'Red-blooded Caravaggio killed love rival in bungled castration attempt' - Telegraph 'Red-blooded Caravaggio killed love rival in bungled castration attempt' By Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent 12:01AM BST 02 Jun 2002 One of the greatest murder mysteries in the history of art appears to have been solved with new evidence that Caravaggio, the Italian artist, killed a rival in a botched attempt to castrate him. For almost 400 years historians have asserted that Caravaggio, who painted a number of Renaissance masterpieces, murdered Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 in a row over a tennis match. A BBC documentary by Andrew Graham-Dixon, one of the world's leading art historians, will, however, disclose this week that the killing followed a dispute between the two over Fillide Melandroni, a female prostitute, whose services both men sought. It will use documents held in the Vatican and Rome State archives to show that Tomassoni, a pimp, died when Caravaggio attempted to cut off his testicles.

The disclosures will also alter a widely held perception of Caravaggio as a homosexual because of the large number of nude males that he painted. This image was consolidated in the 1986 film Caravaggio , directed by Derek Jarman, in which the painter was projected as a brooding homosexual. Related Articles Mr Graham-Dixon said, however, that a report written by the barber surgeon who examined Tomassoni's dead body provided evidence that Caravaggio was, at least on one occasion, aggressively heterosexual. "Sure, he had an eye for male beauty, but he probably swung both ways," said Mr Graham-Dixon, who is also a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine. "The new research shows that Caravaggio didn't just lash out after a game of tennis but that he was avenging his honour in a way that was utterly in keeping with the culture of the Rome of his day. "One of the fascinating things is the discovery that particular wounds in Roman street fights meant particular things. If a man insulted another man's reputation he might have his face cut.

If a man insulted a man's woman he would get his penis cut off." The barber surgeon's report, made on the night that Tomassoni died, has also been re-examined by experts in the Italian art world. Monsignor Sandro Corradini, another historian who has combed the Vatican archives, said that the document showed that Tomassoni bled to death through the femoral artery in his groin, having been floored during the duel. Mgr Corradini, who is author of a book about the artist, Evidence for a Trial, holds the post of Devil's Advocate in the Vatican, assisting the Pope on whether long-dead nominees for sainthood should be beatified. He believes that Caravaggio pinned Tomassoni to the ground with his sword and then made a bungled attempt to castrate him. Maurizio Marini, a leading art historian and author of one of the main monographs of Caravaggio, has collaborated with Mgr Corradini on the new research. "The game of tennis was a pretext for a duel, not the cause of it," he said. "The documents say that he probably wanted to castrate him if it was a question of a woman.

But Tomassoni probably moved and he got him in the femoral artery." Caravaggio met Fillide Melandroni when he was commissioned to paint her for an Italian nobleman. Tomassoni is believed to have been her pimp. "Judging by the way he painted her, Caravaggio had clearly succumbed to her sexual charms," said Mr Graham-Dixon, whose documentary Who Killed Caravaggio will be broadcast on BBC2 on Saturday. Caravaggio was born in 1571, the son of a mason in Lombardy. He was the last great master of the Italian Renaissance and is most famous for the dramatic contrasts of light and shade in his paintings - or chiaroscuro - which has widely affected artists since. After being charged with the death of Tomassoni, he fled to Malta and thereafter to Porto Ercole, in Italy. It was there, legend has it, that he died. The new revelations about his murder of Tomassoni have also led scholars to question the circumstances of Caravaggio's death. Some now believe that he might have been murdered by relatives of Tomassoni seeking revenge for his death.

While on the run from Rome, Caravaggio visited Malta where a document has shown that he was convicted of grevious bodily harm of a noble knight, who then pursued him. The latest suggestion is that the knight killed him. Caravaggio | Italian painter | Britannica.com Italian painter Francisco de Zurbarán Caravaggio, byname of Michelangelo Merisi (born September 29, 1571, Milan or Caravaggio [Italy]—died July 18/19, 1610, Porto Ercole, Tuscany), leading Italian painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works. The Conversion of St. Paul (second version), oil on canvas by … SCALA/Art Resource, New York Becoming Caravaggio While most other Italian artists of his time slavishly followed the elegant balletic conventions of late Mannerist painting, Caravaggio painted the stories of the Bible as visceral and often bloody dramas. He staged the events of the distant sacred past as if they were taking place in the present day, often working from live models whom he depicted in starkly modern dress.

