, or architect's overseer than a mere laborer; he was a man of skill and responsibility in the building trades. Crucially, he stood in the service of Francesco Sforza, the Marchese di Caravaggio, the local lord whose title came from the same town. This connection between the Merisi family and the Sforza marquisate of Caravaggio would prove far more important to the painter's life than anyone could have guessed at his birth, for it bound his family to one of the powerful aristocratic houses of Lombardy. The Marchesa, Costanza Colonna, married into the Sforza family, would more than three decades later become the single most loyal protector the fugitive painter had.

His mother was Lucia Aratori, who came from a family of some local consequence in the town of Caravaggio itself. The marriage of Fermo Merisi and Lucia Aratori joined two respectable Lombard families, neither rich nor poor, the sort of households that owned a little land, practiced a skilled trade, and moved at the edges of aristocratic service. Michelangelo was the eldest of their children. He had at least one brother, Giovan Battista, who would later become a priest, and a sister, Caterina. The family belonged, in short, to the comfortable provincial middle of Lombard society, and there was nothing in the circumstances of the painter's birth to suggest either the heights of fame or the depths of disgrace that awaited him. Lombardy in 1571 was a prosperous, populous, intensely Catholic region under Spanish rule, and Milan, its capital, was a great city dominated by the towering moral presence of its reforming archbishop. Into that world, in a plague-shadowed decade, Caravaggio was born.

Plague and Orphanhood in the Town of Caravaggio

The childhood of Caravaggio was shaped, and then shattered, by one of the worst catastrophes to strike northern Italy in the sixteenth century. In 1576 a devastating epidemic of plague swept through Milan and the surrounding territory of Lombardy. It is remembered in Italian history as the plague of San Carlo, because the archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, won lasting fame for the courage with which he tended the sick and organized relief while wealthier men fled the city. The Merisi family was among those who fled. To escape the contagion in Milan, Fermo Merisi moved his household out to the family's home town of Caravaggio, the place from which they took their name and where Lucia Aratori's relations lived. It must have seemed a reasonable refuge, a smaller place, a familiar one, away from the crowded and infected capital.

The refuge failed. The plague reached the town as well, and in the autumn of 1577 it tore the heart out of the family. Within the space of a single day, the records indicate, Caravaggio lost both his father, Fermo, and his grandfather. Some accounts add an uncle to the toll. The boy was six years old. In one stroke the male authority of the household, the breadwinner, the link to the Sforza service, the figure who would ordinarily have guided a son into a trade and a future, was gone. His mother, Lucia, was left a widow with several young children to raise in a town still reeling from mass death. It is impossible to know with any precision what marks this experience left on the small boy who survived it, but it is not fanciful to observe that death, sudden and physical and close at hand, would later become the central subject of his art, painted with a literalness and an absence of consolation that unsettled even his admirers.

The years that followed are sparsely documented, as the early years of nearly everyone in that century are. Caravaggio grew up in the town of Caravaggio in the care of his widowed mother, in a household that retained property and a degree of security but had lost its head. Lucia Aratori managed the family's affairs and the children's upbringing through the late 1570s and into the 1580s. The family connection to the Colonna and Sforza circle was maintained; the Marchesa Costanza Colonna, herself a young woman married into the Sforza house, knew the Merisi family from these years, and the bond formed in this period would last, astonishingly, until the painter's death. Caravaggio's mother, Lucia, lived on into his young manhood; she died around 1590, when the painter was a young man of about nineteen and already trained, or nearly trained, in his craft. After her death the modest family inheritance was divided among the surviving children, and the eldest son, having no further reason to remain in Lombardy, would soon turn his face toward Rome.

Before that, however, came the decisive event of his adolescence: his entry into the workshop of a working painter. At some point in the early 1580s the boy's family arranged for him to be apprenticed to a master in Milan, and on the sixth of April 1584, when Caravaggio was twelve or thirteen years old, a formal contract was signed binding him as an apprentice for a term of four years. The boy who had been orphaned by plague at six was now to be made into a painter. The man chosen to make him was Simone Peterzano, and the apprenticeship that began in Milan in 1584 was the foundation on which everything else was built.

Apprenticeship in Milan Under Simone Peterzano

Simone Peterzano was a painter of solid reputation in Milan, a competent and serious artist working in the late Mannerist manner that prevailed in Lombardy in the 1580s. He was proud of one connection above all: he described himself, on his signatures and in his self-presentation, as a pupil of Titian, the supreme master of the Venetian school. Whether the young Peterzano had truly studied at length in Titian's Venetian workshop is uncertain, but the claim mattered, because it placed him, and by extension his own pupils, in a line of descent from the greatest colorist of the age. When Caravaggio entered Peterzano's studio under the four-year contract of 1584, he was entering a Lombard workshop that nonetheless looked toward Venice, and the Venetian inheritance, the richness of color, the handling of light and shadow, the sensuous truth of painted flesh, was part of what he absorbed.

The apprenticeship of a painter in sixteenth-century Italy was a long and practical training, closer to a trade education than to anything resembling a modern art school. A boy ground pigments, prepared panels and canvases, cleaned brushes, mixed colors, and copied the master's drawings and paintings endlessly until his hand had learned the craft. Only gradually was he permitted to paint passages of the master's own commissions, drapery first, then backgrounds, and only the most gifted were allowed to develop anything like an independent manner. Caravaggio served this training in Milan through the middle and later 1580s. He learned the disciplined techniques of fresco and oil painting, the preparation of grounds, the construction of compositions, and the whole working vocabulary of the Lombard profession.

What the young Caravaggio drew from his Milanese years went well beyond Peterzano's studio. Lombardy possessed a strong regional tradition of naturalistic painting, a tendency to observe the ordinary world closely and to render it without idealizing it. The painters of Lombardy and the neighboring regions, artists such as Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Lorenzo Lotto, Moretto da Brescia, and the Campi family of Cremona, had cultivated a sober, truthful attention to texture, to humble materials, to the quiet drama of light falling across an ordinary face. The young Caravaggio could see such work in the churches and collections of Milan and the surrounding towns. He could also see, supremely, the Venetian masters whose influence reached Lombardy through Peterzano and through the region's collections. And he grew up under the long moral shadow of the Milanese Counter-Reformation, the rigorous, disciplined, intensely emotional Catholicism championed by Carlo Borromeo, which demanded that religious art move the ordinary believer directly, plainly, and with overwhelming force. All of these strands, the Lombard naturalism, the Venetian color, the Counter-Reformation insistence on emotional immediacy, were woven into the painter before he ever set foot in Rome.

The exact end of his Milanese period is hard to date. The four-year contract of 1584 would have run to 1588, but the documentary trail of Caravaggio's late teens and early twenties is thin and broken. It is clear that by the early 1590s he had left Lombardy. His mother died around 1590; the family property was divided among the heirs in the years immediately following; and Caravaggio, his portion of the inheritance in hand and probably already spent or nearly so, made the journey south to Rome. Some early sources hint that trouble of some kind, the first of the many violent scrapes that would mark his life, hastened his departure from Lombardy, though the details cannot be confirmed. What is certain is that around 1592, a young man in his early twenties, fully trained in the craft of painting and carrying with him the deep Lombard and Venetian inheritance of his apprenticeship, Caravaggio arrived in the city that would make him famous and very nearly destroy him.

Arrival in Rome and the Years of Hardship

The Rome that Caravaggio entered around 1592 was the artistic capital of the Catholic world and a city in the midst of a great transformation. The popes of the late sixteenth century, driven by the energies of the Counter-Reformation, were rebuilding Rome on a monumental scale: new churches, new chapels, new streets, new fountains, a vast program of construction and decoration that created an enormous and continuous demand for painters. Pilgrims poured into the city; cardinals and noble families competed to endow chapels and commission altarpieces; the religious orders, the Jesuits, the Oratorians, the Capuchins, wanted images that would teach and move the faithful. For an ambitious young painter, Rome was the one indispensable place. It was also crowded, expensive, and ferociously competitive, a city where hundreds of painters chased the same patrons, and where a newcomer with no name, no workshop, and no powerful friends could starve.

Caravaggio arrived with almost nothing. The early biographers who chronicled his life within a generation of his death, Giulio Mancini, who knew Rome intimately and was himself a physician to a pope, Giovanni Baglione, a fellow painter who became a bitter enemy, and Giovan Pietro Bellori, writing somewhat later with the authority of the leading connoisseur of his day, all agree on the poverty and obscurity of his first Roman years, though they differ on the details. He had no money, no settled place to live, and no commissions. He moved from one precarious arrangement to another. According to Mancini, he lodged for a time with a Monsignor named Pandolfo Pucci, who gave the young painter board and a roof but fed him so meanly, on nothing but salad greens, that Caravaggio remembered him ever after with contempt and nicknamed him "Monsignor Salad." He worked, briefly and for miserable wages, in the shops of minor painters, turning out cheap devotional pictures and copies by the dozen.

These were genuinely hard years, and they left a mark. Caravaggio fell seriously ill at one point, possibly from a kick by a horse or from the general misery of his circumstances, and was treated at the hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione, where he is said to have painted pictures for the prior, who carried them back to his native Seville and so, perhaps, planted the seeds of Caravaggio's later influence on Spanish painting. The young man was thin, intense, ill-clothed, and unknown, one of the countless hungry talents the city absorbed and often discarded. But he was also, even in obscurity, painting, and the pictures he produced in these lean years already carried the unmistakable signature of an original mind: an extraordinary, almost startling fidelity to the visible world, a refusal to prettify, and a way of looking at the most ordinary things, a boy's face, a piece of fruit, a glass of wine, as if they had never been truly seen before.

It was during this difficult passage that Caravaggio attached himself, for a time, to a far more established and successful painter, and the experience of working in that busy and fashionable workshop gave him both a livelihood and, crucially, the early subject matter on which his independent reputation would be built. The painter was Giuseppe Cesari, known to all Rome as the Cavaliere d'Arpino, and Caravaggio's months in his studio mark the moment when the years of pure hardship began, slowly and unevenly, to give way to the beginnings of recognition.

