The life of the great Italian artist Caravaggio was brief and disreputable, and seems to be lit with the dramatic chiaroscuro effects so characteristic of his paintings. Born in Lombardy in 1571, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio came to notice in Rome in the 1590s, a challenging young artist who swiftly graduated from the pretty-boy cupids and bacchi that were his first speciality, to such masterpieces as Judith Beheading Holofernes and The Calling of St Matthew, painted around the turn of the century. But his life was increasingly marked by violence, and in 1606 he left Rome to escape a murder charge. He later spent time in Naples, Malta and Sicily, always leaving in a hurry, pursued by further scandals and criminal charges, and leaving in his wake a series of broodingly powerful religious works.
He wound up in Porto Ercole, a flyblown little fortress town on the southern Tuscan coast, where he died in the summer of 1610, probably of malaria, at the age of 38. The word his contemporaries used about him was stravagante, which translates as “extravagant”, but which was then still understood in its original sense of one who strays beyond the boundaries.
All this, it hardly needs saying, makes for good biographical copy, and Andrew Graham-Dixon’s gripping new life of the artist is the latest in a line that goes back to a pair of 17th-century memoirs by former acquaintances. One of these, Giovanni Baglione, had been a rival painter in Rome. Caravaggio wrote obscene lampoons about him, addressed to “Gian Coglione” (Johnny Bollock), which resulted in a lawsuit in 1603. Baglione’s account, published in 1642, has an element of score-settling, and helped cement Caravaggio’s posthumous reputation as an unstable character whose art was marred by eccentricities. The view of the metaphysical French artist Nicolas Poussin was that Caravaggio had been “sent into the world to destroy painting”.
Graham-Dixon writes expertly and eloquently about the paintings, as one would expect, but he is even better at bringing out the lurid detail of Caravaggio’s story, much of it drawn from contemporary archival sources. These are documents ferreted out by earlier scholars — he is particularly indebted to Helen Langdon’s meticulous Caravaggio: A Life (1999) — but he interrogates the material closely, and weaves it into a beautifully paced narrative. We find Caravaggio in his insalubrious Roman lodgings in the “dark network of alleyways” clustered around the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza Navona, and at taverns called the Wolf and the Blackamoor. Among his goods, catalogued in a 1605 inventory, are “a guitar, a violin, a dagger, a pair of earrings”, “a small chest covered with black leather, containing a pair of ragged breeches and a jacket”, and a convex mirror that Graham-Dixon plausibly suggests was the one used to create the distorted self-portrait in the Medusa.
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Still more immediate is the eyewitness reportage drawn from Caravaggio’s police record. There was the fracas with a waiter, who accused him of throwing a dish of artichokes in his face and calling him “becco fottuto” (translated by Graham-Dixon as “f*****-over cuckold”). In the summer of 1605, a notary, Mariano Pasqualone, who was bleeding from a head wound, filed charges of assault against him. A witness said: “I saw a man with an unsheathed weapon… He turned round at once and made three jumps and then turned towards the palace of the illustrious Cardinal del Monte [Caravaggio’s patron] which was nearby down the street where we were. He wore a black cloak on one shoulder only.” The man had attacked from behind, but Pasqualone knew who it was: “It could not have been anyone other than Michelangelo da Caravaggio.” For a moment we are there, in a Roman street, with the black-cloaked assailant hurrying back to the sanctuary of the cardinal’s apartments. Black is a constant in descriptions of Caravaggio: he goes “dressed all in black, in a rather disorderly fashion”; he has “a thin black beard, thick eyebrows and black eyes”.
This incident has a back-story that adds a further dimension. A few nights before, Pasqualone said, he had traded insults with Caravaggio “on account of a girl called Lena, who stands at the Piazza Navona”: she “is Michelangelo’s girl”. The particular Italian phrasing means she was a prostitute; Graham-Dixon thinks it also means she was a prostitute controlled by Caravaggio, and “the painter, therefore, was a part-time pimp”. The homicide of May 28, 1606, which precipitated Caravaggio’s flight from Rome, comes out of the same underworld. The victim, Ranuccio Tomassini, was also a pimp, and among his girls was Fillide Melandroni. She was a strikingly beautiful, round-faced, auburn-haired young woman, as we know from several depictions of her by Caravaggio, who used her as the model for the neck-slicing Judith, and for Mary Magdalen. The exact cause of the fight is not certain. The fatal stab wound, recorded as in Tomassini’s upper thigh, may have been an attempted castration.
Caravaggio was also accused of homosexuality. His future biographer Baglione spoke of his bardassa or catamite, probably meaning Caravaggio’s studio assistant, Francesco Boneri, known as Cecco. He was said to be the model for the full-frontal cupid in Omnia vincit amor, of which the itinerant English artist Richard Symonds wrote in about 1650: “Checcho del Caravaggio tis calld among the painters… Twas the body & face of his owne boy or servant that laid with him.” Caravaggio’s homosexuality (or more probably bisexuality) is rumoured rather than evidenced — like that of his English contemporary and soul mate, Christopher Marlowe — but seems credible.
As Graham-Dixon shows, Caravaggio is intimately present in his paintings. They include many self-portraits — from the haunting Sick Bacchus of the 1590s, to the late David and Goliath, where the severed head of the giant bears his unmistakably saturnine features — and they have also the dark, high-tension ambience of his life. He infuses familiar biblical scenes with a rough-textured realism drawn directly from experience — the shabbily dressed apostles, the thuggish scourgers of Christ, the dirty soles of a kneeling pilgrim, the blades ripping into flesh. In the great Beheading of St John, painted in Malta, the blood spattered on the floor spells “michelangelo” — the only known work to bear his signature.
The strength of this new biography lies not in its primary discoveries, which are modest, but in its tremendous narrative drive, which steers the story fluently and plausibly between the pitfalls of academic dryness and overdone speculation. As a human story it is ultimately tragic, with the paradox at its heart that the artist’s troubled, transgressive life — or, more simply, his appalling behaviour — seems a kind of precondition for his creation of some of the greatest and most distinctive paintings in western art, works of unflinching power whose influence reverberates through the work of his avowed admirer, Rembrandt, and on to Picasso, who set to work on the horse in Guernica saying: “I want it to be so realistic — just like in Caravaggio — that you can smell the sweat.
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Charles Nicholl’s books include Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind