1.
They tortured him of course.
2.
More precisely, they carved up his face – “sfregio,” it was called, a ritual disfigurement intended to inflict permanent and visible dishonor on one who had disrespected the wrong people. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was no stranger to this code of vendetta. In his earlier Roman years, he had run with prostitutes who were known to take the occasional blade to the face of a rival. Now in Naples, towards the end of his strange and violent life, it was his turn to be branded.
3.
With so many enemies, it was difficult to know who had carried out or ordered the hit. Was it the clan of Ranuccio Tomassoni, the Roman pimp Caravaggio had murdered in a duel in 1606, precipitating the flight and 19 months of wanderings that had led to this squalid bloodletting outside a notorious brothel? Or was it the work of Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, the Maltese Knight Caravaggio had seriously wounded in a fracas two months earlier and who just might have tracked him down through the Straits of Messina and the Gulf of Salerno? Or was it any number of other lowlifes, nobles, rivals, or patrons he might have crossed along his furious way?
4.
Whoever it was, the assailants slipped back into the night, never to be known or apprehended. They had done their work. Nor was it any common street thug they had mutilated, perhaps partially blinded. The victim of this assault outside the Osteria del Cerriglio, where poets and artists mingled with courtesans, rentboys, and cut-throats, was the greatest painter of the age, one of the greatest of any age. He never really recovered.
5.
You can see the damage in “The Denial of Saint Peter,” executed in Naples during his convalescence and one of his very last works. It’s still a Caravaggio — the peasant earthiness of Peter’s features, the flaring chiaroscuro, the heightened drama of sin and redemption. But the reductive simplicity of the composition, the shallow, featureless space, the coarse description of Peter’s hands — this too is Caravaggio at the end of his life. Either he couldn’t see what he was painting anymore or his hands were shaking.
6.
He would die soon, trying desperately to get back to the place where, once, it had all gone right: Rome.
7.
Before there was Rome there was Milan, where the adolescent boy apprenticed under a feeble imitator of Titian named Simone Peterzano. And before there was Milan there was Caravaggio, the sleepy backwater on the Lombardy plain that would ultimately give Michelangelo Merisi the name by which he is (mistakenly) known today.
8.
Caravaggio did have one thing going for it: patronage. The local marchese, Francesco Sforza, was connected to the Pope; his bride, the marchesa Costanza Colonna Sforza, was the daughter of the military commander who had triumphed over the heathen “Turks” at the Battle of Lepanto. And Fermo Merisi, the father of Michelangelo, had the good fortune to work for them.
9.
Nominally, Fermo was their house architect. In fact, he was more like a majordomo, but what matters to history is the alliance formed between the marchesa and her majordomo’s intriguing son, who somehow touched her maternal heartstrings. Given his penchant for wildly destructive behavior in later life, Caravaggio would need friends in high places. The marchesa, at crucial times, would be that friend.
10.
Despite this useful connection, the lowborn Merisi children would have to make their way in the world, especially after Fermo was carried off by the plague while still a young father. In three years (1576-1578), it carried off about a fifth of the city of Milan along with him. Such was life in early modern Europe.
11.
Caravaggio knew a lot about plague. It spared his mother, who died of other circumstances in 1589, but took his father, his grandfather, his grandmother, and an uncle. The late, sepulchral “Resurrection of Lazarus” clearly draws on memories of the ravages he would have seen as a boy. So much for the lofty idealism Peterzano would have tried (unsuccessfully) to instill into his recalcitrant apprentice.
12.
After mother Lucia’s death, the children were cared for by relatives and the Colonnas. They had a small inheritance to help them stake their place in the world. Sister Caterina married well and had six children. Brother Giovan Battista became a priest. The eldest, Michelangelo, rose from his humble origins (according to Karel van Mander, a Dutch artist who knew him) “through his industry and by tackling and accepting everything with farsightedness and courage, as some people do who refuse to be held down through timidity or through lack of courage.”
13.
Years later, when Caravaggio had established himself in Rome and Giovan Battista came calling, the flourishing artist denied knowing him. “Brother,” Giovan Battista said, “I’ve come such a long way to see you, and now that I’ve seen you I’ve had what I wanted. May God grant that you do well.” He did do well. And he never saw his brother again. Was Giovan Battista being insufferably holy or Caravaggio being willfully perverse? Or was it a bit of both? Life imitates art. Maybe that’s why, years later, Caravaggio painted “The Denial of Saint Peter.” He had lived it.
14.
By the time of that fraternal rebuff (witnessed by his protector, Cardinal Del Monte), Caravaggio’s truculence was a long enforced habit. Little is known of his apprenticeship in Milan, but his early years in Rome were hungry and hardscrabble. He had arrived in 1592, a young man on the make like thousands of others. Hopefuls from all over Italy and beyond were flocking to Rome to cash in on the visual propaganda blitz known as the Counter Reformation. Caravaggio would surpass them all, but in the beginning there was only penury, rejection, and hackwork.
15.
The hackwork — mostly copying small devotional pictures — was supervised by a miserly house steward, who lodged him but barely fed him. (“Monsignor Salad,” Caravaggio called him, after the starvation rations he received.) Caravaggio’s lot improved when he joined the workshop of the renowned Giuseppi Cesari, who assigned him still life details and other piecework on the many commissions that came his way. Caravaggio must have seen that he was already better than the gentlemanly Cesari would ever be, but for now he had somewhat steadier work and a foot halfway in the door.