The Workshop of the Cavaliere D'arpino

Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d'Arpino, was at the close of the sixteenth century one of the most successful and sought-after painters in Rome. He worked in a refined and decorative late Mannerist style, he enjoyed the favor of popes and cardinals, he ran a large and productive workshop, and he was, in worldly terms, everything the young Caravaggio was not. Around 1593 or 1594 Caravaggio entered this workshop as a paid hand. He was not an apprentice, for he was already a trained painter in his twenties; he was a journeyman, an employee, hired to contribute to the steady stream of commissions flowing through one of the busiest studios in the city.

The work Caravaggio was given there is one of the most revealing facts of his early career. The Cavaliere d'Arpino set him to painting flowers and fruit. In the division of labor of a large workshop, the specialized still-life passages, the bowls of fruit, the sprays of blossom, the decorative natural detail that filled the corners and foregrounds of larger compositions, were often handed to a particular hand with a gift for them. Caravaggio had exactly that gift, and the months he spent painting flowers and fruit for the Cavaliere d'Arpino taught him, or rather allowed him to perfect, a skill that would become one of the foundations of his fame. He learned to render the physical world, a piece of fruit with a bruise on its skin, a leaf beginning to curl and brown, a drop of water on a petal, with a truthfulness so intense that the painted object seemed to exist in the room with the viewer.

Caravaggio later said, according to a remark preserved by one of his early biographers, that it cost him as much labor and skill to paint a good picture of flowers as to paint a picture of figures. The statement was a small revolution in itself. It asserted that the humblest subject, treated with total seriousness and total skill, was the equal of the grandest, an idea that ran directly against the entire academic hierarchy of his age, which ranked the painting of noble historical and religious subjects far above the mere imitation of fruit and flowers. The conviction behind that remark, that the truth of the visible world was worthy of the highest art, was already the seed of everything Caravaggio would do.

His time with the Cavaliere d'Arpino did not end well, and the relationship seems to have soured, as so many of Caravaggio's relationships would. He left the workshop, possibly after an illness, possibly after a quarrel. But he carried away from it the genre that would launch him: the close, intense, half-length depiction of ordinary figures and ordinary things, painted from the live model with merciless fidelity. In the years immediately after he left the Cavaliere's studio, working now as an independent painter scraping for buyers, Caravaggio produced the remarkable series of early pictures that first made knowledgeable Romans take notice of a strange new talent in their midst.

The First Independent Paintings

The pictures Caravaggio painted in the middle 1590s, as he struggled to establish himself as an independent master, are unlike anything else being produced in Rome at the time, and they remain among the most immediately captivating works he ever made. They are mostly of modest size, mostly showing one or a few figures at half length, close to the picture plane, brilliantly lit against plain backgrounds. Their subjects are not the lofty themes of religious history but boys, musicians, fortune-tellers, cardsharps, and arrangements of fruit, treated with a directness that was startling then and remains arresting now.

Among the earliest is the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, a painting of a sensuous, slightly disheveled youth holding out a heaped basket of grapes, figs, peaches, and apples toward the viewer. The fruit is rendered with the precision Caravaggio had perfected in the Cavaliere's workshop, every blemish and bloom in place, and the boy himself, lips parted, shoulder bare, gazes out with an ambiguous, inviting expression. A companion in spirit is the so-called Young Sick Bacchus, a self-portrait in which Caravaggio painted himself, pale, greenish, evidently unwell, crowned with ivy in the guise of the wine god, holding a bunch of grapes. The picture is widely thought to date from his recovery from the illness that put him in the hospital, and it has the strange, queasy intimacy of a man studying his own diminished face in a mirror.

Other early works pushed the same naturalism toward narrative and even toward comedy and menace. The Cardsharps, painted around 1594, shows a fresh-faced, well-dressed young dupe absorbed in a game of cards while an older accomplice signals over his shoulder and a second cheat prepares to pull a hidden card from behind his back. The whole small drama of innocence, deception, and greed is staged with a clarity and a psychological sharpness that no one in Rome had quite seen before. The Fortune Teller, of which Caravaggio painted two versions, shows a gypsy woman reading the palm of a young gallant, and looking closely, one sees that as she holds his hand and meets his eyes she is gently slipping the ring from his finger. These are pictures about looking and being deceived, about the surfaces of the world and what they conceal, and they are painted with a relish for ordinary human types, the swagger of the young, the cunning of the practiced cheat, that was entirely new.

It was The Cardsharps, above all, that changed Caravaggio's fortunes. The picture was seen, admired, and bought, and through it Caravaggio came to the attention of the man who would lift him out of poverty and obscurity for good. A Roman dealer in pictures, in whose shop near the church of San Luigi dei Francesi Caravaggio's works were displayed for sale, brought the young painter to the notice of an exceptionally cultivated and powerful churchman, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. The cardinal bought The Cardsharps, was captivated by it, and shortly afterward took the painter himself into his household. The years of salad suppers and starvation wages were over. With the patronage of Cardinal del Monte, Caravaggio entered, at last, the world of wealth, learning, and influence in which his genius could fully unfold.

Cardinal Del Monte and the Palazzo Madama

Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte was one of the most discerning patrons of the arts in late sixteenth-century Rome. He was a Tuscan, closely tied to the ruling Medici dynasty of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and he served in Rome as a kind of cultural ambassador and agent for Medici interests. He lived in the Palazzo Madama, the great palace near the church of San Luigi dei Francesi that belonged to the Medici, and around him gathered one of the liveliest intellectual circles in the city. Del Monte was interested in music, in science, in alchemy and natural philosophy; he was a friend and supporter of the astronomer Galileo Galilei; and he had the connoisseur's eye and the open mind to recognize, in the strange and uningratiating pictures of an unknown young Lombard, the arrival of a major talent.

From roughly 1595 or 1596 until about 1600, Caravaggio lived as a member of Cardinal del Monte's household in the Palazzo Madama. He was given board, lodging, and an allowance, and in return he painted, both for the cardinal himself and for the wealthy collectors in the cardinal's orbit. This was the single most important professional relationship of his early career. It gave him security, it gave him time, and above all it placed him at the center of a network of cultivated and powerful patrons, cardinals, bankers, marchesi, who would commission his work and, for as long as they could, protect him from the consequences of his temper.

The pictures Caravaggio painted in and around the del Monte household show a painter consolidating and deepening his powers. He produced refined and poetic images of music-making, The Musicians and The Lute Player, in which beautiful youths with instruments and sheet music are bathed in a clear, caressing light, pictures that reflected the cardinal's own deep love of music. He painted a magnificent Bacchus, the wine god as a heavy-lidded, slightly tipsy young man offering a glass of wine across a table laid with fruit, a picture that is at once a celebration of sensuous beauty and a sly, faintly satirical study of a real boy dressed up in a costume. For del Monte he painted the astonishing Medusa, the severed, screaming head of the Gorgon depicted on a circular ceremonial shield, a tour de force of horror and illusion that the cardinal sent as a diplomatic gift to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. And he painted the famous Basket of Fruit, a single wicker basket of fruit and leaves set on a ledge against a plain pale ground, a picture so concentrated, so completely serious in its attention to a humble subject, that it stands as one of the founding works of still-life painting in Italian art.

In these years, too, Caravaggio's range was widening from genre and still life toward overtly religious subjects, treated with the same uncompromising naturalism. He painted a Penitent Magdalene, a young woman seated on a low chair, her jewelry cast on the floor beside her, weeping, that looked less like a traditional saint than like a real Roman girl caught in a moment of private sorrow. He painted Saint Catherine of Alexandria and a harrowing Judith Beheading Holofernes, in which a young woman, brow furrowed in concentration and distaste, saws through the neck of the screaming Assyrian general while an old servant looks on. The naturalism that had been charming in a basket of fruit became, when turned upon sacred and violent subjects, something far more disturbing and far more powerful. By the end of the 1590s Caravaggio was ready, and his patrons were ready to make him ready, for the commission that would carry his art onto the public stage of Rome: the decoration of a chapel in the very church beside which his pictures had once hung for sale.

The Basket of Fruit and the Dignity of Ordinary Things

One particular strand of Caravaggio's achievement deserves separate attention, because it amounts to a quiet revolution within the larger one: his contribution to the birth of still-life painting as a serious and independent art. The skill he had perfected painting fruit and flowers in the workshop of the Cavaliere d'Arpino did not remain a mere studio specialty. In Caravaggio's hands the depiction of inanimate things, fruit, leaves, glass, bread, became a vehicle for the same uncompromising truthfulness that drove his figure painting, and in doing so he helped to establish a whole genre.

The supreme example is the picture known simply as the Basket of Fruit, painted in the years of his association with Cardinal del Monte and given to the cultivated Cardinal Federico Borromeo of Milan, in whose great library it has remained. The painting is astonishing in its restraint. A single wicker basket of fruit and leaves sits on the edge of a ledge, projecting slightly into the viewer's space, against a plain, pale, luminous ground; there is nothing else. It is one of the earliest pure still lifes in Italian art, a picture in which a humble subject is treated with total seriousness and granted the full dignity of a finished work of art. And Caravaggio painted the basket with merciless honesty. The fruit is not at the peak of an idealized perfection; some of the leaves are withered and curling, an apple is marked by a wormhole, and the whole arrangement carries the quiet suggestion of time, ripeness, and decay. He refused to flatter even a bowl of fruit.

Behind the picture lay a conviction that overturned a settled hierarchy. The academic theory of Caravaggio's age ranked the kinds of painting in a strict order, placing grand religious and historical subjects at the summit and the mere imitation of fruit, flowers, and ordinary objects far below. Caravaggio is recorded as having said that it cost him as much labor and skill to make a good picture of flowers as to make one of figures, and the remark, simple as it sounds, was a direct challenge to that hierarchy. It asserted that the truth of the visible world, faithfully and skillfully rendered, was worthy of the highest seriousness whatever its subject, and that a basket of fruit honestly seen was not a lesser thing than a saint.

That conviction did not stay confined to his independent still lifes. It runs through the still-life passages embedded in his great figure paintings, the basket of fruit teetering on the table's edge in the Supper at Emmaus, the carafes and loaves and humble props that populate his sacred scenes, each painted with the same concentrated attention as the faces and hands. And it fed directly into the wider history of European art. The seventeenth century would see still-life painting flourish into one of the major genres of the age, in Italy, in the Netherlands, and in Spain, where the sober, dignified Spanish still life developed in part under the long influence of Caravaggio's example. The man who took the saints down into the streets had also, with the same gesture, lifted a basket of fruit onto the wall of a cardinal's library and declared it worth painting forever.