He accentuated the poverty and common humanity of Christ and his followers, the Apostles , saints , and martyrs , by emphasizing their ragged clothing and dirty feet. He also developed a highly original form of chiaroscuro , using extreme contrasts of light and dark to emphasize details of gesture or facial expression: an outflung arm, a look of despair or longing. His influence on the course of Western art has been immense and has not been limited to the field of painting alone. Caravaggio’s work shaped that of many later artists, ranging from Rembrandt in Holland and Diego Velázquez in Spain to Théodore Géricault in France. His dramatic sense of staging and innovative treatment of light and shade have also directly inspired many leading figures in the medium of cinema, including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Martin Scorsese . Caravaggio’s reputation was clouded, during his own lifetime and in the aftermath of his untimely death, by the turbulent and ultimately tragic circumstances of his personal life. He committed murder and violent assault while at the peak of his success in Rome and consequently spent much of his later career—when he also created many of his most-compelling works—as a fugitive from justice .

Since the mid-20th century his violent exploits and volatile character have enhanced his popular appeal as a perceived outsider and rebel against convention. His presumed but unproven homosexual tendencies, which have been inferred both from his paintings and from certain historical documents, have added greater intrigue to his legend . He might be described as the perfect Old Master for an age in love with the idea of celebrity and in thrall to the cult of a doomed self-destructive genius. In truth he was a more subtle, sensitive, and intellectually ambitious artist than the myths that have accumulated around him might suggest. He was also less of a hothead. Close inspection of the archival information concerning him, his friends, and his enemies—much expanded by late 20th-century research in the archives of Rome, Naples , and Malta —has revealed that even his most apparently impulsive acts were governed by a certain logic, even if it was often the logic of vendetta . He was a violent man, but he lived in violent times, and he was as much sinned against as sinning. Early life and training in Lombardy: 1571–92 Britannica Stories Romanticism Caravaggio left Lombardy in 1592.

He would never return to the land of his birth. A series of legal documents from the late 1580s and 1590 record the sale, by Caravaggio, of a few small pieces of land that he had inherited from his family. The precise circumstances surrounding his departure from Milan remain unclear, but marginal notes in a manuscript copy of Giulio Mancini’s early account of Caravaggio’s life suggest that he was involved in some form of violent incident involving the murder of a policeman. So it seems that he began his career as he would end it, as a man in trouble with the law. Rome: 1592–99 First apprenticeships in Rome: Pucci, Cesari, and Petrigiani Caravaggio traveled to Rome, as many aspiring artists did, in search of work. The newly elected pope, Clement VIII , was determined to transform the city into the visible symbol of a revived and flourishing Catholic faith. New churches were being built and old churches remodeled, with altarpieces and sculptures commissioned in great numbers.

At a rough estimate, about 2,000 artists lived and worked in the city, out of a total population of 100,000. They had their own quarter, an area of approximately two square miles between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Spagna, where they clustered in distinct communities according to their place of origin. Competition between the different groups, and between individual artists, was intense and frequently flared up into feuds and vendettas . Rome was a city of migrants—priests seeking preferment, pilgrims seeking salvation, mercenary soldiers seeking employment—as well as a place where social distinctions were more fluid than in other, more-feudal parts. Many hoping for fame and fortune in that opportunistic environment pretended to a higher social status than their birth merited and behaved according to a debased version of the old chivalric codes of honour, whereby the slightest perceived insult or injury was met with force. Caravaggio’s many fights and disagreements with others fit into that wider pattern of violence, so it would be wrong to see his behaviour, however apparently erratic, as freakish or exceptional.