16.
But all this hustling took a toll. Around this time, Caravaggio painted for himself a “Self Portrait as Bacchus,” which shows the hunger and ill health that would have been his daily lot. Never had a Greek god looked more sickly. The ash colored lips, the swollen left eye, the filthy thumbnail, even the moldy grapes that Caravaggio as Bacchus holds in his right hand: there would have been thousands of desperate hustlers and street people in the city, and some of them would have looked just like this.
17.
If Counter Reformation Rome was Hollywood on the Tiber for artists and architects, Caravaggio was about to be “discovered” by the Eternal City’s equivalent to a powerful casting agent. It happened in 1595 when Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, the Medici’s smoothly adroit fixer in Rome, spotted Caravaggio’s “Cardsharps” in a second hand dealer’s shop near the Piazza Navona. Del Monte had the money and the taste to acquire pretty much whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was not just the painting. He wanted the painter.
18.
So Caravaggio moved into Del Monte’s Palazzo Madama on Piazza de San Luigi and joined his circle of artists, scientists, musicians, connoisseurs, and very expensive courtesans. He brought with him as an assistant Mario Minniti, the meltingly beautiful teenage boy who had posed for him in the picture that had caught Del Monte’s eye. Like his newly acquired painter, the cardinal, it would seem, liked boys too.
19.
At any rate, Del Monte commissioned one or two of the outrageously provocative canvases of overripe male adolescents that Caravaggio produced in the next several years. Mario Minniti was subsequently replaced as Caravaggio’s boy model and studio assistant by Francesco “Cecco” Boneri, the naked, splay-legged figure posing as a laughingly corrupt Cupid in “Omnia vincit Amor.” It was of this painting than an English traveler, picking up on rumors still current, wrote in 1650, “Twas the body & face of his owne boy or servant that laid with him.”
20.
If Caravaggio is Exhibit A in the queer studies wing of art history departments, the loving attentiveness he lavished on the earthly beauty of his Madonnas and female saints somewhat complicates that claim. That all these Madonnas and saints were well-known prostitutes who worked with him regularly implies a level of intimacy beyond the professional. Of course Caravaggio slept with his models. Whether they were male or female didn’t much matter to him.
21.
One such prostitute was Fillide Melandroni, as beautiful as she was violently temperamental (the Roman police, or sbirri, were all too familiar with her outbursts) and the model for the serenely majestic “Saint Catherine” and the holy assassin Judith in “Judith and Holofernes.” Like Mario Minniti, she remained loyal to the wayward genius she had known for a few years in Rome and will reappear at the end of this story.
22.
Caravaggio stayed at Del Monte’s Palazzo Madama for the next six years, doing some of his very greatest work under the cardinal’s protection — in fact, becoming a star, the kind of artist who changed the rules and attracted schools of imitators. Artemesia Gentileschi (who would have known him from her girlhood as a friend of her painter father’s) would have been inconceivable without Caravaggio, and Rembrandt wouldn’t have been quite the Rembrandt we know.
23.
In Rome, being a lot better than everybody else (with the sole exception of Annibale Carracci) and loudly proclaiming it to the world wasn’t necessarily a wise career move. The long knives came out.
24.
Trouble had started as early as Milan, where Caravaggio had been a less than obedient pupil of Petrerzano. There were dark reports of his involvement in quarrels and even in a murder in that turbelent city. By the time he got to Rome he was already intimate with the sort of thieves and hustlers he depicted in his early cabinet pictures. There was nothing worked up in Caravaggio’s revolutionary realism. It was the life he lived.
25.
It was and had been for some time a double life — on the one hand, conversing with intellectuals and cultured aristocrats in Palazzo Madama, on the other hand, swaggering around the streets with a crew of like-minded hotheads. “When he’s worked for a fortnight,” wrote his contemporary van Mander, “he goes out for a couple of months with his rapier at his side and a servant behind him, moving from one tennis court to another and always looking for fights or arguments, so he’s impossible to get on with.”
26.
He looked the part, too, wearing the rich silks and velvets favored by the Roman bravi — except that he wore them until they were in tatters. Then he’d acquire a new suit and wear that one out too. If any of his cohorts thought his eccentricities merited comment, they probably knew enough to keep their mouths shut.
27.
This particular hothead, with his striped taffeta and poniard, happened to be a genius. When he got the commission for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, his genius would be put to its greatest test. Caravaggio had never before attempted anything on this scale — three multi-figured, wall-sized narratives on the life of the Apostle Matthew. He struggled at first, and had to redo the smallest of the three, a depiction of an angel guiding Matthew in his writing of his Gospel. With the other two, especially “The Calling of Saint Matthew,” he changed Western art forever.
28.
Matthew the tax collector sits in the backroom of a tavern or inn with assorted thugs, pretty boys, and hangers-on. Christ has entered with Saint Peter at right and is calling Matthew to a new life with a simple pointing of a finger. In a moment Matthew will rise, follow his Savior out of the room, and never look back. You must change your life, Rilke said. This is how it happens.
29.