A New Way of Seeing: Naturalism and the Light of Caravaggio

Before turning to the great public commissions that made Caravaggio famous, it is worth pausing to ask what made Caravaggio's painting style so revolutionary, because the answer explains both the speed of his rise and the storms of controversy that followed him. Caravaggio's revolution had two inseparable parts: an uncompromising naturalism and a radical handling of light.

The naturalism came first. Caravaggio painted, so far as the evidence allows us to reconstruct his method, almost entirely from the living model and from objects placed in front of him. He appears not to have made the elaborate preparatory drawings that were the foundation of conventional studio practice; no securely attributed drawing by his hand survives, and technical examination of his canvases has revealed instead a different procedure. He worked out his compositions directly on the canvas, often scoring quick incisions into the wet ground with the butt of his brush or another sharp tool to fix the placement of a head, a shoulder, a hand. He posed real people, the people he could find and afford, street boys, working men, courtesans, the inhabitants of the rough quarter of Rome where he lived, and he painted them as they were. When he needed a saint, he found a man with the right body and the right face and painted that man. When he needed the Virgin, he painted a Roman woman he knew. The result was a sacred art populated by recognizably ordinary human beings, with dirty feet, weathered skin, and the unidealized bodies of the poor.

The light came second, and it is the quality most immediately associated with his name. Caravaggio developed, and pushed to an extreme no one had attempted before, a method of dramatic illumination in which a strong, raking light falls from a single source upon figures who emerge from a deep, enveloping darkness. The technical terms later coined for this are chiaroscuro, the modeling of form through the contrast of light and shade, and tenebrism, the use of overwhelming darkness as the dominant key of a picture. In a mature Caravaggio the background is often a near-total black, an undefined void, and the figures are cut from it by light as if by a knife. The effect is theatrical in the most literal sense: the eye is seized and directed, the dramatic moment is isolated and intensified, and the viewer is made to feel present at an event happening in real, physical space, in a real and sudden instant of time.

Together these two innovations produced something genuinely new in European art. Caravaggio collapsed the distance between the sacred subject and the ordinary viewer. A worshipper standing before one of his altarpieces did not look up at remote, idealized, weightless figures in a golden realm; he looked into a dark room, lit as his own room might be lit by a single window or candle, and saw people of his own kind, his own city, his own poverty, caught at the overwhelming moment when the divine broke into their lives. This was exactly the emotional immediacy the Counter-Reformation Church had been calling for, and it was also, to many cultivated eyes, a shocking violation of decorum, an unbearable coarseness. Caravaggio's whole career would be lived in the tension between those two reactions.

The Contarelli Chapel and the Calling of Saint Matthew

The commission that carried Caravaggio's art onto the public stage came in 1599, and it concerned a chapel that had stood unfinished for a long generation. The French cardinal Matteo Contarelli, whose name in his native French was Matthieu Cointrel, had acquired a chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, the national church of the French community in Rome, and had left funds and detailed instructions for its decoration with scenes from the life of his name-saint, the apostle and evangelist Matthew. Contarelli had died in 1585 with the chapel still bare, and the project had languished for years. Caravaggio's patron Cardinal del Monte had a hand in the affairs of the church and the chapel, and through that influence, on the twenty-third of July 1599, Caravaggio was contracted to paint the two large lateral canvases for the Contarelli Chapel. It was his first major public commission, and it required him to work on a scale far beyond the intimate half-length pictures of his early career.

He produced two enormous paintings: The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. They were installed in the chapel by July 1600, and they made Caravaggio, almost overnight, the most talked-about painter in Rome. The Calling of Saint Matthew is one of the supreme achievements of European art. It shows the moment described in the Gospel when Christ, passing by, sees the tax collector Matthew at his table and says simply, "Follow me." Caravaggio sets the scene not in any sacred precinct but in a dim room that could be a Roman tavern or counting-house. Matthew sits at a table with a group of well-dressed young men and an older companion, money spread before them. Christ enters from the right, almost lost in shadow, and extends his arm, his hand and pointing finger deliberately echoing the gesture of God giving life to Adam in Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. A shaft of light enters with him and crosses the wall above the figures.

The genius of the painting lies in the instant it chooses and the ambiguity it preserves. Matthew responds to the call with a gesture, but scholars have argued for centuries about which figure is Matthew and what exactly the gesture means. The bearded man at the center appears to point to himself, as if to say, "Who, me?", though some have read his hand as pointing toward the young man hunched over the coins at the end of the table. The uncertainty is part of the picture's power: it captures the very second in which an ordinary man, absorbed in money, hears himself summoned to abandon everything, and the outcome still hangs in the balance. The third painting, the altarpiece showing The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, with the evangelist writing his Gospel as an angel guides him, was added afterward. Caravaggio's first version of it was refused by the church, reportedly because the saint, shown as a coarse, bald, bare-legged laborer with the angel almost physically directing his hand, lacked the dignity expected of an evangelist. He painted a second, more decorous version, which was in place by 1602, and the first version passed into a private collection, where it was destroyed in Berlin in the last months of the Second World War.

The Cerasi Chapel: Saint Paul and Saint Peter

The triumph of the Contarelli Chapel brought further public commissions at once, and the most important followed within a year. In September 1600 Caravaggio contracted to paint two large canvases for the chapel of Monsignor Tiberio Cerasi in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, one of the most prominent churches of Rome, standing just inside the city's northern gate. Cerasi was Treasurer-General to Pope Clement VIII, a man of wealth and standing, and he wanted his chapel decorated by the leading talents of the day. The central altarpiece of the chapel, an Assumption of the Virgin, was given to Annibale Carracci, the great Bolognese painter who, with his family, was then leading the rival current of classical reform in Roman art. The two side walls went to Caravaggio.

For the Cerasi Chapel Caravaggio painted The Conversion of Saint Paul, often called the Conversion on the Way to Damascus, and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. As with the first Saint Matthew altarpiece, his initial versions of these two pictures were not accepted, and he painted them again; the surviving canvases in the chapel are the second versions, and the first version of the Conversion survives in a private collection, allowing a rare direct comparison of how Caravaggio rethought a subject. The accepted Conversion of Saint Paul is among his boldest inventions. The future apostle, struck from his horse on the road to Damascus by a blinding light from heaven, lies flat on his back on the ground, eyes shut, arms thrown upward toward a light the viewer cannot see falling from above. Most of the canvas is filled not by drama in the conventional sense but by the enormous body of the horse, patiently lifting a hoof, and by the old groom who holds its bridle. The supernatural event is rendered as something almost entirely interior: there is no host of angels, no parting cloud, only a man on the ground, overwhelmed, and the great indifferent animal beside him.

The Crucifixion of Saint Peter is equally stripped of grandeur and equally unforgettable. The apostle, an old man, is shown being raised on his cross, which at his own request has been set upside down, because he held himself unworthy to die in the posture of his Lord. Three executioners, their faces hidden or turned away, strain with the heavy physical labor of hoisting the cross, one bracing it with his back, one hauling on a rope, one lifting from below. Peter, already nailed to the wood, twists his head and torso to look outward, his face a mask of pain and grim resolve. There is no crowd, no landscape, no consoling sky, only the brutal, sweating work of an execution carried out by laborers who might be unloading a cart. Caravaggio had taken the two founding apostles of the Roman Church and shown their decisive moments as events of the body, heavy, physical, and real, and in doing so he had given the Counter-Reformation an art of overwhelming and disturbing immediacy.

The Supper at Emmaus and the Roman Masterpieces

The first years of the new century were the summit of Caravaggio's worldly success. Between roughly 1600 and 1606 he was the most sought-after painter in Rome, and the cardinals, bankers, and noble collectors of the city competed for his work. Alongside the public altarpieces he produced a stream of pictures for private patrons, and several of them rank among the masterpieces of European painting. Many were commissioned by two families in particular: the Mattei, whose household Caravaggio joined for a time, and the immensely rich banking family of the Giustiniani, of whom the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani became one of his most devoted collectors.

For Ciriaco Mattei, Caravaggio painted the Supper at Emmaus, the version now in the National Gallery in London. It shows the moment when the risen Christ, supping at an inn with two disciples who have not recognized him, breaks the bread and is suddenly known. Caravaggio freezes the instant of recognition: one disciple grips the arms of his chair as if to thrust himself up, the other flings his arms wide, and a basket of fruit teeters on the very edge of the table, casting a shadow shaped like a fish. Christ himself is shown beardless and youthful, an unconventional choice that heightens the shock of the disciples' delayed recognition. For the same family Caravaggio painted The Taking of Christ, a night scene of Judas seizing and kissing his master while armored soldiers close in, their polished steel catching the light. That painting vanished from view for centuries and was only identified again, hanging unrecognized in a Jesuit residence in Dublin, in 1990, one of the great rediscoveries in the history of art.

For Vincenzo Giustiniani, Caravaggio painted The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, in which the doubting apostle, frowning in concentration, actually pushes his finger into the wound in the side of the risen Christ while two other apostles crane forward to watch, an image of almost shocking physical literalness in the service of a meditation on faith and doubt. For Giustiniani too he painted Amor Vincit Omnia, "Love Conquers All," a grinning, naked boy with dark wings, the god Cupid, trampling the symbols of human achievement, music, learning, warfare, fame, beneath his feet. He painted a Sacrifice of Isaac for Maffeo Barberini, the cultivated cardinal who would later become Pope Urban VIII, and several powerful images of Saint John the Baptist as a brooding adolescent in the wilderness. These were the years when Caravaggio could command high prices, when his manner was already being imitated by other painters, and when his fame had spread beyond Rome. They were also the years in which his life outside the studio grew steadily more dangerous.

Rejected Altarpieces and the Limits of Naturalism

Even at the height of his success, Caravaggio's naturalism kept colliding with the expectations of the institutions that commissioned his work, and a striking number of his religious paintings were refused by the very patrons who had ordered them. The pattern had begun with the first Saint Matthew altarpiece and the first Cerasi canvases, and it continued through the most ambitious sacred works of his last Roman years.

