On the evening of 28 May 1606, on a pallacorda court — an early form of tennis — in Rome's Campo Marzio district, a quarrel over a wager, or a woman, or both, ended with Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio driving his blade into a young man named Ranuccio Tomassoni, who bled to death. Some modern historians, noting the wound's placement near the groin, suspect the painter was attempting the era's gesture of sexual insult — a botched castration — rather than murder. The law did not split hairs: Caravaggio, badly wounded himself, fled the city, and the papal authorities pronounced a bando capitale, a capital ban, meaning that anyone in the Papal States could kill him on sight and claim a reward. For his remaining four years, the most influential painter in Europe worked with a price on his head — quite literally on his head, which the sentence entitled any bounty hunter to deliver.
The catastrophe surprised no one who knew him. Caravaggio, born in Milan in 1571 and raised in the Lombard town whose name he carried, had conquered Rome in the 1590s under the protection of Cardinal Francesco del Monte; his Calling of Saint Matthew and its companions in the Contarelli Chapel, unveiled around 1600, made him famous almost overnight for tenebrism — figures blazing out of theatrical darkness — and for casting street people, prostitutes among them, as saints and virgins. But the police files of Rome preserve the other portrait: arrests for carrying a sword without licence, a libel action brought by the rival painter Giovanni Baglione, stones thrown at his landlady's window and, in 1604, a plate of artichokes hurled at a waiter's face. A contemporary wrote that after a fortnight's work he would swagger about for a month with a sword at his side, spoiling for trouble. In 1606 the trouble finally arrived at full scale.
Painting for a pardon
The fugitive's itinerary can be traced through masterpieces. Sheltered first on the estates of the powerful Colonna family, he moved to Naples, where commissions rained on him — the Seven Works of Mercy dates from these months. In 1607 he sailed for Malta with an audacious plan: to become a Knight of the Order of St John, a status that might leverage a papal pardon. It half worked. Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, delighted to acquire a court painter, knighted him in July 1608, and Caravaggio painted for the order's cathedral in Valletta the vast Beheading of Saint John the Baptist — at roughly three and a half by five metres his largest canvas, and the only work he ever signed, the letters famously placed in the blood flowing from the Baptist's neck. Within weeks he had brawled again, wounding a senior knight; imprisoned in a rock-cut cell in Fort Sant'Angelo, he escaped — apparently by rope, down the fort's walls and away by boat — and in December 1608 the order expelled him in absentia as "a foul and rotten member".
He zigzagged through Sicily — Syracuse, Messina, Palermo — leaving altarpieces of deepening darkness, sleeping armed, described by acquaintances as half-deranged with fear. Returning to Naples in 1609, he was ambushed outside the Osteria del Cerriglio and his face slashed — the sfregio, the signature disfigurement of Italian vendetta — so badly that reports of his death circulated. From this final period comes David with the Head of Goliath, in which the boy David holds aloft a severed head that is unmistakably Caravaggio's own self-portrait: the painting was destined for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope's nephew and the man who controlled pardons. It is the most literal plea bargain in art — my head, delivered in oils, so that you need not take it in fact.
Death on the beach
In July 1610, with the pardon reportedly close, he sailed north with paintings for Borghese, was mistakenly detained at the coastal garrison of Palo, and lost his boat — and canvases — onward. Struggling up the Tuscan coast, he died of fever at Porto Ercole around 18 July 1610, aged 38; the pardon is generally said to have been granted or imminent within days of his death. His revolution outlived the scandal: the caravaggisti spread his darkness across Europe, and the critic who led his twentieth-century rehabilitation argued that without Caravaggio there could have been no Ribera, no La Tour, no Vermeer, no Rembrandt as we know them. The Church that condemned the man kept the altarpieces. It usually does.
Quiz nuggets
- Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni on 28 May 1606 after a quarrel over a pallacorda (early tennis) match, earning a papal bando capitale — a kill-on-sight death sentence.
- The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Valletta, 1608) is his largest painting and the only one he signed — in the Baptist's blood.
- Knighted by the Order of St John in July 1608, he was expelled months later "as a foul and rotten member" after escaping Fort Sant'Angelo.
- In David with the Head of Goliath, Goliath's severed head is Caravaggio's self-portrait, aimed at pardon-broker Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
- He died of fever at Porto Ercole in July 1610, aged 38, with his pardon reportedly days away.