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.