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Bellori claims that around 1590–1592, Caravaggio, already well known for brawling with gangs of young men, committed a murder which forced him to flee from Milan, first to Venice and then to Rome. |
On 28 November 1600, while living at the Palazzo Madama with his patron Cardinal Del Monte, Caravaggio beat nobleman Girolamo Stampa da Montepulciano, a guest of the cardinal, with a club, resulting in an official complaint to the police. Episodes of brawling, violence, and tumult grew more and more frequent. Caravaggi... |
After his release from jail in 1601, Caravaggio returned to paint first The Taking of Christ and then Amor Vincit Omnia. In 1603, he was arrested again, this time for the defamation of another painter, Giovanni Baglione, who sued Caravaggio and his followers Orazio Gentileschi and Onorio Longhi for writing offensive po... |
Between May and October 1604, Caravaggio was arrested several times for possession of illegal weapons and for insulting the city guards. He was also sued by a tavern waiter for having thrown a plate of artichokes in his face. |
An early published notice on Caravaggio, dating from 1604 and describing his lifestyle three years previously, recounts that "after a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an arg... |
In 1605, Caravaggio was forced to flee to Genoa for three weeks after seriously injuring Mariano Pasqualone di Accumoli, a notary, in a dispute over Lena, Caravaggio's model and lover. The notary reported having been attacked on 29 July with a sword, causing a severe head injury. Caravaggio's patrons intervened and man... |
Upon his return to Rome, Caravaggio was sued by his landlady Prudenzia Bruni for not having paid his rent. Out of spite, Caravaggio threw rocks through her window at night and was sued again. |
In November, Caravaggio was hospitalized for an injury which he claimed he had caused himself by falling on his own sword. |
On 29 May 1606, Caravaggio killed a young man, possibly unintentionally, resulting in his fleeing Rome with a death sentence hanging over him. Ranuccio Tomassoni was a gangster from a wealthy family. The two had argued many times, often ending in blows. The circumstances are unclear, whether a brawl or a duel with swor... |
Many rumours circulated at the time as to the cause of the fight. Several contemporary avvisi referred to a quarrel over a gambling debt and a pallacorda game, a sort of tennis, and this explanation has become established in the popular imagination. Other rumours, however, claimed that the duel stemmed from jealousy ov... |
Caravaggio's patrons had hitherto been able to shield him from any serious consequences of his frequent duels and brawling, but Tomassoni's wealthy family was outraged by his death and demanded justice. Caravaggio's patrons were unable to protect him. Caravaggio was sentenced to beheading for murder, and an open bounty... |
Good modern accounts are to be found in Peter Robb's M and Helen Langdon's Caravaggio: A Life. A theory relating the death to Renaissance notions of honour and symbolic wounding has been advanced by art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon. Whatever the details, it was a serious matter. |
Caravaggio was forced to flee Rome. He moved just south of the city, then to Naples, Malta, and Sicily. |
Exile and death (1606–1610) |
Naples |
Following the death of Tomassoni, Caravaggio fled first to the estates of the Colonna family south of Rome and then on to Naples, where Costanza Colonna Sforza, widow of Francesco Sforza, in whose husband's household Caravaggio's father had held a position, maintained a palace. In Naples, outside the jurisdiction of th... |
His connections with the Colonnas led to a stream of important church commissions, including the Madonna of the Rosary, and The Seven Works of Mercy. The Seven Works of Mercy depicts the seven corporal works of mercy as a set of compassionate acts concerning the material needs of others. The painting was made for and i... |
Malta |
Despite his success in Naples, after only a few months in the city Caravaggio left for Malta, the headquarters of the Knights of Malta. Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, Costanza's son, was a Knight of Malta and general of the Order's galleys. He appears to have facilitated Caravaggio's arrival on the island in 1607 (and his es... |
Major works from his Malta period include the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, his largest ever work, and the only painting to which he put his signature, Saint Jerome Writing (both housed in Saint John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta) and a Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page, as well as portraits of other... |
Yet, by late August 1608, he was arrested and imprisoned, likely the result of yet another brawl, this time with an aristocratic knight, during which the door of a house was battered down and the knight seriously wounded. Caravaggio was imprisoned by the Knights at Valletta, but he managed to escape. By December, he ha... |
Sicily |
Caravaggio made his way to Sicily where he met his old friend Mario Minniti, who was now married and living in Syracuse. Together they set off on what amounted to a triumphal tour from Syracuse to Messina and, maybe, on to the island capital, Palermo. In Syracuse and Messina Caravaggio continued to win prestigious and ... |
Caravaggio displayed bizarre behaviour from very early in his career. Mancini describes him as "extremely crazy", a letter from Del Monte notes his strangeness, and Minniti's 1724 biographer says that Mario left Caravaggio because of his behaviour. The strangeness seems to have increased after Malta. Susinno's early-18... |
Return to Naples |