Among the throngs who flocked to the see the installation in 1599 was Giovanni Baglione, a grasping second rater who played the role of Salieri to Caravaggio’s Mozart. Baglione tried very hard to be unimpressed, which didn’t stop him from aping Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro without approaching anything like Caravaggio’s originality, humanism, subtlety, and above all profound understanding of the interpenetration of the sacred and the profane. Anyone else might have ignored the ugly backtalk that Baglione stirred up. Caravaggio wasn’t anyone else.
30.
Like all the other painters in Rome, Caravaggio and Baglione were competing for the same commissions and the same patrons. It was bad enough to lose, as he sometimes did, to a hack like Baglione — worse still to lose to a hack who slavishly imitated him while slagging him to anyone who would listen. Caravaggio might have hit back violently. Instead, he had one of his crew compose and circulate a couple of scurrilous poems. They weren’t very subtle or even literary, but anybody who was anybody read them, or knew about them. Baglione, the poems, said, couldn’t paint for shit.
31.
One of the few moments of levity in the otherwise terrible saga of Caravaggio’s life is the spectacle of the aggrieved Giovanni Baglione mustering all his dignity before the Governor of Rome in a libel suit he new brought against Caravaggio and his friends. Asked by the magistrates to identify the documents in question, he replied with the ingenuousness of a village idiot, “that which begins ‘Johnny Baggage’ and ends ‘an insult to painting’ and the other that begins ‘Johnny Prick’ and ends ‘otherwise he’d’ve been a fucking prick.’”
32.
This commedia del’arte imbroglio wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t helped to establish a precedent: trouble with the authorities and a few weeks in the Governor’s prison before the whole mess was straightened out, perhaps through the intervention of Del Monte or some other art-loving patron. Nor did it allay growing suspicions in some quarters that this jumped up genius might be more trouble than he was worth.
33.
Caravaggio was still the leading painter of the Roman avant-garde, and commissions for masterworks like the “Madonna of the Pilgrims” were still ahead. But he was living on his own now, no longer under Del Monte’s stabilizing influence, and his noisy altercations in taverns and on piazzas were starting to attract the wrong kind of attention. Worse still, he was about to see one of his greatest works, “The Death of the Virgin,” removed within weeks of its unveiling from the altar for which it had been commissioned.
34.
You can see “The Death of the Virgin” in the Louvre rather than on the altar of Santa Maria della Scala, where it ought to be. And you can also see why the pious Carmelites who commissioned it might have changed their minds. Some said that the beautiful and still youthful Mary that Caravaggio depicted was all too evidently “a courtesan he loved,” but that wasn’t the problem. Everyone knew that painters used prostitutes for models — who else could they get? — and everyone knew that Caravaggio’s woman at the time was the much desired courtesan Lena Antognetti. No, the problem with “The Death of the Virgin” was that this Virgin was just too emphatically, transcendentally dead.
35.
Caravaggio’s way of dealing with Counter Reformation orthodoxy was to ignore the limp piety and enforced bigotry and to focus instead on the life experiences of humble believers. If he had to throw in an angel or two, that angel would be equipped with dingy, oversized pigeon wings. Almost all his miracles, epiphanies, and crucifixions took place in the workaday world of taverns, sparsely furnished rooms, and darkened, nondescript interiors. His more discerning collectors appreciated this stunning naturalism, but to get away with such heterodoxy, he had better be on his best behavior. And he wasn’t.
36.
The infractions were racking up: carrying his sword without a license, insulting a police officer, assaulting (big mistake) a mid-level Vatican functionary. Impossibly touchy where his honor was concerned, he threw a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter who had made the mistake of serving them with insufficient deference. A Roman police blotter preserves his furious words: “It seems to me, you fucking prick, that you think you’re serving some two bit crook.”
37.
Caravaggio’s get out of jail card was his association with Del Monte, but even Del Monte could do only so much. After the bloody attack on the Vatican functionary, Caravaggio betook himself to Genoa, ostensibly to work on a commission for the Duke of Modena, but really to keep a step ahead of the law. In Genoa, relations of Costanza Colonna sheltered him until Del Monte could work out a settlement in Rome, which duly occurred later that summer. Upon his return, Caravaggio swore to the legal authorities an oath of peaceableness. Which he violated almost immediately.
38.
This time it was a squabble with his landlady, who had locked him out and thrown out his few belongings. She issued a complaint saying that Caravaggio had come round in the middle of the night, throwing rocks and smashing her window shutters — trivial enough, except that it boded ill for the fresh start he hoped to be making.
39.
Caravaggio’s misfortune’s were Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s main chance. Younger, richer, and, if possible, even less devout than Del Monte, he snapped up the rejected “Madonna of the Palafrenieri” for a song and had it installed in his villa on the outskirts of the city, where it can be seen to this day. Enough influential clients coveted Caravaggio’s work to pull strings for him when needed, and he would need every possible string pulled when his increasingly reckless behavior culminated in the tragedy that was waiting to happen: the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni.
40.
It might have looked like a mindless eruption of violence over a meaningless tennis match, but trouble between Caravaggio and Tomassoni, a street tough with relatives in high places, had been brewing for some time. Very possibly they were rival pimps. Fillide Melandroni definitely worked for Tomassoni, and maybe Tomassoni felt that Caravaggio was encroaching on his territory. Keeping a small stable of prostitutes would have been a way of ensuring a steady supply of models, not to mention some free sex. All that late night roistering, armed to the gills, might have been partly a matter of business: Caravaggio was looking out for his girls.
41.