The most famous of these rejections concerns the Death of the Virgin, an enormous altarpiece commissioned by the papal lawyer Laerzio Cherubini for his chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere. Caravaggio painted the death of the Mother of God as the death of a poor woman. The Virgin lies stretched on a plain bed, her body heavy and slack, her feet bare and swollen, her face that of an ordinary corpse; the apostles around her are weeping working men, and a young woman in the foreground sits doubled over with grief. There is no glory, no ascent, no choir of angels, only a red curtain hanging overhead and a community of the poor mourning one of their own. The Carmelite friars of the church refused the picture. Contemporaries reported various objections: that the Virgin was shown with indecent bare legs, that her body was swollen and undignified, and, most damningly, that Caravaggio had used the body of a drowned prostitute as his model. Yet the painting's quality was beyond dispute, and on the advice of the painter Peter Paul Rubens, then working in Italy, the Duke of Mantua bought it; it later entered the French royal collection and hangs today in the Louvre.

A second notorious case was the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, known as the Madonna dei Palafrenieri after the confraternity of papal grooms who commissioned it. The picture was placed on an altar in Saint Peter's Basilica itself and then, after a very short time, removed, apparently judged unsuitable for so sacred a setting, and it too passed into the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Even the Madonna di Loreto, also called the Madonna dei Pellegrini, painted for the church of Sant'Agostino, which was accepted and remains in place, provoked complaint, because Caravaggio had shown two humble pilgrims kneeling before the Virgin with the dirty, work-hardened soles of their feet thrust toward the viewer. The recurring quarrel was always the same. Caravaggio insisted on painting the sacred in the flesh of the real and the poor, and a significant part of his clerical audience found the result not devout but indecorous, even blasphemous. That his rejected pictures were instantly snapped up by the most sophisticated collectors in Italy only sharpened the paradox of his position: he was simultaneously the most desired and the most distrusted painter of his age.

Rivalry and the Libel Trial of 1603

Caravaggio's success bred imitators, and his temperament bred enemies, and in 1603 the two came together in a courtroom. The painter Giovanni Baglione had taken to working in a manner that borrowed heavily from Caravaggio's dramatic lighting and naturalism, and had won, to Caravaggio's evident fury, a prestigious commission and even a papal honor. Caravaggio held Baglione's work in contempt, and he and his circle expressed that contempt in the cruelest currency of the Roman art world: scurrilous verse. Obscene, mocking poems ridiculing Baglione as a painter and a man circulated in the city, and Baglione, his reputation under attack, went to law.

In the late summer of 1603 Baglione brought a suit for criminal libel against Caravaggio and three of his associates: the painter Orazio Gentileschi, the architect Onorio Longhi, who was one of Caravaggio's closest and most combustible friends, and a young man named Filippo Trisegni. Caravaggio was arrested and held in the prison of Tor di Nona. The transcript of the proceedings survives, and it is one of the most precious documents of the painter's life, because it preserves Caravaggio's own voice. Questioned by the magistrates, he denied authorship of the verses, named the painters he respected and those he did not, and, most memorably, offered a definition of artistic excellence. A good painter, he said in effect, a valent'huomo, a worthy man of the craft, is one who knows how to paint well and to imitate natural things well. It is the nearest thing to an artistic creed that Caravaggio ever left in his own words, and it places the imitation of nature at the very center of his idea of art.

Caravaggio was released after some weeks, reportedly through the intervention of the French ambassador, whose nation's church Caravaggio had so gloriously decorated. But the episode revealed how exposed his position had become. He had the protection of great patrons, but he also had determined enemies, and Baglione's hostility never cooled. Decades later, long after Caravaggio was dead, Giovanni Baglione would write one of the earliest biographies of him, a brief and poisonous account that emphasized his violence and his coarseness and that shaped, for centuries, the unfavorable view of his character. The libel trial of 1603 was, in retrospect, a warning. Caravaggio's gifts could win him the patronage of cardinals, but his pride and his rage were steadily multiplying the number of men who wished him ill, and the Roman courts were beginning to know his name very well.

A Life of Violence: the Roman Police Records

The criminal and police archives of Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century preserve an extraordinary record of Caravaggio's conduct in the streets, and that record is one of the strangest features of his biography, because it documents, year after year, the behavior of a man who was at the very same time painting some of the most profound religious images in the history of art. Between roughly 1600 and 1606 Caravaggio appears in the surviving Roman court documents again and again, almost always in connection with violence, weapons, or insult.

The incidents form a grim and sometimes almost absurd catalogue. He was repeatedly arrested for carrying a sword and dagger through the city without proper authorization, a serious offense in a Rome anxious to control armed brawling; on at least one occasion he produced a license that his powerful friends had obtained for him. He was charged with throwing stones at the city police, the sbirri. In the spring of 1604 he was accused of hurling a plate of cooked artichokes into the face of a waiter at an inn, after demanding to know which of the artichokes had been cooked in butter and which in oil and taking the man's answer as an insult; he was reported to have reached for his sword. He was accused of insulting and assaulting a former landlady, Prudenzia Bruni, and of throwing stones at her window after a dispute over rent and impounded furniture. In the summer of 1605 he wounded a notary named Mariano Pasqualone in a night-time assault; the quarrel concerned a woman, Lena, who was Caravaggio's model and, the notary's complaint implied, his mistress, and after the attack Caravaggio judged it prudent to leave Rome for a short time before returning.

What these records reveal is a man living, by choice or by temperament, in the most turbulent and dangerous milieu of the city, the world of the Campo Marzio district with its taverns, its courts for ball games, its prostitutes, its bravi and swordsmen and quick-tempered young men of fashion. Caravaggio dressed and behaved like one of them. He went armed; he answered insults, real or imagined, with steel; he kept company with violent friends such as Onorio Longhi. The early biographers, even those most sympathetic to his art, describe a man who would paint brilliantly for two weeks and then swagger out with his sword at his side and a servant boy behind him, spoiling for a fight, contemptuous of anyone who crossed him. For years his patrons, the cardinals and marchesi who valued his pictures, were able to extricate him from the consequences. But the trajectory of the police records is one of escalation, and in the early summer of 1606 the escalation reached the point from which there was no return.

The Death of Ranuccio Tomassoni

On Sunday, the twenty-eighth of May 1606, Caravaggio killed a man, and the killing destroyed his life in Rome and turned the remaining four years of his career into a flight. The dead man was Ranuccio Tomassoni, a young man of a clan from the Campo Marzio with which Caravaggio appears to have had a long and bitter rivalry. The two groups, Caravaggio and his friends on one side, Ranuccio Tomassoni and his brother and associates on the other, met that day, and the encounter ended in a fight with swords.

The traditional account, repeated for centuries, held that the quarrel arose from a wager on a game of pallacorda, an early form of tennis, that the two men had been playing or watching, and that a dispute over the score or the bet flared into a brawl. More recent research into the surviving documents and into the honor culture of the period has suggested a deeper cause. The Tomassoni family had connections to the world of organized prostitution, and it is now widely thought that the feud between Caravaggio and Ranuccio Tomassoni concerned a woman, most likely the courtesan Fillide Melandroni, who had modeled for several of Caravaggio's paintings and with whom Ranuccio Tomassoni had a connection. In the rigid code of male honor that governed such men, an affront over a woman demanded a violent answer, and the encounter of the twenty-eighth of May may have been less a spontaneous brawl than a planned confrontation between two armed parties.

However it began, the outcome is clear. In the fight Caravaggio struck Ranuccio Tomassoni a blow that severed a major artery in the area of the groin and upper thigh, and Tomassoni bled to death. Some scholars have argued, from the nature and placement of the wound, that Caravaggio's intention may have been not to kill but to inflict a deliberate, shaming wound, a mutilation that carried a specific meaning in a quarrel over a woman, and that the blow went fatally wrong. Caravaggio himself was wounded in the head in the same fight. What is beyond dispute is that a man was dead, and that this time no patron, however powerful, could make the matter disappear. The Tomassoni family demanded justice, and the Roman authorities pronounced upon Caravaggio a bando capitale, a capital sentence. It was a sentence of a peculiarly terrible kind: it declared the painter an outlaw whom any person might lawfully kill, and it specifically authorized the killer to prove the deed by producing the condemned man's severed head. The most celebrated painter in Rome was now a hunted man, and within days of the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni he had fled the city he would never see again.

Flight from Rome and the Colonna Protection

In the days after the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni, Caravaggio left Rome, wounded and in fear of his life, and he never returned. The capital sentence pronounced against him meant that the city had become, quite literally, a place where any man might lawfully cut him down. He went first to the countryside south and east of Rome, to the territory of the Alban Hills, where he found shelter on the estates of the Colonna family. This refuge was no accident, and the help the Colonna gave him in the summer of 1606 was the beginning of a remarkable pattern of aristocratic protection that would follow Caravaggio for the rest of his life.

The Colonna were one of the oldest and most powerful noble houses of Italy, and Caravaggio's connection to them ran back to his own origins. His father had served the Sforza marquisate of the town of Caravaggio, and the Marchesa of that house was Costanza Colonna, a daughter of Marcantonio Colonna, the celebrated commander who had helped lead the Christian fleet to victory over the Ottomans at the great sea battle of Lepanto in 1571, the very year of the painter's birth. Costanza Colonna had known the Merisi family since Caravaggio's Lombard childhood, and she became, in his years of disgrace, his most faithful protector. The Colonna estates in the hills near Rome, places such as Zagarolo, Palestrina, and Paliano, offered the fugitive a hiding place beyond the immediate reach of the Roman authorities.

Even now, hunted and hidden, Caravaggio did not stop painting. In the months he spent on the Colonna lands he produced powerful works, including a second version of the Supper at Emmaus, darker and more austere than the London picture, and intense, meditative images of solitary penitents and saints. These pictures already show a change. The exuberance and the rich incidental detail of his Roman heyday begin to fall away, and the figures stand more starkly alone in their darkness. The art of a hunted man was becoming graver, more concentrated, more haunted.

But the hill towns of the Colonna could only ever be a temporary refuge, too close to Rome and too small to absorb a man of Caravaggio's fame and needs. By the late autumn of 1606 he had moved on, traveling south to the great city of Naples, beyond the borders of the Papal States and the jurisdiction of the Roman courts. The Colonna had a strong presence in Naples as well, and Caravaggio went there under the wing of their protection. The four years of his exile had begun in earnest, and they would carry him farther and farther from the world he had conquered.

