The Rogue of Italy

Calling of St. Matthew by Caravaggio

Why is it that in movies and literature we are drawn to the rogue, the misfit, the renegade? I don’t know why but it is certainly so. It is also true in the lives of artists; men who have taken a different path and wound up living a tragic life. Take, for instance, the life of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known simply as, Caravaggio.

He was born September 29, 1571, in Milan, Italy, the son of middle-class parents. After serving a lackluster four-year apprenticeship in Milan, he fled to Rome after wounding a police officer. Early in his career he developed an intense realism or naturalism for which Caravaggio is now famous. He preferred to paint his subjects as the eye sees them, with all their natural flaws and defects instead of as idealised creations. This allowed a full display of Caravaggio's virtuosic talents. He quickly became the most famous and celebrated artist in Europe and the greatest representative of the Baroque school of painting.

His friends thought him rebellious and dangerous. After a week’s work he would swagger through town picking fights with anyone he met. In 1606, he killed a man in a brawl and fled Rome with a price on his head. He landed in Malta where he was involved in another tragic fight. On he fled to Naples where he was accosted by unknown enemies. During the fight he injured several men. While in Naples he received many commissions for religious paintings and became the official painter for the Knights of Malta. But he battered down the door of a Knight, attacked him, and was expelled from the Order “as a foul and rotten member.”

In spite of his fame, Caravaggio was always one step ahead of the long arms of the law. Between 1600 and 1606 he was brought to trial eleven times, usually for violence. Once, while in Sicily, a famous friend offered to help him secure a pardon from Pope Paul V so he could return to Rome. But after being expelled from the Order of the Knights of Malta his friend withdrew his help.

In 1610, still in hopes of receiving a pardon, Caravaggio boarded a boat and headed north. With him were his last three paintings which he hoped to give the cardinal as thanks for help. But this time there was no hiding place. The knights, known for their relentlessness, pursued him, and Caravaggio, now thirty nine, in an attempt to seek forgiveness and refuge in Rome, tried to get there, but died at Porto Ercole, in Tuscany, apparently of a fever.

Caravaggio achieved one of the most important revolutions in the history of painting. He inherited a world where the classical idealism of Michelangelo was still normative, especially in the depiction of the human body. Caravaggio rejected this idea and painted with an intensity of realism unknown up to then. His impact was so immediate, profound and lasting that it affected all the great painters of the first half of the seventeenth century.

Just paint it!