To judge by the different accounts provided by his first biographers—Giovanni Baglione and the aforementioned Bellori and Mancini, all writing within living memory of Caravaggio—the artist’s early years in Rome were unsettled. At the start he lodged with a jobbing painter from Sicily named Lorenzo Siciliano, in whose workshop, says Bellori, “Caravaggio painted heads for a groat apiece and produced three a day.” Mancini reports that during that period Caravaggio also lodged with a beneficed priest of St. Peter’s named Pandolfo Pucci, whose hospitality left much to be desired: “He was given nothing but salad to eat in the evening.…After a few months he left…calling his benefactor and master ‘Monsignor Salad.’ ” Caravaggio next spent some time in the studio of a minor Sienese painter called Antiveduto Grammatica. Then he moved to the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari, also known as Cavaliere d’Arpino , who was one of the most-prominent artists in Rome during the 1590s.

Cesari was responsible for a number of monumental altarpieces and decorative schemes but employed Caravaggio merely to paint decorative borders or embellishments to his work: pictures of “flowers and fruit.” According to Bellori, Caravaggio resented the restriction to such lowly subject matter: “As he was working at these things against his will and feeling great regret to see himself kept from figures, he welcomed the opportunity offered by Prospero.” Two pictures by Caravaggio survive with a provenance that links them to the Cesari workshop: Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Self-Portrait as Bacchus (also called Sick Bacchus). Both were expropriated from Cesari by Scipione Borghese, the papal nephew, in the early 1600s and have remained in the Borghese collection ever since. They are subtle and bittersweet works, the first perhaps inspired by the divine longing of the Bridegroom in the Song of Songs, the second by the ancient association between art and the Roman god of wine and creative abandon.

Given that each remained with Cesari after Caravaggio’s departure, it is possible that they had been painted as demonstration pieces: proof to his master that he could indeed paint more-ambitious subjects than flowers and fruit alone. The artist’s time with Cesari appears to have ended badly, with an obscure accident involving a kick from a horse that left Caravaggio in the hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione. According to Mancini, at about the start of 1595, after eight months in the Cesari workshop, he lodged with another priest: “Monsignor Fatin Petrigiani, who gave him the comfort of a room in which to live.” At about that time he met Prospero Orsi, a painter of grotesques , who (according to Bellori) encouraged Caravaggio to strike out on his own and paint directly for the market.

Baglione adds that Caravaggio painted a number of self-portraits at that time—now presumed lost—and “a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was all done meticulously.” The subject is dramatic, as might be expected of a work intended to pique the interest of Roman connoisseurs: a young man in a state of undress, picking at a bowl of fruit, is rudely interrupted by a lizard that bites his finger. It may have been intended as a parable of the punishments that attend the lascivious, with the snapping lizard symbolizing the pains of venereal disease. The patronage of Cardinal del Monte Caravaggio struggled to make ends meet throughout the mid-1590s, so he approached several picture dealers in Rome. He struck up a working relationship with Costantino Spata, who had a shop in the piazza bordering the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. It was through Spata that Caravaggio came to the attention of his most-important early patron, Francesco Cardinal Maria del Monte, who lived in the nearby Palazzo Madama.

Between them, the painter and his dealer concocted a plan to attract the notice of del Monte, a prominent collector who regularly passed Spata’s shop. Caravaggio painted two pictures of a novel and unfamiliar kind, depicting scurrilous scenes drawn from the milieu of low everyday life: The Cardsharps and The Gypsy Fortune Teller. In each, a young man is being tricked out of his fortune by a colourful rogue, or pair of rogues. In a sense, the pictures allegorically enact Caravaggio’s own stratagem in painting them, namely that of ensnaring a wealthy man. The trick worked: not only did del Monte purchase both works, but he gave Caravaggio board and lodging, encouraged his development as a painter, and secured him numerous commissions. The Cardsharps, oil on canvas by Caravaggio, c. 1594; in the … Fine Art Images/Heritage-Images Del Monte was a music lover as well as an afficionado of painting. Not only was he protector of the Sistine Chapel Choir, but he was also at the forefront of the late Renaissance shift from medieval polyphony to monody .

