We’re so eager to know something—anything—concrete about the elusive Caravaggio that fragments of a femur, cranium, and spine were exhumed 400 years after his death in the hope that they might be his. Depending on whom you believe, those bones did or did not belong to the mercurial Baroque artist, and they may or may not be proof that he had syphilis and lead poisoning. What is clear, regardless, is that centuries after his death at age 39, we still know little about Caravaggio the man.
Caravaggio’s oil paintings of genre scenes, mythological subjects, and biblical stories have survived, but their popularity is a relatively new phenomenon. The artist was commercially successful in his lifetime, but his contemporaries started chipping away at his reputation early on, claiming among other things that he followed nature too closely and ignored the idealization that was so prized during the High Renaissance. One of Caravaggio’s early biographers, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, wrote in 1672 that the artist “lacked invention, decorum, disegno, or any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken from him, his hand and his mind became empty.” In other words, according to this oft-repeated critique, Caravaggio’s only talent was that he could copy nature well.
That wasn’t true, of course. He pioneered tenebrism, a style in which figures are cloaked in shadow but dramatically illuminated by a single light source. Another invention was his depiction of biblical characters as contemporary figures, painting them warts and all, with dirty fingernails, tan lines, and wrinkles. Still, Caravaggio’s reputation declined until he was rediscovered in the 20th century, when a 1951 exhibition of his paintings in Milan helped reignite interest in him among the general public and scholars.
Caravaggio helped craft the dramatic Baroque style of the Counter-Reformation, but interest in him also stems from his reputation as a troublemaker. He was known to carry an unlicensed sword and look for a fights, a fact verified in records of the 11 trials against him that took place between October 1600 and September 1605. Much of what we know about Caravaggio, in fact, comes from criminal records. They tell us that he once cut a hole in his ceiling to allow more light into his studio, which led his landlord to evict him; that he threw stones at his landlady’s house and sang songs outside her window, hurled a plate at a waiter because he thought a dish of artichokes was undercooked, teased a rival with lewd sexual insults, assaulted a man on the street, and killed a man in a swordfight. He spent much of his adult life as a fugitive. In short, Caravaggio made a singular name for himself both inside and outside his studio.
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Early years
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Caravaggio, one of at least five children, was born in 1571 on the feast day of the archangel Michael, which is why his parents, Fermo and Lucia Merisi, named him Michelangelo. Fermo was a stonemason, and Lucia came from a family with ties to local nobility: Her father worked as an agent for the powerful Sforza family, collecting rents on their behalf, and her sister was a wet nurse to several Sforza children. The artist spent his early years (the least documented parts of his life) living both in Milan and in the nearby town of Caravaggio, where his family had a country home. Years later, he would adopt the town’s name as his moniker.
The bubonic plague hit Milan during the summer of 1576, when Caravaggio was almost five. This prompted his family to move from the congested city to greater safety in their country home. Still, the Merisis were unable to avoid loss. An October 1577 document records the death of Caravaggio’s father, paternal grandfather, and paternal grandmother. Caravaggio’s uncle had died earlier that year.
In April 1584, a 13-year-old Caravaggio entered into a four-year painting apprenticeship with Simone Peterzano, a Mannerist painter from Bergamo. A doctor and art collector from Siena named Giulio Mancini, who wrote a brief, early biography of Caravaggio and treated him in Rome, wrote that “he studied diligently for four to six years in Milan, though now and then he would do some outrageous thing because of his hot nature and high spirits.”
According to written records, some of Caravaggio’s earliest paintings from his time in Milan were portraits and still lifes, most of which haven’t survived. Bellori describes a painting of “a vase of flowers with the transparencies of the water and glass, and the reflections of a window of the room, rendering flowers sprinkled with the freshest of dewdrops,” for example.
Regardless of the training he received from Peterzano, early sources claimed that Caravaggio never made preparatory drawings for his paintings—a revolutionary practice at the time. This has been confirmed by x-ray scans of his paintings that reveal no underdrawings; moreover, there are no known drawings by him at all.
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Rome
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. When Caravaggio was 11, his mother died and bequeathed the family property to him and his siblings. By 1592 he had taken the money from the sale of this land, spent it all, and moved to Rome. When the impetuous and penniless 21-year-old arrived, he was a complete unknown. Initially he stayed with someone named Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci, who, Caravaggio claimed, provided a meager diet of mostly salad. (When Caravaggio left Pucci’s house a few months later, he nicknamed him Monsignor Insalata, or Mister Salad.)
At some point he started working in the studio of Giuseppe Cesari, then one of the most successful painters in Rome, and was tasked mostly with painting flowers and fruits. Toward the end of his time in Cesari’s workshop, he painted Young Sick Bacchus (ca. 1593–4), showing the god of wine clutching a bunch of yellowish grapes whose tone matches the subject’s sallow skin. This is almost certainly a self-portrait; during this time Caravaggio was ill himself and spent months in the hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione.
