Caravaggio: The Most Wanted Man in Rome

A Roman magistrate opened a case file on the night of May the 28th, 1606. A killing behind the Palazzo Firenze. A single deep wound near the groin, the kind Roman street code reserved for a dispute over a woman. Not an insult to a man's name. The killer was 34, and already the most talked about painter in the city. Cardinals owned his work. The Pope's own household had commissioned altarpieces from him. Within four years he'd sentenced to death in absentia, made a Knight of Malta, stripped of that title within weeks, and left for dead in a Naples alley with his face cut open. His name was Michelangelo Maurici. History remembers him by the town he came from, Caravaggio. He was born in Milan in 1571, into a family plague would gut within a decade. His father and grandfather died on the same day in 1577, his mother seven years after that. At 13 he was apprenticed to Simone Petosano, a Milanese painter trained under Titian, and spent four years grinding pigment and copying Venetian masters. Almost nothing else survives about this period, except one line in a Milanese court record. He left the city around 1592 after wounding a police officer, cause unrecorded. He arrived in Rome with no patron, no money, and reportedly painted fruit into other artists' canvases for a few coins a week just to eat. His break came through Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a collector with a taste for the unconventional, who took him into his household Under del Monte's roof, he painted the works that still define his early period. Centuries later, x-rays of these canvases turned up something unusual for the era. No preparatory drawing underneath. Caravaggio worked straight onto primed canvas, sometimes scratching guide marks into the wet ground with a brush handle, composing directly from live models rather than academic invention. It's part of why his figures still look like specific people, not ideals. The move into religious commissions brought fame and, almost immediately, trouble. The Calling of St. Matthew made his name in 1600, with its tavern lighting and contemporary dress on biblical figures. But his literalism cut both ways. The Death of the Virgin, painted for a private chapel, was pulled by the commissioning Carmelites in 1606. A contemporary account claims he'd modelled the Virgin on a drowned prostitute pulled from the Tiber. Decorum was the official complaint. Either way, the painting came down within days. By then, Rome's courts already held more paperwork on his name than on most professional criminals, and one name kept crossing his path, a small-time enforcer named Ranuccio Tomassoni, carrying a sword without license, insulting the city guard, throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter who'd served them the wrong side up, wounding a notary over a woman and fleeing briefly to Genoa, getting sued by his landlady for unpaid rent and answering by putting rocks through her window. Turning up at a hospital claiming he'd fallen on his own sword, a story his own friends doubted. A police report from 1604 noted that after finishing a commission, he'd spend weeks wandering from one ball court to the next, with a rapier at his hip, more or less openly looking for a fight. Rome's underworld and Rome's art world were, for Caravaggio, increasingly the same neighbourhood. On the night of May the 28th, he and Tomassoni finally settled whatever was between them for good. The cover story that circulated at the time was a quarrel over a game of palacorda and a disputed bet that's the version that made it into the news sheets. The surgeon's report tells a different story. Tomassoni bled out from a wound to the femoral artery, close to the groin, the kind of wound Roman honour culture reserved specifically for The most credible account ties it to Philode Melandroni, a courtesan who'd modelled for Caravaggio and whom Tomassoni, by some accounts, controlled as her pimp. Caravaggio was wounded too. His companions had to half-carry him from the scene. Within hours, Rome's governor issued a death sentence to be carried out by anyone who found him. He fled south before dawn. Naples took him in without asking questions outside Roman jurisdiction, and his protector, Costanza Colonna, kept a palace there. For ten months he worked constantly, without a single recorded arrest, producing the Seven Works of Mercy and the Madonna of the Rosary. Then he sailed for Malta, chasing something Naples couldn't offer, a path to a pardon through the Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt was flattered enough by his portraits to petition Rome for Caravaggio's admission as a knight, murder charge and all. Caravaggio paid his entrance fee with a painting, The Beheading of St John the Baptist, nearly 18 feet wide, the largest canvas he ever attempted and the only one he ever signed, his name written into the blood pooling from the Baptist's severed neck. He was knighted in July of 1608. The peace lasted five weeks. On the night of August the 18th, a brawl broke out at an organist's house in Valletta, a pistol fired, a door beaten down, a senior knight seriously wounded. Caravaggio was arrested and locked in the dungeon of Fort St Angelo. By October he'd escaped, nobody knows how. By December, the order's full assembly expelled him in the very room where his Baptist hung a putrid and fetid member, the decree read. He fled on foot towards Syracuse, then Messina, then Palermo, still painting major altarpieces between stops, still sleeping with a dagger under his pillow. Nine months later he doubled back to Naples, gambling that Colonna protection could shield him while he waited on his pardon. It didn't hold. Outside a well-known tavern, several armed men left his face, deliberately cut open a sfregio, the specific mark Italians of the period used to shame a man rather than simply kill him. For once, it was his own name landing on the wrong side of a ledger. The pardon arrived in the summer of 1610 too late to matter. Sailing north to reclaim it, he put in at Porto Ercole on the Tuscan coast and died within days at 38. Newsletters at the time called it fever. In 2010, researchers exhumed bones from a Porto Ercole ossuary and found unusually high lead levels, decades of handling lead-based pigment, alongside bacterial traces suggesting sepsis from an old, untreated wound. Not one clean cause, most likely, but several converging at once, poisoned slowly by his own paint, weakened by an old injury, finished off by a fever, far from every powerful man who'd spent his career either buying his paintings or trying to have him killed. Within a generation, half of Europe's painters were copying his lighting, the Gentileschis, Ribera, Rubens, all working in the dark he'd invented. Then, for nearly 300 years, he was written out of art history as vulgar and undisciplined, until an Italian scholar named Roberto Longhi put him back at the centre of the story in 1951. Somewhere in a Roman archive, his name still sits in a police ledger next to a murder charge. In the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Borghese, it sits under something else entirely. Genius.