He favoured the single melodic line sung by the solo voice, as well as new forms of musical theatre: developments that would eventually lead to the aria and the opera . Caravaggio’s The Musicians of 1595–96, an unusual depiction of musicians rehearsing, which once hung in del Monte’s music room in the Palazzo Madama, encapsulates the moody experimental character of the cardinal’s musical patronage. Four boys tune their instruments or leaf through their scores to prepare for their performance: they are awaiting, by implication , the animating presence of del Monte himself. Caravaggio painted a number of other pictures on musical themes during his early years under the cardinal’s protection. He also painted Boy with a Basket of Fruit—a still life with religious sacramental associations, carried by the contrast between worm-eaten apples and grapes, symbols respectively of perishable flesh and the redemption of Jesus’ blood in the form of holy wine. That painting formed part of the collection of Federico (Federigo) Borromeo, who may have commissioned it from the artist.

In addition, he painted devotional works for other Roman noblemen in del Monte’s circle, including The Penitent Magdalene and The Rest on the Flight to Egypt: soft, delicately coloured paintings of a gently lyrical character that would not be repeated in his later work. Del Monte was ambassador for the powerful Florentine family of the Medici , who supported the expense of his Roman residences. Encouraged by del Monte, Caravaggio painted two of his most teasingly original pictures of the mid-to-late 1590s for the Medici grand duke of Tuscany: Bacchus and Head of the Medusa. Each is a subtle jeu d’esprit. The Bacchus, for which Caravaggio’s moonfaced friend, the Sicilian painter Mario Minniti, acted as model, has been interpreted as a depiction of a male prostitute in down-at-heel lodgings offering a prospective client a glass of wine.

But on closer examination, the boy’s thoughtful expression and his attributes—vine-leaf wreath, another of the artist’s baskets of fruit in which worm-holed apples and salvific grapes are mingled, carafe of wine—indicate that the figure is Bacchus in his guise as a prefiguration of Christ, offering not the pleasures of vice but eternal salvation. It is the kind of picture that Ottavio Cardinal Paravicino may have had in mind when he referred to Caravaggio, in a letter of 1603, working “in that middle area, between the sacred and the profane.” Bacchus, oil on canvas by Caravaggio, 1596–97; in the Uffizi … Fine Art Images/Heritage-Images The Medusa is even more strikingly unconventional and might in its way be regarded as a precursor of conceptual art . Painted on canvas and attached to a piece of wood in the shape of a shield with a strap on the back, it is a picture intended not merely to be looked at but actually worn.

Only when strapped to the viewer’s arm, as it once was by the Medici ruler of Florence for whom it was painted, did its meaning become clear. It turned its wearer by implication into the hero Perseus , at the moment when he slew the snake-haired Medusa . The wearer of the shield in effect became Perseus, gazing at the monster’s reflection in the shield mirror, by which means he could escape the Gorgon ’s deadly gaze. Since Perseus was indeed a mythological hero with whom the Medici liked to identify themselves—as evinced in Benvenuto Cellini ’s famous sculpture of Perseus and Medusa of half a century earlier—it was likely a compliment well calculated to please them. Head of the Medusa, oil on wood covered with canvas by Caravaggio, … Fine Art Images/Heritage-Images Successful artist and criminal This period of the painter’s life, when his fortunes began to rise, also marks his first appearances in the criminal archives of Rome.

He is mentioned in testimony given in July 1597 by a barber named Luca, in connection with a murky and ultimately unsolved case involving a missing cloak and a dagger: This painter is a stocky young man…with a thin black beard, thick eyebrows and black eyes, who goes dressed all in black, in a rather disorderly fashion, wearing black hose that is a little bit threadbare, and who has a thick head of hair, long over his forehead. Caravaggio, who wore black not because it was fashionable but probably because it enabled him to evade detection in Rome’s unlit streets at night, would be arrested on numerous occasions over the succeeding years. A strong flavour of the artist’s proud and acerbic character is conveyed by his own words in court following his detention on May 4, 1598, for bearing arms in a public place: “I was arrested last night…because I was carrying a sword. I carry the sword by right because I am Painter to Cardinal del Monte. I am in his service and live in his house.

