Caravaggio’s death still haunts his work

The artist would make Johnny Depp blush when it comes to celebrity hellraising but mystery surrounds his demise at 38.

Caravaggio included his own face in The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, far right, bearing the scars of a beating that left him disfigured. It was the last painting he produced before his death. Picture montage: The Times/Getty Images/Alamy

In the second episode of Ripley, the Netflix adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley, would-be artist Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) takes the grifter Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) to see The Seven Acts of Mercy by Caravaggio.

“He painted it when he was 36, a year after he murdered a man in Rome,” Dickie tells Tom. “Colourful life. And death.”

Caravaggio died in 1610 after a life of destructive celebrity hellraising that Johnny Depp could only dream of. The great Italian painter left behind works of savage beauty suffused with violence and uncertainty, a trail of bloody destruction, a long police record and an enduring mystery. More than four centuries later, the cause of Caravaggio’s death is still disputed.

Was he carried off by syphilis, malaria, sunstroke, intestinal infection, brucellosis from unpasteurised milk, a heart attack or sepsis from a wound sustained in a brawl? Was he assassinated in revenge for the murder he had committed? Or was he killed by the Knights of Malta for assaulting a senior member of that chivalric order? Some believe the 38-year-old Caravaggio was poisoned, and perhaps mentally unbalanced, by prolonged exposure to the lead in his paint. He may have painted himself to death.

In Netflix's Ripley series, the characters view Caravaggio’s The Seven Acts of Mercy. Picture: Netflix/The Times

This week the National Gallery has put on display, for the first time in 20 years, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, believed to be Caravaggio’s final work, painted just before his unsolved death.

The last Caravaggio is an extraordinary and disturbing painting: more impressionistic than most of his earlier works, it depicts Ursula at the very moment the arrow strikes her breast, mildly puzzled, the violence in shocking close-up. The upturned face behind Ursula is that of Caravaggio himself, looking on, mouth agape in horror, howling, powerless.

Born Michelangelo Merisi, Caravaggio earned an early reputation as a painter of astonishing genius and a drunken, argumentative street fighter, prone to highly erratic behaviour. He quit Milan for Rome after wounding a policeman.

The painter was not the first person to use sport (in his case tennis) as an excuse for hooliganism. As one contemporary noted: “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 argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him.”

When it comes to celebrity hellraising, Caravaggio would have left the actor Johnny Depp in his wake. Picture: Jack Hill/The Times

He threw a plate of artichokes at a waiter, hurled rocks through his landlady’s window, injured a lawyer with his sword in a dispute over his model and lover, and beat up a young nobleman with a club.

He insulted city guards, failed to pay his rent and wandered Rome’s streets with other young thugs, looking for trouble. His arrest and trial records cover several pages: slander, theft, assault.

But if his lifestyle was brutish, his genius was sublime, illuminating his canvases with the dramatic shadow dance of light and darkness known as chiaroscuro. The subjects were often violent, haunting, mesmerising depictions of torture and death, reflecting an inner struggle and, perhaps, the psychiatric damage caused by toxic lead.

On May 29, 1606, Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, a young gangster and pimp from a wealthy family, in a brawl or duel over a prostitute. He may also have castrated him. He may not have intended to kill him.

Sentenced to death by beheading, he fled from Rome to Naples and then to Malta. His painting increasingly featured decapitated heads, depicting his own face. Under the patronage of the grand master of the Knights of Malta, he painted some of his greatest works.

Then came another fight, a break-in and a vicious assault on a senior knight. Expelled from the order as a “foul and rotten member” and imprisoned in Valletta’s fortress dungeon, he staged a daring escape, fled to Sicily and then made his way back to Naples.

Caravaggio fled to Malta after committing murder but another transgression led to him being imprisoned at Fort St Angelo in Valletta. Escaping from the dungeon, he made his way back to Naples. Picture: Alamy/The Times

Caravaggio was now on the run, hounded by his enemies and increasingly paranoid.

He slept fully clothed and heavily armed. Outside a tavern in Naples he was attacked by a group of armed assailants, badly beaten up and his face horribly and deliberately disfigured.

Who attacked him, and why, has never been fully established.

Soon after, he painted The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. The faces of the onlookers are obscured and unrecognisable, as Caravaggio’s now was. The brushstrokes suggest a painter whose eyesight and balance had been permanently damaged.

The brushstrokes Caravaggio used to create The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula suggest the artist had suffered damage to his eyesight. Picture: The Times/Archivio Patrimonio Artistico Intesa Sanpaolo

But it is the brutal, battle-marked face of the Hunnish king that holds and appals the viewer. He has just shot the sainted Ursula at close range for rejecting him and his face is sweaty with murderous exertion, his brow furrowed. The king’s expression is an amalgam of fury, horror and perhaps regret for what he has done: all emotions that Caravaggio himself must have felt as his knife plunged into Tomassoni.

Soon after, in the summer of 1610, he took a boat northwards for Rome, hoping that the intercession of friends and a gift of paintings would secure a papal pardon, but probably knowing he was doomed. He died on the way, at Porto Ercole in southern Tuscany on July 18, 1610.

Remains believed to be those of Caravaggio reveal evidence of lead poisoning and sepsis, but whether the painter was killed by chemicals, bacteria or his many enemies will never be known for certain. He bequeathed no will or explanation. Instead, he left his last painting as a testament, an agonised adieu on canvas. Guilty, horrified expressions depicted by a man who had lost his face; a scarred killer painted by a scarred killer.

Was the image of the saint, calmly awaiting death amid the slaughter, his plea for redemption? The eyes in his final self-portrait are no more than tiny specks of light and almost sightless, contemplating eternity and probable damnation.

This is a painting by a man who knows death, and perhaps his own death, is near.

The Times