So the killing wasn’t spontaneous at all. It was a duel. Caravaggio and Tomassoni, accompanied by their “seconds” and supporters (three to each side) met on a tennis court on the Campo Marzio on May 28, 1606. It was all over in a few moments: Tomassoni bleeding to death from a severed artery, Caravaggio with a gash in his head, and Caravaggio’s second, Captain Petronio Toppa, left almost for dead.
42.
Caravaggio had always been proud of his swordsmanship, but the coup de grace was a flick of his blade at Tomassoni’s crotch. So much for the gentlemanly art of dueling. After the fatal blow, the duel degenerated into a murderous free for all. Tomassoni’s brother slashed Caravaggio in the head and probably would have killed him if not for the intervention of Petronio Topapa, who barely survived the wounds he incurred. Tomassoni was carried off to a surgeon’s, where he died that night. Caravaggio didn’t wait around to hear the death sentence (bando capitale) pronounced by the Pope. By the following morning he was nowhere to be found.
43.
Caravaggio was now a wanted man, exiled from Rome and with a price on his head. He couldn’t have escaped from the city without the discreet assistance of one or more of his patrons, most likely the Marchesa Colonna, now resident in Rome and with a network of family connections in the region. It was to a Colonna stronghold in Zagarolo, about twenty miles southeast of Rome, that Caravaggio made his way, finding refuge with the Duke Marzio Colonna. And there he did what he always did in times of stress: he painted.
44.
Under these circumstances, the self-portrait as a decapitated Goliath that Caravaggio now painted for Scipione Borghese (who didn’t much care that his favorite painter was a murderer condemned by in absentia by Borghese’s uncle, Pope Paul V) was a harrowing Act of Contrition. The blood streaming from Goliath’s neck, the saliva pooling in his open mouth, the sightless, half open right eye: Caravaggio painted himself as the brute he knew himself at least partly to be.
45.
If Borghese was expecting triumph, which was the way most artists treated the subject, what he got was tragedy. A slender, beautifully lit young David holds out the giant’s head in troubled contemplation. David has reason to look troubled. The model is Cecco Boneri, and he’s gazing at the ruin of his friend and protector.
46.
Hoping to gain lost ground and win a papal pardon, Caravaggio moved on to Naples, where Marzio Colonna sheltered him and where avid patrons were already lining up. For the Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia he produced one of his greatest altarpieces, “The Seven Acts of Mercy.” But he also produced work like the slackly conventional “Madonna of the Rosary,” which for the first time showed signs of compromise and even desperation. He had taken to sleeping with his clothes on and his dagger at his side. Paranoia? Maybe not.
47.
There were interested parties working behind the scenes to smooth Caravaggio’s passage back to Rome. Del Monte, Borghese, and others wanted their man in the art capital of the world, where he belonged and where they might keep him busy creating masterpieces bound for their own collections. And in fact there were signs that the Vatican was softening. The fiction that Caravaggio had killed in self-defense offered a convenient cover for everyone. Just when the machinery seemed to be moving, however, Caravaggio chose this moment — July 1607 — to sail to the southern Mediterranean outpost of Malta. There he would create possibly his greatest painting. And throw his life away.
48.
Why Malta? Costanza Colonna’s son was there, a former black sheep like Caravaggio himself but now a member of the island’s Venerable Council. Fabrizio Sforza Colonna would be an important contact for Caravaggio, but Malta — a garrison state controlled by the severely militaristic Order of the Knights of St. John — nevertheless seemed an odd choice for someone so resistant to authority. Maybe he thought that if he put his shoulder to the wheel and pleased the right patrons, he would be protected by and even welcomed into the fold of the most formidable brotherhood in Christendom. Incredibly, that is just what happened.
49.
Once again, Caravaggio’s reputation preceded him. Some of the greatest grandest Knights of the Order of St. John very much wanted their portraits painted by this celebrated prodigy. The greatest, grandest of them all, Alof de Wigancourt, the Grand Master himself, was so taken with his new portraitist that he sat for him twice.
50.
The surviving portrait of Wigancourt recalls similarly majestic state portraits by Titian, but in a touch entirely typical of Caravaggio, attention falls on the all too human pageboy standing warily at his master’s side. If the boy seems less impressed than he ought to be, Wigancourt didn’t notice. The warrior aristocrat must have felt a strange kinship with the headstrong artist. He would soon bend or break nearly every rule of the Order, going so far as to lobby the Pope personally, to get Caravaggio knighted.
51.
In lieu of the tribute money that the generally well-born knights paid for their induction, Caravaggio would paint an altarpiece depicting the beheading of John the Baptist for the oratory of the Co-Cathedral of St. John in the capital city of Valletta. Working as always with no preparatory sketches or studio assistants to block in a background, he created in about three months the largest (10 by 15 feet) and maybe the greatest work of his career. It’s the only picture he ever signed. There, beneath the pool of the Baptist’s blood, inscribed in the same crimson, is the name by which he wanted to be remembered: “F. Michelangelo” – Brother Michelangelo.
52.
The executioner hasn’t quite finished the job. Holding his victim prone and reaching back for the dagger that will sever the head from the neck (at this point it’s only half attached), he impassively follows the instructions of the jailer standing beside him, while Salome’s servant holds the plate that in a few more seconds will bear the weight of a human head. No one is taking any particular pleasure in this distasteful task but, well, orders are orders. About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters.
