Caravaggio

Biography

Caravaggio signed only one painting, “The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist” in St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. It is his largest canvas, about three and a half metres high and five wide. Before the name stands the letter “F” (for fra, that is, brother): in the summer of 1608 the painter had been received as a knight of the Order of Malta. By December of the same year he had been expelled from the order with the formula used in all such cases: “as a rotten and fetid member”.

Michelangelo Merisi was born on 29 September 1571 in Milan; for a long time it was thought that he was born in the small town of Caravaggio itself, east of Milan. His father, Fermo Merisi, was steward and architect-decorator to the Marchese of Caravaggio, of the Sforza family; his mother, Lucia Aratori, was the daughter of a local landowner. When plague struck Milan in 1576, the family left for Caravaggio, but the father and grandfather died there, and the mother brought up five children in poverty. In 1584 the boy was apprenticed for four years to the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, who is described in the contract as a pupil of Titian.

He left Milan in 1592, or, by other accounts, in the autumn of 1591. Quarrels and the wounding of a guard are given as the reason, and the early biographer Bellori even speaks of a killing. He arrived in Rome, in the words of a contemporary, “naked and extremely needy”. He lodged with the tight-fisted Pandolfo Pucci, nicknamed “Monsignor Salad”, then found his way into the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari, the favourite painter of Pope Clement VIII, where he was set to paint flowers and fruit. His earliest known painting is “Boy Peeling Fruit”, followed by “Boy with a Basket of Fruit”, in which a professor of horticulture later identified the varieties of fruit and even a fungal spot on a fig leaf, and “Young Sick Bacchus”, usually taken to be a self-portrait after a serious illness.

After falling out with Cesari, Caravaggio began working on his own. Around him were the painter Prospero Orsi, the architect Onorio Longhi and the sixteen-year-old Sicilian Mario Minniti, who for many years was his model. “The Fortune Teller”, in which a gypsy girl, stroking a young man’s palm, quietly slips off his ring, and “The Cardsharps” were bought from a dealer’s shop by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. For the cardinal’s circle he painted “The Musicians”, “The Lute Player” (now in the Hermitage; the music in the picture can be read, and it is a madrigal by Arcadelt), “Bacchus” and “Boy Bitten by a Lizard”. Then came the first religious paintings: “Penitent Magdalene”, a weeping girl on a low stool among scattered jewellery, “Judith Beheading Holofernes” and “Rest on the Flight into Egypt”.

Fame began in 1600, when he finished “The Calling of Saint Matthew” and “The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew” for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. In “The Calling”, tax collectors sit at a table in a dim room, counting money. Christ comes in from the right; his hand and a band of light run diagonally towards Matthew, who points at himself in surprise. Caravaggio was never again without commissions, but the Church did not always accept what he painted. The first “Saint Matthew and the Angel”, a bald peasant with dirty feet, was rejected, and he had to paint it again. The same happened with “The Conversion of Saint Paul” for Santa Maria del Popolo; in the second version the horse’s rump takes up more room than the saint. A conversation with an attendant of the church has been preserved: “Is the horse God, then?” “No, but it stands in God’s light.” The “Madonna of the Serpent” hung in St Peter’s for two days. The Carmelites rejected the “Death of the Virgin”, and on Rubens’s advice it was bought by the Duke of Mantua. From the same years come “Supper at Emmaus”, “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas”, “The Entombment of Christ” and “Amor Vincit Omnia”.

The police records about him run to many pages. He beat a cardinal’s guest with a cudgel, sat in the Tor di Nona prison, in 1603 went to court with the painter Giovanni Baglione over insulting verses, in 1604 threw a plate of artichokes in a waiter’s face, and in 1605 wounded a notary and hid for three weeks in Genoa.

On 29 May 1606, in the Campo Marzio, he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni; whether it was a brawl or a duel, deliberate or accidental, is not known. The sentence was beheading, and anyone who recognised him could lawfully carry it out. From this time on, it seems to me, severed heads become an obsession in his paintings, and often the head is his own.

He fled to the Colonna estates south of Rome, then to Naples, where he painted the “Madonna of the Rosary” and “The Seven Works of Mercy”, which still hangs in the church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia. In 1607 he moved to Malta, painted the portrait of the Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt and became a knight. At the end of August 1608, after a clash with an aristocratic knight, he was put in prison; he escaped to Sicily. In Syracuse Minniti met him, and there he painted the “Burial of Saint Lucy”; in Messina came “The Raising of Lazarus” and the “Adoration of the Shepherds”: small, poor figures in an immense darkness.

In late summer 1609 he returned to Naples, and in October he was attacked and his face badly disfigured; in Rome a rumour went round that he had died. To Wignacourt he sent “Salome with the Head of John the Baptist”, with his own face on the platter, and possibly at the same time he painted “David with the Head of Goliath”, in which Goliath is also himself. His last painting was “The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula”.

In the summer of 1610, waiting for a pardon, he sailed north from Naples with three paintings for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. From here on the story gets tangled. On 28 July an anonymous dispatch from Rome reported his death; a poet friend later gave the date as 18 July, and a record of death on that day was found in Porto Ercole. He was buried there in the cemetery of San Sebastiano; when it closed in 1956, the remains were moved to the cemetery of Sant’Erasmo, where in 2010 researchers identified them with a high degree of probability.