MICHELANGELO MERISI DA CARAVAGGIO (1571–1610) was a violent yob but a painter of genius. He did not invent chiaroscuro, dramatic contrasts of light, but he took it to expressive heights, darkening the shadows, transfixing a subject in a blinding beam. The dramatic tenebrism he perfected changed art. It pervades the Baroque and 19th century realism – and film noir. But the Baroque took Caravaggio’s theatricality without the psychological insight. 
He worked without preparatory sketches. His models were beggars, whores, riff-raff. If his life was scandalous so too were his pictures. Not for him the decorous, the pious. A cardinal’s secretary wrote that Caravaggio’s painting was ‘but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust’. His Conversion of St. Paul (1601) in Rome has the prostrate saint dwarfed by his horse’s arse, which is literally ‘in your face’. It appalled critics for centuries. An early complaint was that it was ‘completely bereft of action’. The art historian Jacob Burckhardt thought it ‘coarse’ and moaned that ‘the horse nearly fills the whole of the picture’ (1855). Guidebooks politely ignored it. As late as 1953, Bernard Berenson called the painting a ‘charade’ and was horrified at ‘the importance given to dumb beast over saint’. But then finally in 1955, Walter Friedlaender sensed and explained Caravaggio’s vision – the scene is ‘not a remote spectacle, far separated from the spectator. It speaks directly to him, on his own level. He can understand and share the experiences: the awakening of faith, and the martyrdom of faith.’ Such is the genius of the artist.
Born in Lombardy, he lost his family to the plague. His response was anger. After serving an apprenticeship to a minor Mannerist he moved to Rome. He struggled, selling still lifes on the street. In 1595, his luck changed when an eminent Cardinal spotted his talent. Soon he was a celebrity. But one observer noted that he would ‘swagger about with his sword at his side and with a servant following him, ever ready to engage in a fight, with the result that it is most awkward to get along with him’ (a contemporary called him ‘extremely crazy’). The sword was illegal, he didn’t have a licence. Caravaggio was repeatedly arrested (once for throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter). In 1606 Caravaggio fought with a Roman pimp and gangster, Tomassoni, possibly over a woman, tennis match or debt. Caravaggio killed him and promptly scarpered (after a death warrant was issued), fleeing to Naples and then Malta.
He reasoned that if he become a Knight of Malta (a religious military order like the Knights Templars), he might get a papal pardon. In return for painting the Beheading of St John the Baptist – one of his greatest masterpieces – he was indeed granted membership. Alas, he then got into yet another punch-up (with a more senior knight) and was imprisoned. He escaped, but was expelled from the order – being a ‘foul and rotten member’. They had a point. Fearful of reprisals (with reason) he sailed for Sicily and then Naples – where he was attacked (probably by allies of the knight he’d wounded) and seriously disfigured.
In the meantime, however, the Pope had pardoned him. It was on his way back to Rome, in Porto Ercole, that he died. Recent Vatican records indicate he was murdered by Tomassoni’s family.
His art was as violent as his life. He was the master of the moment: the moment of execution (The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 1608), of revelation (Supper at Emmaus, 1601), of betrayal (The Taking of Christ, 1602). On Caravaggio’s epitaph, ‘dedicated to a friend of extraordinary genius’, are these words: ‘In painting not equal to a painter, but to Nature itself.’