53.
A newly minted Knight of the Magistral Obedience, with the honors and rewards appertaining thereto (a gold chain bestowed by the Grand Master himself, not to mention a couple of slaves for his personal use), Caravaggio chose precisely this moment — August 18, 1608 — to go off the rails. It was yet another brawl — an especially ugly one — but Caravaggio wasn’t a layman anymore, and the penalties for a brawling Knight of Malta admitted of no extenuation.
54.
Exactly what happed outside that house in Valletta is not known, but one of the six or seven disputants — very likely Caravaggio, in the light of subsequent developments — ended up firing a small pistol at a higher-ranking Knight, Fra Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, the Conte della Vezza. Whatever brought on the quarrel — an insult to Caravaggio’s honor is not hard to imagine — a senior Knight of Justice had been shot and seriously wounded. Nobody, not even the greatest painter in the world, could be allowed to get away with that.
55.
If Caravaggio had begun to chafe under the Spartan regulations that a knighthood entailed — no quarreling, no whoring, no leaving the island without express permission — that was as nothing compared to the straits in which he now found himself. Nine days after the shooting and a hurried investigation, Caravaggio was arrested and locked up in a dungeon in the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo. There he might have read the graffiti of despairing prisoners who had gone before him — “imprisoned forever, victim of evil triumphing over good,” reads one — and reflected on the turn of fortune that had plunged him overnight from the summit of public acclamation to this abyss of deprivation and dishonor.
56.
Perfect timing: Caravaggio had been locked up the day before he was to attend, as part of the anniversary observances of the Baptist’s beheading, the official unveiling of his altarpiece in the Oratory of Saint John. As if that irony weren’t sufficiently crushing, three months later he was formally expelled from the Order “like a rotten and diseased limb” in a ceremony that took place, as did all such ceremonies, in the same oratory that housed his monumental canvas. Fortunately, he wasn’t around for that final humiliation. In October, in a move that seems more like a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie than an episode in art history, he had escaped from the well-nigh impregnable fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo.
57.
That escape would have entailed breaking out of his cell, scaling the castle ramparts, rappelling down a 200-foot precipice to the sea, and swimming to safety. Which he did. Then he would have had to find a captain who could sneak him past the harbor night patrols and, once arrived at the haven of Sicily, he would have had to avoid the murderous bandits on the inland route to the port of Syracuse. Clearly, he couldn’t have got off the island without much plotting and the inside help of a corrupt official or two or perhaps a blind eye turned at the right moment by Fabrizio Sforza Colonna. By mid-October, he had arrived at Syracuse, about as safe — which is to say, not very — as he would ever be.
58.
Caravaggio had chosen Syracuse as his destination for one compelling reason: Mario Minetti. His former companion, model, and (probably) lover had returned to his native Sicily and prospered as a respectable family man and the master of a fashionable workshop. Violent and volatile as he was, Caravaggio compelled abiding loyalty among a small band of intimates, among whom Mario was one. The younger man succored his old friend, lending him his state of the art studio and spreading the word to his rich and powerful clients. It soon became apparent that the work those rich and powerful clients wanted was Caravaggio’s, not Mario’s. Which was fine. Mario could have had no illusions about who was the greater artist, and he could afford to pass on a few commissions that Caravaggio desperately needed.
59.
He stayed in Sicily about a year, moving restlessly from Syracuse to Messina to Palermo and keeping a step ahead of the enemies he imagined — and in fact, were — pursuing him. The altarpieces he left behind in those cities were increasingly dark and expressionistic, forfeiting detail and color, but losing nothing of tragic intensity. Local legend had him exhuming a corpse to use as a model for “The Resurrection of Lazarus” and slashing to ribbons a completed canvas that someone had dared to criticize — unlikely, but his behavior had become more erratic. Always armed and now accompanied by a big black dog he named “Corvo” (Crow), “he looked more like a swordsman than a painter,” as one early biographer wrote.
60.
Now more than ever a papal pardon was the goal, not just to remove the death sentence hanging over his head, but also to protect him from the wrath of the Knights of Malta, if they were indeed the ones pursuing him. In September, 1609, he left Sicily for Naples, bringing him one step closer to the capital and ultimate rehabilitation. Caravaggio was a known quantity in Naples, where he stayed once again in the Colonna palace at Chiaia. But neither the Colonnas nor his own wits could save him from what had been in the cards for a long time: the savage and nearly lethal attack that took place outside the Osteria del Cerriglio within a few weeks of his arrival. His enemies, finally, had caught up with him.
61.
He never had a chance. Three men held him down while a fourth sliced his face. Afterwards, he was almost unrecognizable. They could have killed him, but they wanted him to live, bearing his scars for the rest of his life. Everyone would know what that meant.
62.
So who were “they”? Probably not the Tomassoni clan. They definitely would have killed him if they still wanted revenge for the murder of one of their own — an eye for an eye. And probably not Wigancourt, the Maltese Grand Master whom Caravaggio had severely embarrassed with his colossal infractions — a sneak attack outside a louche brothel wasn’t his style. Most likely it was Roero, the aristocratic heavy whom Caravaggio had attacked and injured on Malta. This was how an aggrieved count and Knight of Justice dealt with a mere painter.
63.