Caravaggio eventually developed a business relationship with an art dealer named Costantino Spata, whose shop was near the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Through Spata, Caravaggio met his most significant early patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. Among the paintings that the cardinal bought from Caravaggio was Medusa (1597), now in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, depicting the decapitated head of Medusa as a self-portrait. Another was The Cardsharps (c. 1595), a street-life scene that the painter set against a plain background to draw attention to the facial expressions and drama of the young men at their game.
The cardinal housed Caravaggio in his palace beginning in 1595 and helped promote him, in part by securing commissions. The painter’s career-changing break came in 1599 when he received two commissions for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi: The Calling of Saint Matthew (above) and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (both 1599–1600). In the former, Caravaggio chose to depict the dramatic moment when Jesus walks into a room (in this case, one looking like a Roman tavern) and points at the man who will become St. Matthew. Matthew gestures at himself in disbelief, as if asking, “Who, me?” The figures wear clothing of Caravaggio’s time, which, combined with the everyday interior, made the story look like a contemporary event. The light that pours in from a window above Jesus’s head imitates the real light pouring into the chapel from the window above the altar, placing the viewer in the same illuminated space as the figures in the painting.
In the first decade of the 1600s Caravaggio painted a series of major works including Saint John the Baptist (1600) and The Taking of Christ (1602). He also suffered criticism, with three of the five altarpieces that he completed between 1602 and 1606 either rejected or taken down soon after being installed. One, Death of the Virgin (1601–06), was deemed scandalous because he used a prostitute as a model, reputedly a dead one, and her distorted toes and swollen ankles were considered grotesque. The trio of rejected altarpieces were all quickly bought up by important art collectors, such as the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani and the duke of Mantua (it was Peter Paul Rubens, then in Rome, who suggested that the duke buy The Death of the Virgin).
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Exile
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons In May 1606 Caravaggio’s hot temper put an end to his life in Rome. The painter got into a fight with a young pimp named Ranuccio Tomassoni and killed him; reportedly the man had insulted a prostitute whom Caravaggio liked. The ensuing case against Caravaggio described him as being unstable and stravagantissimo (strange, eccentric, and possessing an extreme degree of extravagance).A death warrant was issued against the artist in Rome, and he fled, never to return.
First he spent a few months in Zagarolo, a small town where he was protected by Duke Marzio Colonna (a relative of Costanza Colonna Sforza and a good friend of Cardinal del Monte). There he painted Supper at Emmaus (1606) in a more understated style that characterized his later work. Painted in an earthy palette, it depicts Jesus sitting at a table at an inn with two followers who don’t recognize him until he raises his hand to bless the meal. There is drama but it is restrained, and the empty spaces are as important as the figures.
After Zagarolo, Caravaggio moved on to Naples. Over the course of his four years in exile until his death, Caravaggio unsuccessfully pursued a pardon from the pope, sending paintings to influential people in close contact with him in the hope that they could mediate. One such painting may have been David with the Head of Goliath (1609–10), likely an intended gift for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of the reigning pope and an admirer of Caravaggio. The gruesome image, interpreted as a sort of mea culpa, shows a young David holding a sword in one hand and the bloodied head of Goliath in the other, with a self-portrait of the artist in the features of the giant’s face.
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Death and legacy
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. The cause of Caravaggio’s death has never been confirmed, but he died in July 1610, possibly aboard a boat. The cause of death may have been syphilis, malaria, or brucellosis, or he may have been killed in retribution for Tomassoni or a knight whom he had assaulted in Malta.
The three early biographies that still form the basis of our knowledge of Caravaggio were all written after his death and are unreliable in different ways. Mancini knew Caravaggio, but his biography was short; another account was written by Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter who once sued Caravaggio for libel; and Bellori based his biography on the other two. Since Caravaggio left behind no letters, account books, or other written documents, these biographies and his criminal record form the lion’s share of what we know about him.
Still, his mode of depicting a specific dramatic moment with theatrical chiaroscuro and his use of live models to introduce an element of realism survived among the Caravaggisti, 17th-century artists (such as Bartolomeo Manfredi and Artemisia Gentileschi) who followed in his stylistic footsteps. Caravaggio was especially popular among foreign painters in Rome, and through such artists who copied his work and traveled back home, his style became international and had a major impact on the Baroque painting that followed.
Caravaggio’s influence still endures worldwide today and can be seen beyond the canvas in the work of photographers, film directors, and modern artists. Director Martin Scorsese has openly admitted to looking to Caravaggio, specifically in his film Mean Streets. “It’s basically people sitting in bars, people at tables, people getting up,” Scorsese told The Guardian. “The Calling of St Matthew, but in New York!”