I am entered on his household payroll.” The German etcher and art historian Joachim von Sandrart (1606–88) wrote a short account of Caravaggio during his years in Rome, remarking that he liked to go around “in the company of his young friends, mostly brash, swaggering fellows—painters and swordsmen—who lived by the motto nec spe, nec metu, ‘without hope, without fear.’ ” His friends included the painters Orsi, Minniti, and Orazio Gentileschi as well the architect Onorio Longhi, a man so hot-tempered that he would be described by a later biographer as having “a head that smoked.” Caravaggio also associated with a number of Rome’s prostitutes and courtesans, notably Fillide Melandroni, a woman from Siena who served as his model for a number of pictures painted in the late 1590s: Martha and Mary Magdalene; the startlingly sadistic-erotic Judith Beheading Holofernes, in which she saws at the neck of the tyrant with her sword in a setting more reminiscent of a Roman bordello than the Assyrian general’s tent described

 in the Apocrypha ; and the haunting Saint Catherine of Alexandria, shown embracing the sword of her own martyrdom with the tenderness of a lover’s caress.

It was with those works, in which he placed sacred figures in a modern setting and in modern dress, using a live model posed before him, that Caravaggio perfected the method that would bring him both fame and notoriety. He also began at this time to develop his characteristically extreme technique of chiaroscuro, darkening his shadows to produce stark contrasts of light and dark, a method eloquently described by Bellori: He went so far in this style that he never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow. Caravaggio’s association with his model for these pictures, Melandroni, may have been personal as well as professional. It was illegal for women to model for painters in Rome at the time, so employing a prostitute was a convenient way of getting around the legislation.

Caravaggio would be linked to a number of other prostitutes during his time in Rome, and there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that he actually operated as a pimp in the time when he was not painting for Cardinal del Monte or his other patrons: an arrangement that would have provided him with free models and casual sexual encounters on demand, as well as extra income. Caravaggio’s association with Melandroni certainly fueled the animosity that would develop, during the years that followed, with a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni. Tomassoni was Melandroni’s pimp during the years when she began modeling for Caravaggio and may well have resented the painter’s connection to her. In any case, the triangular relationship produced a simmering antagonism between the two men. Tomassoni was a dangerous man to have as an enemy, with powerful connections in the city: one of his brothers, Giovan Francesco, was caporione, or area commander, of the Campo Marzio district; another, Alessandro, was accorded the honour of being buried in the Pantheon in Rome.

Rome: 1599–1606 The Contarelli Chapel and other church commissions On July 23, 1599, Caravaggio signed a contract to paint two large paintings for the side walls of the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, the church of the French in Rome. The commission was secured for him by his patron Cardinal del Monte, whose links to the Medici meant that he had close connections with the French community in Rome. Not only was this Caravaggio’s first major public commission, but it involved working on a far larger scale than he had previously undertaken: the pictures were each to be almost 10 feet (3 metres) square. Caravaggio responded to the challenge with mastery. The subjects prescribed were The Calling of St. Matthew and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. Caravaggio used his by-now-established method, setting both episodes in the present day and painting directly from live models posed in mise-en-scènes of his own devising. He set the subject of Christ calling Matthew , the tax gatherer, in a dingy modern tax collector’s office somewhere in a basement of Rome.