C remained in Naples another six months, convalescing to the extent he could and dreaming of Rome. He did manage to create one more major work, “The Martyrdom of St. Ursula.” The chiaroscuro that had once dramatically illuminated complex figurations of theme and action had now given way to a depthless and murky field of browns and reds. “And universal darkness buries all,” as a later poet once wrote.
64.
From here on, the story gets very hazy. On July 9, 1610, Caravaggio boarded a felucca that would take him north towards Rome and the papal pardon he had reason to believe was imminent. He never got there. What went wrong is the subject of multiple conspiracy theories, some of which have a shred of plausibility. However or wherever it happened, by the beginning of August, all of Rome had heard the news: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was dead.
65.
His enemy Giovanni Baglione wrote, “he died miserably — indeed, just as he had lived.” It pleased Baglione to think so. In his account, Caravaggio had been arrested (no reason given) upon landing at the port of Palo, 20 miles west of Rome. There, he was held in prison for two days while the felucca bearing three of his paintings — his passport back into the good graces of his patrons in Rome — sailed on without him. Upon his release he embarked on a suicidal chase along the beach in malarial weather to catch up with the ship at Porto Ercole. He died of a fever along the way.
66.
The story doesn’t quite hold. Why would he have been arrested only to be released? And why would the paintings have been disembarked at Porto Ercole, 70 miles north of Rome? Nor was a body ever found. But it’s not hard to believe that Caravaggio had died of a fever exacerbated by the stress of losing his pictures and, more importantly, from the debilitating and improperly treated effects of his nearly fatal wounding. He didn’t die miserably. He died fighting to the last.
67.
The poet Marzio Milesi composed some elegies for his deceased friend, which serve to remind us that if Caravaggio was a thug who hung with gangsters and sex workers, he was also a highly cultured artist no less at home in the company of poets, musicians, scientists, and learned prelates. Milesi genuinely grieved, whereas some of the other principals — Borghese, Wigancourt, and their underlings — just wanted to get their hands on the loot. In the unholy scramble that followed Caravaggio’s death, Borghese bullied and threatened his way to the largest share of the takings.
68.
One picture that Borghese didn’t get, known as “Portrait of a Courtesan” until it went up in flames during the fighting in Berlin at the end of World War II, remained in the hands of Fillide Melandroni. She held onto this portrait of herself, at her most beautiful and bejeweled, till the end of her days.
69.
Fillide had done quite well on the game, until venereal disease caught up with her at the age of 37 or 38. When she made out her will a few years before she died in 1618, she left most of her costly belongings to charity, but the portrait by the passionate artist she had known so intimately she bequeathed to her aristocratic lover Giulio Strozzi. It was her most cherished possession, and she wanted him to have it.
End
Bibliographical Note:
The flavorful translations of the historical documents in this account come from Peter Robb’s impassioned and novelistic M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio. The notions that Caravaggio might have had a second career as a pimp and that the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni occurred in the course of a duel derive from the entirely persuasive account of Andrew Graham-Dixon in Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. Other estimable sources that I’ve used are Helen Langdon’s Caravaggio: A Life, Howard Hibbard’s Caravaggio, and Francine Prose’s Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. And, of course, there are always the paintings themselves.
When I was in my early-twenties, I made a new year’s resolution to stop looking at myself in the mirror so much. It didn’t work, of course–what else can one do with a reflection besides look at it? This year, in my late-twenties, I set a similar resolution: for four months, until April 1st, I would turn away from Facebook and Twitter. I had grown bored, obsessed, bothered, even–I admit it–enamored with my reflection there. And lord help me if I found myself at midnight yet again, drinking a glass a wine and scrolling through wedding photos of a friend of a friend of a friend, or, come morning, drinking a mug of coffee and vainly attempting to read and retweet one fascinating article after another. J. Alfred Prufrock may have measured out his life with coffee spoons; I had begun to measure mine with status updates.
And also relieved. In his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier decries the devaluation of individual thought and personhood in a Web 2.0 world. He writes:
The problem of the internet–its power, and the way it’s changing how we live our lives–is a big topic these days. There’s The Tyranny of Email: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your In-Box by John Freeman, and, forthcoming, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. The internet age is so young that we’re worried, and intrigued, by how it will shape us–we simply have no idea. The single most fascinating aspect of my detox was the number of people who wanted to talk to me about it. Almost everyone I spoke to said, “I wish I could do that!” Then they got this strained look in their eyes that meant, The internet is ruining my life! When I assured them a detox was easy to do, they weren’t convinced. Or they said, “Okay, yes, next month. I’ll try it.” And then they wouldn’t. It saddened me to see all these people, chained to their online lives, posting flattering photos of themselves, “liking” a funny status update, posting or retweeting a link. It’s a never-ending race to remind others that we’re here, that we exist. It reminds me of when I used to do dance routines and little plays for my mom. “Look!” I’d yell every few seconds. “You’re NOT watching! Look!” It gets exhausting. And it’s not really living.
Thanks for that lively article, Edan. After much nervous contemplation about it in the past year, I still haven’t joined either Facebook or Twitter, and now I know that I won’t!
Dropped out for a week thanks to you–it’s been coming for a while, though. I’ve realized that so much of the time that used to go to reading, like over my morning coffee, is now spent on Facebook or other random internet browsing. So we’ll start with a week, then keep going.
(Emma Straub sent me here–with her Facebook link.)