After only nine months in Sicily, Caravaggio returned to Naples in the late summer of 1609. According to his earliest biographer, he was being pursued by enemies while in Sicily and felt it safest to place himself under the protection of the Colonnas until he could secure his pardon from the pope (now Paul V) and retur... |
In October 1609, he was involved in a violent clash, an attempt on his life, perhaps ambushed by men in the pay of the knight he had wounded in Malta or some other faction of the Order. His face was seriously disfigured and rumours circulated in Rome that he was dead. He painted a Salome with the Head of John the Bapti... |
News from Rome encouraged Caravaggio, and in the summer of 1610, he took a boat northwards to receive the pardon, which seemed imminent thanks to his powerful Roman friends. With him were three last paintings, the gifts for Cardinal Scipione. What happened next is the subject of much confusion and conjecture, shrouded ... |
The bare facts seem to be that on 28 July, an anonymous avviso (private newsletter) from Rome to the ducal court of Urbino reported that Caravaggio was dead. Three days later, another avviso said that he had died of fever on his way from Naples to Rome. A poet friend of the artist later gave 18 July as the date of deat... |
Death |
Caravaggio had a fever at the time of his death, and what killed him was a matter of controversy and rumour at the time and has been a matter of historical debate and study since. Contemporary rumours held that either the Tomassoni family or the Knights had him killed in revenge. Traditionally historians have long thou... |
Caravaggio's remains were buried in Porto Ercole's San Sebastiano cemetery, which closed in 1956, and then moved to St. Erasmus cemetery, where, in 2010, archaeologists conducted a year-long investigation of remains found in three crypts and after using DNA, carbon dating, and other methods, believe with a high degree ... |
Vatican documents released in 2002 support the theory that the wealthy Tomassoni family had him hunted down and killed as a vendetta for Caravaggio's murder of gangster Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a botched attempt at castration after a duel over the affections of model Fillide Melandroni. |
Sexuality |
Since the 1970s art scholars and historians have debated the inferences of homoeroticism in Caravaggio's works as a way to better understand the man. Caravaggio never married and had no known children, and Howard Hibbard observed the absence of erotic female figures in the artist's oeuvre: "In his entire career he did ... |
A connection with a certain Lena is mentioned in a 1605 court deposition by Pasqualone, where she is described as "Michelangelo's girl". According to G. B. Passeri, this 'Lena' was Caravaggio's model for the Madonna di Loreto; and according to Catherine Puglisi, 'Lena' may have been the same person as the courtesan Mad... |
Caravaggio's sexuality also received early speculation due to claims about the artist by Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. Writing in 1783, Mirabeau contrasted the personal life of Caravaggio directly with the writings of St Paul in the Book of Romans, arguing that "Romans" excessively practice sodomy or homos... |
Aside from the paintings, evidence also comes from the libel trial brought against Caravaggio by Giovanni Baglione in 1603. Baglione accused Caravaggio and his friends of writing and distributing scurrilous doggerel attacking him; the pamphlets, according to Baglione's friend and witness Mao Salini, had been distribute... |
Baglione's painting of "Divine Love" has also been seen as a visual accusation of sodomy against Caravaggio. Such accusations were damaging and dangerous as sodomy was a capital crime at the time. Even though the authorities were unlikely to investigate such a well-connected person as Caravaggio, "Once an artist had be... |
The art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon has summarised the debate: |
A lot has been made of Caravaggio's presumed homosexuality, which has in more than one previous account of his life been presented as the single key that explains everything, both the power of his art and the misfortunes of his life. There is no absolute proof of it, only strong circumstantial evidence and much rumour.... |
Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott has taken issue with what he regarded as Graham-Dixon's minimizing of Caravaggio's homosexuality: |
There was a fussiness to the tone whenever a scholar or curator was forced to grapple with transgressive sexuality, and you can still find it even in relatively recent histories, including Andrew Graham-Dixon's 2010 biography of Caravaggio, which acknowledges only that "he likely slept with men". The author notes the a... |
As an artist |
The birth of Baroque |
Caravaggio "put the oscuro (shadows) into chiaroscuro". Chiaroscuro was practised long before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique a dominant stylistic element, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light. With this came the acute observation of physical ... |
He worked at great speed, from live models, scoring basic guides directly onto the canvas with the end of the brush handle; very few of Caravaggio's drawings appear to have survived, and it is likely that he preferred to work directly on the canvas, an unusual approach at the time. His models were basic to his realism;... |
Caravaggio had a noteworthy ability to express in one scene of unsurpassed vividness the passing of a crucial moment. The Supper at Emmaus depicts the recognition of Christ by his disciples: a moment before he is a fellow traveller, mourning the passing of the Messiah, as he never ceases to be to the innkeeper's eyes; ... |
The Caravaggisti |