Naples and the Seven Works of Mercy

Naples in 1606 was the largest city in Italy and one of the largest in Europe, a teeming, crowded, brilliant, and dangerous metropolis, the capital of a kingdom ruled in the name of the crown of Spain through a viceroy. For Caravaggio it had two decisive advantages. It lay outside the Papal States, so the Roman death sentence could not be executed there, and it was a city of enormous wealth, with a hungry market for religious painting and a network of churches, confraternities, and noble patrons eager to commission work. The fugitive painter, far from being a discredited outcast, arrived in Naples as a celebrity, the most famous painter in Italy, and commissions came to him almost at once.

Caravaggio's first Neapolitan period, from late 1606 into 1607, produced some of the most ambitious paintings of his entire career. The supreme work of these months is The Seven Works of Mercy, painted for the Pio Monte della Misericordia, a charitable confraternity of young Neapolitan noblemen devoted to the relief of the poor and the sick. The confraternity's church still possesses the picture, hanging above the altar for which it was made. The commission asked Caravaggio to represent the seven corporal works of mercy of Catholic teaching, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the stranger, visiting the sick, visiting the imprisoned, and burying the dead. A lesser painter would have produced seven separate panels. Caravaggio compressed all seven into a single, crowded, nocturnal street scene, a torchlit corner of Naples itself, where the works of mercy are performed by ordinary people jostling together in the dark, while overhead the Virgin and Child lean down from a tangle of angels. It is one of the most astonishing feats of compression in European art, a whole moral teaching staged as a single moment of urban life.

In Naples Caravaggio also painted the great Flagellation of Christ for a chapel in the church of San Domenico Maggiore, a powerful Madonna of the Rosary, and other works that carried his manner into a city that would never be the same for it. The painters of Naples seized on his example, and a strong Caravaggesque school took root there that would shape Neapolitan painting for decades. Yet Caravaggio did not stay. Despite his success, despite the safety Naples offered, within roughly nine months of his arrival he sailed away again, this time to the island fortress of the Knights of Malta. The reason lay in his deepest need: not money, not commissions, but a path back from disgrace, and he had come to believe that Malta might offer it.

Malta and the Order of Saint John

In the middle of 1607 Caravaggio arrived on the island of Malta, the headquarters of one of the most extraordinary institutions in the Christian world: the Order of the Knights of Saint John, also called the Knights Hospitaller or, from their island, the Knights of Malta. The Order was a sovereign religious and military brotherhood, its members sworn knights who were also professed monks, dedicated to the care of the sick and to perpetual war against the enemies of Christendom at sea. They had withstood a famous Ottoman siege in 1565 and had built, in its aftermath, the fortified new capital of Valletta. To be admitted to the Order was a high honor, and it was also, for a man in Caravaggio's position, something more: a knighthood conferred status, dignity, and a kind of moral rehabilitation, and there was reason to hope that becoming a Knight of Malta might smooth the path toward a papal pardon for the killing in Rome.

Caravaggio's route to Malta again ran through the Colonna. Costanza Colonna's son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, was a general of the Order's galley fleet, and the family connection that had sheltered the painter in the hills near Rome and in Naples now carried him to the island. He arrived to find the Order governed by its Grand Master, Alof de Wignacourt, a Frenchman of great energy and ambition, and Wignacourt quickly grasped what an ornament to his rule the most famous painter in Italy could be. Caravaggio set to work for the Order at once, and the pictures he produced on Malta are among the finest of his late career.

He painted a magnificent state portrait of Alof de Wignacourt, the Grand Master standing in gleaming parade armor while a young page holds his helmet, a painting that fixed forever the image of the Order's ruler. He painted a contemplative Saint Jerome Writing for one of the chapels of the Order's conventual church, and a portrait of the elderly knight Antonio Martelli, a grave and searching study of an old man's face. And then he painted, for the Oratory attached to the conventual church, the largest and in many eyes the greatest single canvas of his life, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. Wignacourt was delighted. On the fourteenth of July 1608, by special dispensation, since the Order ordinarily required noble birth and Caravaggio had none, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was received into the Order of Saint John as a Knight of Magistral Obedience. The murderer with a price on his head was now, formally, a knight. It was the highest point of his rehabilitation, and it lasted only a few months.

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted for the Oratory of the conventual church of the Knights of Saint John in Valletta, where it remains to this day, is by common consent one of the towering masterpieces of European painting and the supreme achievement of Caravaggio's final years. It is also, by a wide margin, the largest picture he ever painted, a vast canvas roughly three and a half metres high and over five metres wide, scaled to the great wall of the chamber in which the knights gathered. Saint John the Baptist was the patron saint of the Order, and the subject of his execution carried a particular weight for a brotherhood whose members vowed their lives to a holy cause.

The painting depicts the moment after the fatal stroke. John the Baptist lies fallen on the ground, his hands bound behind him, his throat already cut; the executioner, an ordinary muscular man, has set aside his sword and bends down to draw the knife that will finish severing the head. A servant girl stretches out a golden basin to receive it. An old woman beside her presses her hands to her head in a gesture of pure horror. A jailer in rich dress stands over the scene and points, with cold administrative calm, at the basin, directing the grisly task. To one side, two prisoners watch through the bars of a window. The vast architecture of the prison courtyard rises above them, plain and immense and almost empty, and the small group of figures is pressed down into the lower portion of the enormous canvas, dwarfed by the surrounding stone and dark.

The picture's restraint is what makes it unbearable. There is no melodrama, no flailing, no theatrical excess; there is only the quiet, methodical, and entirely ordinary business of a killing, carried out by working people in a real and squalid place. And it is on this canvas that Caravaggio did something he did nowhere else in his surviving work. He signed it. In the dark pool of blood spreading from the Baptist's wound he wrote his name, and he wrote it in a form that has been read as beginning with the letter f, for fra, the title of a professed brother of a religious order. The greatest painter of his age signed his single greatest picture in the blood of a martyr, and he signed it as a knight. It is one of the most extraordinary signatures in the history of art, and it was made at the very moment when the brief dignity it proclaimed was about to be torn away.

Disgrace: Imprisonment and Escape from Malta

Caravaggio's career as a Knight of Malta lasted only a matter of months before his old enemy, his ungovernable temper, destroyed it. In the late summer or early autumn of 1608, just weeks after his triumphant reception into the Order, he was involved in a violent affray. The details are imperfectly recorded, but it is clear that a brawl broke out, that several knights were involved, and that one senior knight was seriously, perhaps gravely, wounded. For a brother of the Order to take part in such an attack on a fellow knight was a grave offense against the discipline and honor of the brotherhood, and the consequences came swiftly.

Caravaggio was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of Sant'Angelo, the great castle guarding the harbor of the Order's capital. He was confined in a cell that has become notorious in the literature of his life: the guva, a deep, bottle-shaped pit hollowed out of the solid rock, a prison from which escape was held to be impossible. And yet, before the year was out, Caravaggio escaped. Exactly how he did so has never been established. To get out of the guva, over the walls of Sant'Angelo, past the guards, off the island, and across the sea would have required either extraordinary daring, or substantial outside help, or both, and it is widely suspected that powerful figures who still valued the painter, perhaps within the Colonna circle, perhaps even among the knights themselves, made his flight possible. However it was managed, by the early autumn of 1608 Caravaggio was gone from Malta, a fugitive once again, and this time a fugitive from the very Order that had so recently honored him.

The Order's response was formal and final. On the first of December 1608, the knights assembled in the Oratory of their conventual church, the very room dominated by Caravaggio's towering Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, and there, in front of his own masterpiece, they pronounced his expulsion. He was deprived of the habit of the Order and cast out, in the chilling Latin formula of the decree, as a putrid and fetid member, a rotten limb to be cut away from the body of the brotherhood. The knighthood that had crowned his long effort at rehabilitation was annulled. Caravaggio had been a Knight of Malta for less than five months. He had fled to Sicily, and the last and strangest phase of his wandering had begun.

Sicily: Syracuse, Messina, and Palermo

Caravaggio crossed from Malta to the nearby island of Sicily, landing at the ancient city of Syracuse, on the southeastern coast, around October 1608. Sicily, like Naples, belonged to the Spanish crown, and it offered the fugitive both distance from his enemies and a fresh field of patrons. At Syracuse he had a stroke of good fortune in the form of an old friend. Mario Minniti, a Sicilian painter who had known Caravaggio in his early Roman years and had served as a model for some of his pictures, was now an established and successful artist in his native island, and Minniti used his standing to help his fugitive friend obtain commissions.

The pictures Caravaggio painted during his Sicilian months are among the strangest and most moving of his career, and they show a late style of extreme austerity. For a church in Syracuse he painted The Burial of Saint Lucy, the martyred patron saint of the city, a vast dark canvas in which the small dead body of the young saint lies on the ground while two enormous gravediggers loom in the foreground and the mourners are pressed into a thin band beneath a towering, almost empty wall. Moving on to the city of Messina, on the strait between Sicily and the mainland, he painted The Raising of Lazarus, a great image of Christ summoning the dead man back to life across a dark void crossed by a single shaft of light, and an Adoration of the Shepherds for the Capuchin friars, a picture of the Nativity stripped to a scene of utter poverty, the Virgin and Child lying almost on the bare ground in a ruined stable. Then he traveled to Palermo, the Sicilian capital, where he painted a Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence for an oratory of the city, a picture that would meet a tragic fate: it was stolen in 1969 in one of the most notorious art thefts in history, an act attributed to organized crime, and it has never been recovered.

These Sicilian works share a haunting quality. The figures are smaller, more isolated, swallowed by immense fields of darkness and bare architecture; the handling of paint grows looser, swifter, more nervous; the mood is one of poverty, grief, and bare survival. The early biographers who collected memories of Caravaggio in Sicily, particularly the Messina writer Francesco Susinno, recorded that the painter's behavior in these months had become strange and fearful. He was said to sleep in his clothes with a dagger at his side, to startle and take offense without cause, to be a man perpetually braced for an attack he was certain was coming. The hunted man knew that distance and fame were no longer protection enough, and at some point in the second half of 1609 he left Sicily and sailed back to the one place that had reliably sheltered him, the city of Naples.

