Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian painter who worked mainly in Rome around 1600 and spent his last four years on the run through Naples, Malta and Sicily. He painted religious scenes from live models with blunt realism, picking out figures in hard light against deep shadow, a manner later called tenebrism. His work helped launch Baroque painting and influenced artists from Rubens and Velázquez to Rembrandt, while his violent life, which included killing a man, made him a fugitive under sentence of death.

He was born on 29 September 1571 in Milan, where his father Fermo Merisi worked as household administrator and decorator for the marquess of Caravaggio, a small town east of the city. In 1576 the family fled plague to Caravaggio itself, where his father and grandfather died on the same day the following year. In 1584 he began a four-year apprenticeship under Simone Peterzano, a Milanese painter whom the contract called a pupil of Titian.

In 1592 he left Milan for Rome after "certain quarrels" and an incident in which a police officer was wounded. For a time he painted fruit and flowers in the busy workshop of Giuseppe Cesari, the favourite painter of Pope Clement VIII. His early pictures of boys with fruit and musicians, and genre scenes such as The Cardsharps, brought him to the attention of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a leading collector who took him into his household.

The Counter-Reformation Church wanted religious art that would move ordinary believers. Through del Monte, Caravaggio was commissioned in 1599 to paint the life of St Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi. The Calling and the Martyrdom of St Matthew, delivered in 1600, caused a sensation. Commissions followed, among them The Incredulity of Saint Thomas and The Taking of Christ. Some churches rejected his work: the Death of the Virgin was turned down in 1606, reportedly because his model was a well-known prostitute.

Police and court records from these years fill many pages. He was arrested for carrying weapons, insulting guards, beating a nobleman, libelling the painter Giovanni Baglione, and throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter. On 29 May 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, a man from a well-connected family, in a fight or duel whose cause is disputed; reports mention a gambling debt, rivalry over a woman, and political tensions. Sentenced to death, with a bounty that allowed anyone to kill him, he fled the Papal States.

Protected by the Colonna family, he went to Naples, where he painted The Seven Works of Mercy. In 1607 he moved to Malta, hoping the Grand Master of the Knights of St John, Alof de Wignacourt, could help secure a pardon. Wignacourt made him a knight, and he painted The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist for the cathedral in Valletta, his largest work and the only one he signed. By late August 1608, however, he had been imprisoned after another fight in which a knight was seriously hurt. He escaped and was expelled from the order.

He spent about nine months in Sicily, working in Syracuse and Messina on sombre altarpieces in which small figures stand in vast darkness.

Back in Naples in 1609, he was attacked in October and badly disfigured. Hoping for a papal pardon, in the summer of 1610 he sailed north with paintings meant for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope's nephew. He died at Porto Ercole in Tuscany, reportedly of a fever, on 18 July 1610, aged 38. The cause has been argued over ever since: theories include murder by his enemies, malaria, lead poisoning, and an infected wound from the Naples attack.

His followers, the Caravaggisti, carried his dramatic lighting and realism to many other painters. He was largely neglected until the 20th century, when scholars restored him to a central place in the history of Western painting.

Our 1600 map shows the Italy he moved through, from Milan to Rome, Naples and Sicily, with the Papal States across the centre of the peninsula.