Agreed! I deactivated my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts two weeks ago, and am enjoying it. More than just being tired of the banal status updates, I was annoyed at my repetitive, obsessive checking of the Twitter feed. Anonymity and privacy is underrated.
Without FB I’d be stuck obsessively checking the weather and my clean inbox over and over. My addiction is to the entire laptop…it seems to join my every activity lately. I feel this compulsive need to see if the midnight show of KickAss at the ArcLight is selling, to check BoingBoing for new posts, to Google anything and everything. And, like I said, looking up the unchanging weather every 30 minutes or so. Maybe I need to get on the wagon for a bit!
Interestingly, around the same time you did this I fell in love and …fell off twitter for months. I’m even having trouble keeping up my blog. But I do love both Twitter and FB for the capacity to crowd-source things like where to stay and where to eat, and I do feel closer to friends and relatives at a distance—email can be so cumbersome to respond to, whereas the passive connectivity of FB means they feel more like a part of my daily life than they would otherwise.
Anyway, you’re missed, but I’m glad I get to read you over here.
I suppose it is no surprise to you that I heard of this article by way of a retweet of a twitter post. That, unfortunately, is the great gaping hole in your plan: without those sites you say you don’t need, there would be no one here to read your thoughts on it. Of course, I agreed with you 100%, but then, that’s the gaping hole in my thinking too.
@mrG (“Without those sites you say you don’t need, there would be no one here to read your thoughts on it.”) Not necessarily: I’m not on Twitter, and am an infrequent Facebook user (post a comment or update maybe once every 2 weeks) but I came across this article the way I usually do: by checking one of my favorite sites. Which can still become a distraction; but limiting your online media time to a few favorites, at least primarily, sets a sort of boundary to the field – and insures that your screentime will be thought-provoking and not filled with, say, hours of looking at funny cat videos. I agree with Edan: like most pleasures, it’s a question of moderation in the form of self-regulation.
Loved it…. Will you do a update in 3 months? And on the ball about Twitter!
Although social networking has benefited my life as a writer more than it has damaged it, I am trying to keep a balance. I now have one internet-free day a week, and that seems to be working fine. Like everything in life (food, sex, sleep), it’s all about balance.
You are a remarkable young woman. We miss you, Edan, but more power.
I agree that it is all about balance. I am a journalist so use twitter as a news feed and to find things I might not normally read (such as this article) – but don’t use it outside work. I have never joined, and will never join Facebook, because I have the old-fashioned idea that you should make an effort to keep in touch with friends you care about.
I really had to laugh at the gravity with which the idea of cutting out Facebook and Twitter for a few months was treated in this article (the “collapse” of the internet, the “strained look” in the eyes of almost everyone the author spoke to about it)—as if it were real deprivation.
I keep my number of Facebook friends low, and I enjoy reading about their creative accomplishments and inspirations; I’ve learned about new and obscure music, videos and articles; I find out about the best parties and nightclubs that they frequent and/or promote; and I am genuinely happy for the ones who have married and had children and share pictures of their loved ones.
I’m not addicted to Facebook nor Twitter, but I appreciate it for what it is: it’s a celebration of the moments we want to share.
It’s fine as long as you don’t let it siphon off your valuable time to the point that you need to go cold turkey to remember that it should enhance your social life, not substitute for it. But such is the sad, empty world of the technologically privileged, I suppose.
I am probably at the old end of the demographic here. I am 67. I’ve certainly had my share of addictions (some took years of active overcoming), not-constructive distractions or abused distractions in my life. But now, now, I am so care-taking of my time. TV is gone, movies are here and I make them count. Will my eyesight hold up? I am hoping to live to 90 and take very good care. The Millions “manifesto” struck a chord–not wasting time on vapid (other adjectives also) when I could be reading insightful. I do enjoy some light reading–the last few years the Scandinavian mystery writers fill that niche. So Edan, I think it’s a good thing. Not to presume on how you should do it–but maybe a withdrawal diary? What fills that space, what would you like to fill that space. Rest and remembering are good things to do. Good luck.
My mind is blown wide open. I’m just not sure I have the balls to try it.
Lovely article/post. Re. “If I run into you at the grocery store, the question, “How are you?” will be genuine, and that will feel good” – I can only agree. I enjoy blogging (mostly) though have so far avoided Facebook and Twitter and am fairly sure I’ll continue to avoid it – I like your analogy that it’s like a crowded elevator and everyone is talking over each other. I don’t like crowds or elevators, so that rights me off. For me, despite the undoubted benefits to having an on-line life, social media is essentially, if not necessarily, shallow and vacuous. A hello in a grocery store is so much more meaningful and, dare I say it, profound.
I quit facebook during the month of February and it was hard, especially at first. In the month that I’ve been back, I’ve realized the key my fb portion control: I check in a few times a day and see what my friends are up to but I typically don’t post status updates myself now. I might once a week because when I do then I find myself obsessively wondering if anyone has liked what I wrote or responded at all. I guess others posts feel genuine to me but my own posts feel like the “LOOKIT” thing you described so well.
(an old Peanuts cartoon has Charlie Brown yelling at the red haired girl, “I’M LOOKITING!!”)
Thanks for a great article.
Don’t go back. I quit Facebook last fall. Best decision I made in a while. There are much better timesinks, ones that don’t drain every second of your attention while not really providing anything real.
Has anyone successfully used FB or Twitter for business? Any good stories?
I have hundreds of people on FB and over 1000 following on Twitter. The exchanges can be entertaining but I have yet to derive anything meaningful from it.
When I first got on FB, I used it to see how my old girlfriends compared. Once that little game was over it went back to the typical 3 round e-mail exchanges to catch up on decades of lost time with friends. Now there is a small core of 20+ people that I keep in constant contact with. About the same before FB.
I do not feel the need to put up pictures of my kids, quite frankly it scares me. Also, it is very interesting to see how others boast about every little trip or thing they buy. Updating your status to tell me you just “put down new hard wood floors” is not why I joined a social media network.
There is a value to social media networks but you spend so much time cutting through the noise it almost works against you.
I deleted my twitter and facebook accounts around the same time, in January, and called it social media suicide. I had heard about the suicide sites, but by the time I got on them, they had already been blocked by twitter and facebook. So I deleted all entries, friends, photos, by hand. It was hard. Hard to see all of that love and attention go away. But I did it, because
I knew I was addicted. And
I don’t want facebook and twitter to have the rights to my information.
And I don’t want to spend all of my time on there. I realized that I was in a certain mood when i would check facebook and twitter, the mood of “doing something half-heartedly” or “wanting to waste time.”
Since I got off these sites, I’ve written 40,000 words of my book, 35,000 words on my blog, created an e-newsletter or three, created 6 new paintings, started writing letters to my relatives (which has brought me such joy) created an ebook about how to get more freelance clients, made 10 slideshow presentations to help people find jobs or fundraise better, and started making an online game to teach people how to fundraise. I’ve made three websites too. And I’ve progressed towards my dream of selling iced tea to people in Austin Texas.
I have gotten so much done, and I feel like a better person for having committed facebook suicide. I encourage anyone who wants to have a greater impact on the world to do it.
Mazarine
http://wildwomanfundraising.com
Full disclosure:
I have made a new, professional twitter account that I check once a day, during the week, to post my new blog entry.
I often forget about Facebook for a few days at a time and spend no more than a combined total of a half hour a day or so on Twitter, and I enjoy both places. I do sometimes think about deleting from both sites, though — or, more to the point: I sometimes wish I had the luxury of deleting from both places.
But if you’re promoting a book, deleting your social media accounts is a terrible idea. I’ve booked a lot of events via Twitter contacts, and I don’t like to think of how few people would come to my readings if I weren’t constantly talking to readers and broadcasting my events on these sites.
Facebook is annoying. I have been on Facebook for over a year and it is ok. Great way to share family photos and stories. The key is to keep your network small and easy to manage. Once you let in people you do not know, you are subject to pointless ads and stories.
Facebook is about “ME”. Most people cannot handle seeing a low number on their account so they end up being friends with anyone to get a cool looking popular number. I find most of the information worthless. Farmville, Mob Wars etc.. etc…
The internet is young but I expect a facebook killer application to come along soon. Also, Facebook is upsetting people with its privacy rights. If you want to keep anything safe and secure, just keep it off the internet. Sad but true.
This article is fantastic!!! Thank you for sharing your detox experience. One thing I think about, on top of these issues you brought up, is the way that reading other people’s blogs affects my own creativity. I’m a writer and photographer, and while I often claim to follow other artists blogs in order to find inspiration, I often leave feeling insecure and left out of the internet loop of artists. I’m sure some of this has to do with my own personal issues of insecurity, but as soon as I mention this to fellow bloggers, I’m immediately met with resounding agreement and similar frustration.
While I do often find inspiration from fellow online artists, I often end up recreating the things they have produced. I, as well, want to read and exercise restraint. Perhaps I’m headed to my own detox, of the RSS variety. Who knows…It might end up clearing out my head a bit and allowing me to produce something original.
I often wonder if all of the web is an illusion. Then I check facebook.
Greg Gutierrez
Zen and the Art of Surfing
Thank you, everyone, for your comments. Getting all this feedback means I never have to return to Facebook or Twitter ever again. I exist!
I’ve done the same thing last week, in part to Nicholas Carr’s blog and MGMT’s new song “Flash Delirium” which encourages you to “stab your Facebook”. I only wish more of my friends and family would join me in the real world, but like you said, they all make the same damn excuses.
Loved the article, Edan. I feel some of the same pressures — or rather, all of them. The noise online is deafening, and my contribution to it, at least, is ego-based. My detox starts on July 3rd when I leave on the tour. But I’m trying to take it a step further. No Twitter or Facebook, but no computers or television, either. Just books and thinking. And bicycles.
Excellent article! I have been doing a bit of hand-wringing over the last few weeks about reducing my online activities and presence. Your well-written piece provides all the intellectual, and quasi-emotional, support I need to flip the switch into the off position.
One question, though. Did you inform friends and “followers” of your impending departure or did you just leave?
Cheers!
A lovely, thoughtful essay.
(And I got here via facebook, for which I am grateful.)
I’ve been off FB since July 1 and guess what I’ve been doing? Reading voraciously…like I used to before SM took over my life (including your book, Edan! Which was incredibly compelling). Anyway, I miss it the way I might miss being at a great party but not enough to go back. I deleted my account and the people who love me and are my friends are still in my life. In fact, we talk on the phone and share our real lives. I don’t know if you are still “off” but I’m thinking about leaving Twitter too. Merry Christmas!