The Return to Naples and the Attack at the Osteria Del Cerriglio

Caravaggio returned to Naples late in 1609, and once again he placed himself under the protection of the Colonna, lodging in or near the household of the Marchesa Costanza Colonna. He was now a man who had been condemned to death in Rome, expelled in disgrace from the Order of Malta, and, by his own evident conviction, marked for vengeance. His fears, as the early sources record them, were no longer the ravings of a disordered mind. They were a sober reading of his situation. He had powerful enemies: the family of the man he had killed, and very possibly agents of the Knights of Malta, an order not known for forgiving an affront to its honor.

The blow, when it came, nearly killed him. One night, outside a Naples tavern known as the Osteria del Cerriglio, a notorious haunt frequented by the rougher elements of the city, Caravaggio was set upon by several armed men who had evidently lain in wait for him. He was attacked with such ferocity that he was left severely wounded, and his face was slashed and disfigured, a deliberate facial mutilation of the kind that carried, in the honor culture of the time, a specific and humiliating meaning. The assault was so grave that reports of his death spread, and the news reached Rome that the painter Caravaggio had been killed in Naples. He had not been killed, but he had been very badly hurt, and his recovery was slow and incomplete; the man who survived the Osteria del Cerriglio was scarred and weakened.

Even now, broken in body, Caravaggio went on painting, and the works of this last Neapolitan period are among the most desolate and powerful he ever made. He painted The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, his last documented painting, completed in the spring of 1610 for the Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria, a picture of terrible quietness in which the saint looks down at the arrow that has just been shot into her breast at point-blank range. He painted a Denial of Saint Peter, in which the apostle's face crumples in the instant of his betrayal. And he painted, or completed, the David with the Head of Goliath in which the youthful David holds out the severed, anguished head of the giant, a head that is, unmistakably, a self-portrait of Caravaggio himself, scarred, suffering, and condemned. It was with such paintings, and with a desperate hope, that he prepared in the summer of 1610 to make his last journey.

The Last Journey and Death at Porto Ercole

By the summer of 1610 Caravaggio had reason to believe that the long ordeal of his exile might be nearing its end. Powerful friends had been working in Rome on his behalf, and the central figure in these efforts was Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the art-loving nephew of the reigning pope, Paul V, and one of the most avid collectors in Italy. A pardon for the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni appeared to be within reach. Caravaggio resolved to return toward Rome to be on hand when it came, and he prepared, in the manner he understood best, to grease the wheels of his rehabilitation with paintings. He gathered several canvases to carry north as gifts for the men whose favor he needed, and among them, it is generally believed, was a David with the Head of Goliath, that searing image of his own severed head, offered as a painted plea for mercy.

In July 1610 Caravaggio left Naples by sea, sailing north up the Italian coast on a small boat. The voyage ended in confusion and disaster. The boat put in at Palo, a fortified place on the coast north of Rome under Spanish control, and there Caravaggio was arrested, apparently in a case of mistaken identity, and held for two days. While he was detained, the boat sailed on without him, carrying his precious paintings up the coast to the port of Porto Ercole. When Caravaggio was finally released, he found himself stranded, separated from the pictures on which his future depended, and he set out frantically, by land or by whatever means he could find, to pursue the boat northward along the coast.

He reached Porto Ercole, a small harbor town in the Stato dei Presidi, a string of Spanish-held coastal enclaves on the Tuscan shore. There, around the eighteenth of July 1610, his strength gave out. Exhausted by the chase, stricken with fever, his body very likely still weakened by the terrible wounds of the attack at the Osteria del Cerriglio, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died. He was thirty-eight years old. He died alone, far from Rome, far from the patrons and rivals and crowded studios of the city he had conquered, on an obscure stretch of the Tuscan coast, and he was buried at Porto Ercole. Within days the news traveled to Rome, where it arrived tangled in rumor and contradiction. The pardon for which he had risked the journey is thought by some to have been granted at last in the very weeks of his death. If so, it came too late by a matter of days. The most revolutionary painter of his age was gone.

The Mystery of Caravaggio's Death

The death of Caravaggio at Porto Ercole has never been fully explained, and the question of exactly how the painter died has generated almost as much investigation as any episode of his life. The contemporary accounts that reached Rome in the summer of 1610 were tangled and contradictory, and the rumors that swirled around the event have never entirely settled. The traditional explanation, the one repeated for centuries, is that Caravaggio died of a fever, very probably malaria, the disease endemic to the marshy coastal lowlands of the Tuscan Maremma where Porto Ercole lay. A man who had crossed that country on foot in the heat of July, exhausted, ill, and weakened by old wounds, was a natural victim of such a fever, and the simple account of death by sickness fits the known facts well.

But the simple account has never silenced the alternatives, and the manner of Caravaggio's death has remained one of the enduring puzzles of art history. Some have argued that he died of the lingering effects of the savage attack outside the Osteria del Cerriglio in Naples, that an infected and unhealed wound, carried for the better part of a year, finally killed him. Others have raised the possibility of foul play, suggesting that the enemies who had hunted him for four years, the Tomassoni family or agents of the Knights of Malta, finally caught up with him on that lonely coast. Still others have pointed to the painter's profession itself, proposing that years of working with lead-based pigments had poisoned him, and that lead poisoning, which can produce violent and erratic behavior as well as physical collapse, might even help explain the rages that wrecked his life.

In 2010, on the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, a team of Italian researchers undertook an ambitious scientific investigation. They located bones at Porto Ercole that, after analysis using carbon dating, DNA comparison, and other methods, they concluded with a stated high degree of confidence belonged to Caravaggio. The findings, much debated, were taken to support a combination of causes: a body carrying a heavy burden of lead, weakened and perhaps finally overwhelmed by infection and the effects of his wounds and the brutal conditions of his last journey. Later scientific work, examining biological traces associated with the remains, pointed toward a fatal infection of the blood, a sepsis arising from a wound. None of these investigations has produced a verdict that all scholars accept, and given the gaps in the evidence none ever may. Caravaggio's death, like so much of his life, remains shadowed, contested, and unresolved, an ending as turbulent and uncertain as the career it closed.

Caravaggio and the Counter-Reformation Church

Caravaggio's art cannot be understood apart from the religious revolution within which he lived and worked, and the question of how Caravaggio's religious paintings reflected the spirit of the Counter-Reformation is central to any account of his achievement. He was born only eight years after the close of the Council of Trent, the great assembly through which the Roman Catholic Church responded to the challenge of the Protestant Reformation, and the world of his whole career was shaped by the energies that council had released. The Catholic Church of Caravaggio's lifetime was a church on the offensive, reforming itself, reaffirming its doctrines, and mobilizing every instrument it possessed, including the visual arts, in the work of renewal.

The Council of Trent, in the decree on sacred images issued at its final session in December 1563, had set down what religious art was now expected to do. Images were to instruct the faithful in the truths of the faith, to bring the great events of sacred history vividly before the eyes of ordinary believers, and to move them to devotion, repentance, and the imitation of the saints. Religious painting was, at the same time, to avoid anything lascivious, confusing, or doctrinally improper, and to observe a proper decorum suited to the holiness of its subjects. These twin demands, emotional power and immediacy on one side, dignity and correctness on the other, set the terms of Catholic art for more than a century, and Caravaggio's whole career can be read as a single, extraordinary, and deeply controversial response to them.

In one respect Caravaggio answered the call of the reformed Church more completely than any painter of his age. The Counter-Reformation wanted an art that would reach the ordinary believer directly, that would make the sacred story real and urgent and present. Caravaggio's naturalism did exactly that. By painting the saints and the events of the Gospel in the bodies, faces, clothing, and settings of the contemporary Roman poor, he abolished the distance between the holy narrative and the worshipper kneeling before it. His pictures spoke with overwhelming force to exactly the audience the reformers most wished to reach, and the new religious orders of the age, the Oratorians who followed the example of Filippo Neri, the Capuchins, and the charitable confraternities, with their emphasis on personal devotion, humility, and care for the poor, found in his work a powerful visual ally. Caravaggio's Lombard childhood, lived in the shadow of the austere reforming archbishop of Milan, had steeped him from the beginning in this serious, demanding, emotionally direct strain of Catholic piety.

Yet in another respect Caravaggio's art collided head-on with the Tridentine demand for decorum, and this collision explains the long series of rejected altarpieces that runs through his career. To churchmen of a more conservative temper, his refusal to idealize, his dirty feet and swollen corpses and coarse, weathered faces, did not make the sacred more accessible; it dragged it down, stripped it of the dignity that holiness required. The same painting could strike one cleric as a triumph of devotional power and another as something close to blasphemy. Caravaggio lived permanently inside that disagreement. He had given the Counter-Reformation Church the most emotionally compelling religious images it would ever possess, and the Church could never quite decide whether to embrace them or recoil from them.

The Patrons Who Shaped a Career

No artist of Caravaggio's era worked alone or for an open market in the modern sense, and the story of his career is inseparable from the story of the patrons who shaped it. In the system of his time, a painter rose or fell according to the powerful men and institutions willing to commission, collect, house, and protect him, and Caravaggio, for all his self-destructiveness, possessed an extraordinary gift for attracting patrons of the very first rank. The web of cardinals, bankers, princes, and noble families who supported Caravaggio's career is, in its way, as remarkable as the paintings themselves.

The first and most important was Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who lifted him out of poverty, took him into the Palazzo Madama, and gave him the security and the connections from which everything else flowed. Through del Monte's circle Caravaggio reached other great patrons. The Roman nobleman Ciriaco Mattei and his brothers, in whose household the painter lived for a time, commissioned major works including the Supper at Emmaus and The Taking of Christ. The fabulously wealthy banker Vincenzo Giustiniani became perhaps the most devoted private collector of his work, acquiring picture after picture, including the rejected first version of the Saint Matthew altarpiece, and assembling under his roof one of the greatest concentrations of Caravaggio's art ever held in private hands. The cultivated cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, sat for Caravaggio and commissioned from him a Sacrifice of Isaac.