The installation of the St. Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had an immediate impact among the younger artists in Rome, and Caravaggism became the cutting edge for every ambitious young painter. The first Caravaggisti included Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Baglione. Baglione's Caravaggio phase was short-liv... |
Caravaggio's brief stay in Naples produced a notable school of Neapolitan Caravaggisti, including Battistello Caracciolo and Carlo Sellitto. The Caravaggisti movement there ended with a terrible outbreak of plague in 1656, but the Spanish connection—Naples was a possession of Spain—was instrumental in forming the impor... |
Rubens was likely one of the first Flemish artists to be influenced by Caravaggio whose work he got to know during his stay in Rome in 1601. He later painted a copy (or rather an interpretation) of Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ and recommended his patron, the Duke of Mantua, purchase Death of the Virgin (Louvre). A... |
A number of Catholic artists from Utrecht, including Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen travelled in the first decades of the 17th century to Rome. Here they became profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio and his followers. On their return to Utrecht, their Caravaggesque works ins... |
Death and rebirth of a reputation |
Caravaggio's innovations inspired the Baroque, but the Baroque took the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism. While he directly influenced the style of the artists mentioned above, and, at a distance, the Frenchmen Georges de La Tour and Simon Vouet, and the Spaniard Giuseppe Ribera, within a few ... |
Thus his reputation was doubly vulnerable to the unsympathetic critiques of his earliest biographers, Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter with a vendetta, and the influential 17th-century critic Gian Pietro Bellori, who had not known him but was under the influence of the earlier Giovanni Battista Agucchi and Bellori's ... |
In the 1920s, art critic Roberto Longhi brought Caravaggio's name once more to the foreground and placed him in the European tradition: "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different". The influential Bernard Be... |
Epitaph |
Caravaggio's epitaph was composed by his friend Marzio Milesi. It reads: |
"Michelangelo Merisi, son of Fermo di Caravaggio – in painting not equal to a painter, but to Nature itself – died in Port' Ercole – betaking himself hither from Naples – returning to Rome – 15th calend of August – In the year of our Lord 1610 – He lived thirty-six years nine months and twenty days – Marzio Milesi, Jur... |
He was commemorated on the front of the Banca d'Italia 100,000-lire banknote in the 1980s and '90s (before Italy switched to the euro), with the back showing his Basket of Fruit. |
Oeuvre |
There is disagreement as to the size of Caravaggio's oeuvre, with counts as low as 40 and as high as 80. In his monograph of 1983, the Caravaggio scholar Alfred Moir wrote, "The forty-eight color plates in this book include almost all of the surviving works accepted by every Caravaggio expert as autograph, and even the... |
A painting depicting Judith Beheading Holofernes was allegedly discovered in an attic in Toulouse in 2014. In April 2016 the expert and art dealer to whom the work was shown announced that this was a long-lost painting by the hand of Caravaggio himself. That lost Caravaggio painting was only known up to that date by a ... |
In April 2021 a minor work believed to be from the circle of a Spanish follower of Caravaggio, Jusepe de Ribera, was withdrawn from sale at the Madrid auction house Ansorena when the Museo del Prado alerted the Ministry of Culture, which placed a preemptive export ban on the painting. The 111 centimetres (44 in) by 86 ... |
Theft |
In October 1969, two thieves entered the Oratory of Saint Lawrence in Palermo, Sicily, and stole Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence from its frame. Experts estimated its value at $20 million. |
Following the theft, Italian police set up an art theft task force with the specific aim of re-acquiring lost and stolen artworks. Since the creation of this task force, many leads have been followed regarding the Nativity. Former Italian mafia members have stated that Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence was sto... |
The whereabouts of the painting are still unknown. A reproduction currently hangs in its place in the Oratory of San Lorenzo. |
In December 1984, Saint Jerome Writing (Caravaggio, Valletta) was stolen from the St. John's Co-Cathedral, Malta. The canvas was cut out of the frame. The painting was recovered two years later, following negotiations between the thieves and Fr. Marius J. Zerafa, then the Director of Museums in Malta. A full account of... |
Cultural legacy |
Caravaggio's work has been widely influential in late-20th-century American gay culture, with frequent references to male sexual imagery in paintings such as The Musicians and Amor Victorious. British filmmaker Derek Jarman made a critically applauded biopic entitled Caravaggio in 1986. Several poems written by Thom Gu... |
In 2013, a touring Caravaggio exhibition called "Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy" opened in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. The show included five paintings by the master artist that included Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604–1605) and Martha and Mary Magdalene (158... |
In 2022 a new biopic about Caravaggio was released: L'Ombra di Caravaggio, an Italian-French movie directed by Michele Placido. |
Caravaggio was prominently featured as motif in Steven Zaillian's Netflix series Ripley, based on Patricia Highsmith's book The Talented Mr. Ripley. The murder of Rannucchio is also depicted. Caravaggio is portrayed by Daniele Rienzo. |
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