Above all there was the house of Colonna. The connection ran back to Caravaggio's origins, for his father had served the Sforza marquisate of the town of Caravaggio, into which Costanza Colonna had married, and it was this aristocratic loyalty that transformed itself, after the killing of 1606, into the lifeline of his exile. The Colonna sheltered the fugitive on their estates near Rome, eased his way in Naples, and, through Costanza's son Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, a general of the galleys, carried him to Malta. In Naples the charitable noblemen of the Pio Monte della Misericordia gave him one of his greatest commissions, and the Genoese collector Marcantonio Doria commissioned his last documented painting. On Malta the Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt became, for a few months, his proud patron. And at the very end the powerful art-collecting cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of the reigning pope, acquired Caravaggio's rejected masterpieces for his own galleries and worked toward the pardon the painter so desperately sought. That a man so quarrelsome and so dangerous could command, to the last day of his life, the loyalty of such patrons is one of the most telling measures of how completely his genius was recognized.

The Painter in His Own Pictures

One of the most haunting aspects of Caravaggio's art is the way the painter inserted his own face into his paintings, and the study of Caravaggio's self-portraits and hidden self-images offers an unusually direct, if always ambiguous, window onto how he saw himself. He never, so far as is known, painted a conventional, independent self-portrait of the kind that Rembrandt or Durer left in abundance. Instead he placed himself inside the sacred and mythological dramas he was paid to paint, as a participant, a witness, or a victim, and these embedded self-images form a strange autobiography scattered across two decades of work.

The earliest is generally taken to be the so-called Young Sick Bacchus of his first Roman years, in which the painter, pale and unwell, studied his own face in a mirror and presented it under the guise of the wine god, a picture widely associated with his recovery from the illness that had put him in a Roman hospital. In the great Martyrdom of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel, a bearded man at the back of the violent scene turns to look back at the killing with an expression of troubled, helpless attention, and that figure has long been identified as Caravaggio himself, the artist present at the martyrdom he has staged, unable either to intervene or to look away. In The Taking of Christ, the man at the right edge of the canvas who raises a lantern to light the scene of the betrayal is traditionally read as a self-portrait, the painter literally cast as the bearer of the light by which the drama can be seen.

The most powerful and most disturbing of these self-images comes at the very end. In the David with the Head of Goliath painted in his last hunted years, the severed head of the giant, mouth open, eyes dimming, blood running from the brow, is unmistakably the face of Caravaggio. The painter portrayed himself as the defeated, decapitated monster, held out at arm's length by the young hero, and some scholars have seen in the youthful David, gazing at the head with an expression closer to sorrow than to triumph, a second self-portrait, the painter as he had once been confronting the painter as he had become. Painted very likely as a gift intended to help win his pardon, the picture is a confession, a plea, and a self-judgment all at once. Taken together, these hidden faces tell us something the documents cannot. They show a man who understood himself as implicated in the violence of his own art, present at every martyrdom, and who, at the close of a ruined life, could imagine his own features only as those of the slain giant, condemned, suffering, and asking, through paint, for mercy.

Caravaggio's Technique and Working Method

Understanding how Caravaggio actually painted is essential to understanding why his pictures look the way they do and why they were so revolutionary, and modern technical examination of his canvases has revealed a working method as unconventional as the results it produced. The single most important fact about that method is that Caravaggio worked, to an extraordinary degree, directly from life and directly onto the canvas, without the elaborate scaffolding of preparatory work that underpinned the practice of nearly every other major painter of his age.

The standard procedure of the period began with drawing. A painter would make studies of figures, of drapery, of hands and heads, would work out the composition in drawings, would often transfer a finished design to the canvas by mechanical means, and only then begin to paint. Caravaggio appears to have dispensed with almost all of this. No drawings that can be securely attributed to him survive, and the absence is not an accident of preservation; it reflects a genuinely different way of working. Technical study of his paintings has shown that he laid in his compositions on a dark ground, the brownish or reddish-black priming that gives his pictures their deep tonality, and that he frequently scored rapid incisions into that ground with a hard point, marking the key contours, a head, a profile, the line of a shoulder, before painting. These incisions, visible in raking light on many of his canvases, took the place of the under-drawing other painters used.

He posed living models in a darkened room and lit them with a strong, concentrated light falling from above, and he painted what he saw. The early biographers describe exactly this, a studio kept dark, the model illuminated as if by a single high window, the painter rendering directly the brilliant lights and plunging shadows that the arrangement produced. Some later writers, struck by the photographic intensity of his observation, have speculated that he used mirrors or other optical devices to project his images, a theory that remains controversial and unproven. What is certain is that his procedure made him dependent on the model in front of him, that it favored half-length compositions and dramatic single moments, and that it produced a vividness of physical presence that no method based on drawing and idealization could match. The cost of this approach was a limited output. Caravaggio worked picture by picture, from life, and he left behind a relatively small body of work, only around sixty paintings now generally accepted as his, a tiny corpus for an artist of such towering influence, and one whose attributions are still fiercely argued by specialists.

The Man Behind the Paintings: Character and Companions

The Caravaggio who emerges from the documents is a figure of violent contradictions, and the early biographers, even those who admired him, struggled to reconcile the sublimity of the art with the turbulence of the man. He was, by every account, proud, quick to take offense, contemptuous of authority and of rivals, and prone to sudden and dangerous rage. He dressed expensively and carelessly, wearing fine clothes until they fell to rags. He kept a sword at his side and a servant boy at his heels. He worked, the sources say, in furious bursts, painting intensely for a stretch of days or weeks and then abandoning the studio for the taverns and the streets, where trouble reliably found him. And yet the same man produced, year after year, paintings of profound religious feeling, of tenderness, of pity for the poor and the suffering, paintings that suggest an imagination saturated with the Gospel and capable of overwhelming compassion.

His companions in Rome were drawn largely from the world of artists and the demimonde that surrounded it. His closest friends included the architect Onorio Longhi, himself famously hot-tempered and a participant in several of Caravaggio's scrapes, and the Sicilian painter Mario Minniti, who modeled for some of the early pictures and who, years later, would help the fugitive find work in Sicily. The painter Prospero Orsi, a specialist in decorative grotesques, was an early promoter of Caravaggio's reputation, and for a time he moved in the same circle as Orazio Gentileschi, a fellow painter and a co-defendant in the libel trial of 1603.

For his models Caravaggio used the people of his own world. Boys from the streets posed as Bacchus and as the youthful saints. Working men became apostles and executioners. And the women of Rome's flourishing world of courtesans served as his Madonnas and his saints, a practice that scandalized the devout. The courtesan Fillide Melandroni, whose name is bound up with the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni, sat for several pictures; a woman named Lena, identified with Maddalena Antognetti, is associated with the Madonna pictures of his last Roman years and with the assault on the notary Pasqualone. Caravaggio also painted himself repeatedly into his own canvases, most hauntingly as the sickly young Bacchus of his early Roman years and, at the very end, as the severed, suffering head of Goliath. He never married, never founded a formal workshop with apprentices in the ordinary sense, and never settled. He was a solitary, restless, and finally a hunted man, and the wonder of his story is that out of so disordered a life came an art of such concentrated and lasting power.

The Early Biographers and the Making of a Legend

Almost everything later ages have believed about Caravaggio's character was filtered through a handful of early biographers who wrote within a century of his death, and the way these writers shaped his story is itself an important part of his legacy. They did not agree with one another, they mixed documented fact with rumor and moral judgment, and the portrait they collectively handed down, of a brilliant but dangerous and ungovernable genius, has proved almost impossible to dislodge, even where modern research has corrected its details.

The earliest published notice of Caravaggio appeared while he was still alive. The Dutch painter and writer Karel van Mander, in his great compendium of artists' lives published in 1604, included a brief account of the Roman scene that already described Caravaggio as a painter of extraordinary gifts who was also wild, quarrelsome, and impossible to deal with, a man who would work and then roam the city looking for a fight. That double image, genius and violence inseparably linked, was fixed from the very beginning. Some years after the painter's death, the Sienese physician Giulio Mancini, who had lived in Rome through Caravaggio's career, wrote an account in his treatise on painting that is valuable for its closeness to the events, though it too is colored by gossip.

The most consequential of the early biographers were two men with opposing agendas. Giovanni Baglione, the rival painter whom Caravaggio had mocked and who had sued him for libel, published in 1642 a life of Caravaggio that was knowledgeable but laced with the resentment of an old enemy. And in 1672 the influential connoisseur and theorist Giovan Pietro Bellori included Caravaggio in his celebrated collection of artists' lives. Bellori was a champion of the classical, idealizing tradition in art, and he profoundly disapproved of Caravaggio's method of slavishly copying nature without correcting it toward ideal beauty. Yet Bellori could not deny the power of the paintings, and his account, admiring and condemning in nearly equal measure, became the single most influential interpretation of Caravaggio for the next two centuries. To these accounts a later writer, the Sicilian Francesco Susinno, added in the eighteenth century a collection of vivid, half-legendary anecdotes about the painter's troubled months in Sicily. Together these sources created the Caravaggio of legend, and separating the documented man from that legend has been one of the central tasks of modern scholarship.

The Caravaggisti: Followers and the Spread of a Style

Although Caravaggio never founded a school in the formal sense, never took on the train of apprentices that a successful Roman master would normally have gathered, his manner of painting swept across Europe with a speed and a reach that few artistic innovations have ever matched. Within a few years of his most famous Roman commissions, painters were imitating his dramatic lighting, his naturalism, his half-length figures crowded close to the picture plane, and the term art historians use for this army of imitators and disciples is the Caravaggisti, the followers of Caravaggio.

In Rome itself the influence took hold at once. Orazio Gentileschi, Caravaggio's friend and fellow defendant in the libel trial, adopted the new manner, and his gifted daughter Artemisia Gentileschi became one of the most powerful painters of the Caravaggesque generation, producing versions of subjects such as Judith beheading Holofernes that rival Caravaggio's own in dramatic force. The painter Bartolomeo Manfredi specialized in the tavern scenes and genre subjects of Caravaggio's earlier manner and codified them into a repeatable formula that other artists, especially visiting foreigners, eagerly learned. Carlo Saraceni and Orazio Borgianni carried the style forward in Rome, and the great city, full of foreign painters come to study, became the place where the Caravaggesque language was caught and carried home.

It was carried very far. The painters of the Dutch city of Utrecht, Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen, came to Rome, absorbed Caravaggio's example, and returned to the Netherlands to found a flourishing Caravaggesque current; Honthorst became so celebrated for his candlelit night scenes that the Italians had called him Gherardo of the Nights. In France the style shaped Valentin de Boulogne and stands behind the magical, candle-lit religious paintings of Georges de La Tour. In Spain, and in Spanish-ruled Naples where Caravaggio himself had worked, his influence ran deep: the Neapolitan Battistello Caracciolo took it up immediately, the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera built a major career on a powerful Caravaggesque naturalism, and the young Diego Velazquez and Francisco de Zurbaran absorbed the lesson of his light and his truthfulness. Even painters of the very first rank who never imitated him directly, Rubens, who admired and copied his work, and Rembrandt, whose whole art is a meditation on dramatic light, stand in some measure in his debt. No painter of the seventeenth century did more to change how Europe painted.

Eclipse: the Long Neglect of Caravaggio

Given the breadth and speed of his influence, one of the most surprising facts of Caravaggio's story is what happened next: he was, for the better part of two and a half centuries, largely forgotten, his reputation sunk so low that he became a minor footnote in the history of art. Understanding this long eclipse is necessary to understanding the drama of his eventual return.

The decline began within a generation of his death. The Caravaggesque manner, so fashionable in the first decades of the seventeenth century, gradually gave way to other currents. The dominant tradition of Italian and then European painting flowed instead from the classical, idealizing reform associated with the Carracci family of Bologna and their heirs, painters such as Domenichino, Guido Reni, and, supremely, the Frenchman Nicolas Poussin. This tradition prized ideal beauty, noble composition, harmonious color, and the improvement of nature toward an ideal, precisely the values that Caravaggio's raw, unselective naturalism seemed to defy. The influential criticism of Giovan Pietro Bellori, who had set the classical ideal at the center of his theory of art, taught generations of connoisseurs to regard Caravaggio as a painter of great but dangerous talent, a man who had copied nature without ennobling it and had thereby led art astray.

As the classical and academic view hardened into orthodoxy through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Caravaggio's standing fell further still. His pictures were admired here and there, but he was widely treated as a coarse, even brutal painter, an artist whose violent life and violent art were of a piece and equally to be deplored. The great nineteenth-century English critic John Ruskin wrote of him with open distaste. His surviving paintings were scattered, often misattributed, sometimes confused with the work of his imitators, and many were lost to view in private collections and provincial churches. The man who had changed the course of European painting had become, in the standard histories, a name mentioned briefly and often disapprovingly, a cautionary example rather than a master. It would take the twentieth century, and one scholar above all, to undo nearly three hundred years of neglect.

Rediscovery: Roberto Longhi and the Return of a Master

The rehabilitation of Caravaggio is one of the great stories of modern art history, and at its center stands the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi. From early in the twentieth century, Longhi devoted himself to the study of Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti with a passion and a scholarly rigor that gradually transformed the way the painter was understood. He worked to sort the genuine paintings from the misattributions, to trace the spread of the Caravaggesque style across Europe, and to make the case, in writing of brilliance and conviction, that Caravaggio was not a coarse anomaly but one of the supreme and most consequential painters in the entire history of Western art.

The decisive public moment came in 1951, when Longhi organized a major exhibition of Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. For the first time a large body of the painter's work was gathered in one place and presented to a broad public, and the effect was electrifying. Visitors and critics alike were confronted with the sheer power of the paintings, and the exhibition is generally regarded as the event that restored Caravaggio, decisively and permanently, to the front rank of the artistic canon. In the decades that followed, scholarship on Caravaggio multiplied; historians and connoisseurs such as Walter Friedlaender and Denis Mahon, and many others after them, deepened the understanding of his life, his patrons, and his work, while archival researchers steadily recovered the documents, the contracts, the court records, the baptismal entry, that anchor the modern biography in fact.

The recovery extended to the paintings themselves. Long-lost works were identified and restored to the canon, most dramatically The Taking of Christ, recognized in 1990 hanging unregarded in a Jesuit house in Dublin. Major exhibitions devoted to Caravaggio now draw enormous crowds; his life has become the subject of biographies, novels, plays, and films; his churches in Rome are places of pilgrimage for travelers from around the world. From a near-forgotten name, Caravaggio has become, within a single century, one of the most popular, most studied, and most beloved of all the old masters, and the once-orthodox judgment that condemned him has been completely overturned.

Caravaggio in the Modern Imagination

In the century since his rediscovery, Caravaggio has become something more than a name in the history of art; he has become a figure of the modern popular imagination, and the reasons that his paintings still draw crowds have as much to do with the drama of his story as with the power of the work. The combination of supreme artistic genius and a life of violence, scandal, flight, and mysterious death has made him irresistible to writers, filmmakers, and the wider public, and a substantial industry of books, films, and exhibitions has grown up around him.

Part of that fascination has been fed by the dramatic fate of the paintings themselves. The most famous of all stolen Caravaggio paintings is the Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence, which the artist painted in Palermo in his last Sicilian months. In 1969 the picture was cut from its frame in the Oratory of San Lorenzo and vanished, in a theft long attributed to the Sicilian organized-crime networks, and despite decades of investigation and a stream of conflicting testimony about its fate, it has never been recovered. It remains one of the most valuable and most sought-after missing artworks in the world, and a painted reproduction now hangs in the place its masterpiece once occupied. The opposite kind of drama surrounds The Taking of Christ, which had been lost to scholarship for centuries until, in 1990, it was recognized hanging in the dining room of a Jesuit residence in Dublin, mistaken for a copy. Its identification and restoration turned an overlooked picture into one of the treasures of the National Gallery of Ireland.

Caravaggio has also entered the wider culture through film and literature. The painter's life inspired a celebrated 1986 film by the English director Derek Jarman, and his story has been retold in a steady stream of novels, plays, and major biographies, several of which have reached large general audiences and kept the debates about his life and death alive for new readers. His influence on the modern visual imagination runs deeper still through the medium of cinema. The dramatic, directional lighting he perfected, the figure carved from darkness by a single shaft of light, has become part of the basic vocabulary of film, and cinematographers and directors regularly speak of Caravaggesque lighting as a deliberate effect, a direct inheritance from a painter who died more than three and a half centuries before the invention of the motion picture.

For all the books and films, it is still the encounter with the paintings themselves that accounts for his hold on the public. In Rome, visitors line up daily in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi to feed coins into the light that illuminates the Contarelli Chapel, and the same scene repeats in Santa Maria del Popolo and Sant'Agostino, where his altarpieces remain in the very chapels for which they were painted. Major exhibitions devoted to Caravaggio reliably become events, drawing crowds that few old masters can command. New attributions, claims that a long-overlooked canvas may be an authentic Caravaggio, make international headlines and provoke fierce scholarly argument, because the surviving corpus is so small that every addition matters and every claim is contested. Four centuries after his death, the orphan from Lombardy is one of the most recognized names in the history of painting, and his pictures, scattered through the churches and museums of Europe, continue to do exactly what he built them to do: seize the eye, and refuse to release it.

The Legacy of Caravaggio

The legacy of Caravaggio is vast out of all proportion to the brevity of his life and the smallness of his surviving body of work. He died at thirty-eight, an outlaw, leaving perhaps sixty paintings, and yet he changed the art of Europe more profoundly than almost any painter who came before or after him. His achievement can be summed up under a few great headings, and each of them has shaped the way pictures have been made ever since.

First, he gave European painting a new naturalism. By insisting that the sacred could and should be shown in the bodies and faces of ordinary, unidealized, often poor human beings, he broke the long dominance of an idealizing tradition that placed beauty above truth, and he opened the way for an art that found dignity and meaning in the real. Second, he made light into a dramatic and psychological instrument. The tenebrism he perfected, the cutting of brilliantly lit figures out of profound darkness, gave painters a new means of directing attention, intensifying emotion, and staging the decisive instant of a story, and its influence runs from the seventeenth-century Baroque straight through to the lighting of the modern cinema, where directors and cinematographers still invoke his name. Third, through the Caravaggisti he transmitted these innovations across the whole of Europe, so that the art of Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Spain in the seventeenth century is unthinkable without him.

There is also the legacy of the story itself. Caravaggio is one of the very few old masters whose life grips the imagination as powerfully as his art, and the union of the two, the sublime painter and the violent fugitive, the man who could create images of overwhelming tenderness and pity and also kill a man in the street, has made him an enduringly fascinating figure, the subject of endless biography and speculation. That fascination has its dangers; it can reduce a great artist to a lurid legend. But at its best it draws people toward the paintings, and it is before the paintings, in the churches of Rome and Naples and Valletta and in the great galleries of the world, that the true measure of Caravaggio is taken. There, four centuries on, the light still falls as he commanded it, the saints still have the faces of the poor, and the decisive moment is still frozen, forever, at the instant of its happening.

CONCLUSION

The life of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was short, violent, and largely unhappy, and it ended in obscurity on a fever-ridden coast far from the city that had made him famous. He was orphaned by plague as a small child, trained in the workshops of Lombardy, and thrown into the brutal competition of Rome with nothing but his talent. That talent was enough to lift him, within a few years, to the summit of his profession, to make him the most sought-after and the most controversial painter in the artistic capital of the Catholic world. And then the same ungovernable nature that gave his paintings their terrifying intensity destroyed the life that had produced them. He killed a man, lost everything, and spent his last four years as a fugitive, painting masterpiece after masterpiece in Naples and Malta and Sicily while the sentence of death followed him from city to city.

It would be easy, and it would be wrong, to let the drama of that story overshadow the reason it is remembered at all. Caravaggio matters because of what he did with paint. He looked at the world, at real bodies, real faces, real light and real darkness, with an honesty that no painter before him had dared, and he made that honesty the vehicle of the deepest religious and human feeling. He showed Saint Matthew as a startled tax collector, the Virgin as a tired poor woman, the apostles as laborers, the executioners as ordinary working men, and in doing so he insisted that the sacred is not remote from ordinary life but breaks into it, suddenly and overwhelmingly, in the dark rooms where real people live and suffer and die.

For nearly three centuries the world chose to forget him, and then, in the space of a few decades, it remembered him completely, and now his place among the supreme painters of all time is secure beyond argument. The churches of Rome where his great chapels still hang, the galleries that guard his canvases, and the millions who travel each year to stand before them are the final verdict on the orphan from Lombardy who became a fugitive and a genius. Caravaggio gambled and lost almost everything a man can lose. But the paintings survived, and through them, against every expectation his disordered life could have raised, he won.

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