Christ and Peter , wearing timeless robes that symbolize eternal salvation, encounter Matthew and a group of taxpayers in gaudy modern dress. Christ beckons Matthew, as if to draw him away from the temptations of money toward redemption. A great beam of light bisects the composition diagonally, turning the entire composition into an abstract diagram of Matthew’s traditional symbol, the balance or set of scales: Christ’s divine light will lever him upward, making his soul light and enabling him to rise out of base darkness. In the second of the two panels, Caravaggio imagined Matthew’s apocryphal murder on the orders of a pagan ruler as a terrorist killing taking place in the baptismal chapel of a modern Roman church. Matthew, wearing priest’s robes, is baptizing a group of nearly naked men. One of the men, who has been merely feigning Christian devotion, leaps up to assassinate Matthew with a sword. As the saint bleeds to death into the baptismal pool—a subtle allusion to the belief that violent death in the name of faith represents a second and yet holier baptism, baptism by blood—an angel descends to thrust the martyr’s palm branch into his hands.

Caravaggio included his own self-portrait in the picture, as a man looking back at the horror of the killing as he turns to flee. The Calling of St. Matthew, oil on canvas by Caravaggio, … Mauro Magliani/age fotostock The paintings for the Contarelli Chapel instantly established Caravaggio as the most dynamic and original painter working in Rome. More commissions followed, notably, in the autumn of 1600, for the funerary chapel of Tiberio Cerasi in Santa Maria del Popolo. The subjects this time were The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion of St. Peter. Caravaggio treated both themes with extreme austerity and simplicity. He placed Paul on his back in a pool of light, just after having been struck from his horse by a divine thunderbolt.

His patient, heavy horse and loyal retainer stand beside him, half shrouded in shadow, as he experiences the mystical truth of Christ’s entire life, from alpha to omega, in an ecstasy of revelation mimed by his gesture and position: helpless as the newborn Jesus was at the Nativity , a baby in a manger, yet with his arms simultaneously outflung, as Christ’s would be on the cross. In the second picture he showed Peter being crucified upside down by a group of burly, poor assassins, grimly focused on the mechanics of murder. In each of the pictures, Caravaggio aggressively asserted the humility of the followers of Christ. Santa Maria del Popolo was one of the principal pilgrimage churches of Rome, placed as it was at the northernmost edge of the city. These were paintings aimed squarely at poor pilgrims, intended to foster in them a sense of identification with the equally poor first followers of Christ. His pictures make a striking contrast with the altarpiece for the same chapel, painted at the same time by Annibale Carracci , in which the Virgin Mary , clothed splendidly as the Queen of Heaven, is watched on her way skyward by a group of nobly dressed apostles.

Two rival approaches to representing the mysteries of the faith are there crystalized. Caravaggio’s paintings express what might be termed the pauperist view within the Catholic church, favoured by the Franciscans and other orders strongly committed to the notion that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Caracci’s painting takes a more-cautious approach to the notion of holy poverty, presenting a vision of the blessed Virgin intended to awe and inspire the mass of poor pilgrims flooding into Rome at the turn of the 16th century—and, by implication, to keep them in their place. Caravaggio may have shown what he thought of Carracci’s picture by arranging the composition of his Conversion of St. Paul so that the rump of his horse is turned toward the face of Carraci’s Virgin. But during the years that followed, his direct insistence on Christian humility and poverty would fall out of favour with the Catholic church in Rome. Caracci’s more-decorous style, closely attuned to the church authorities’ desire to control and subdue a large shifting population of actual poor—increasingly perceived as a threat to social order—would gradually gain the ascendancy.

As a result, Caravaggio would suffer much censorship and frustration, despite his rising reputation. Sometime during the first half of 1601, Caravaggio left the household of Cardinal del Monte—although he remained under his protection, as he would assert more than once during his several appearances in court—to take up residence with the powerful Mattei family, who lived in a honeycomb of interconnected residences built over the ancient Roman Teatro di Balbo. Caravaggio lived in the palace of Girolamo Cardinal Mattei, painting a number of pictures for him and his two brothers, Ciriaco and Asdrubale. These included two of his most-brilliant devotional paintings, The Supper at Emmaus and The Betrayal of Christ. In the second picture he once more included his own self-portrait as a witness to the Judas kiss, holding up a lantern as if almost to advertise his by-now-trademark use of intense light-dark contrasts. About the same time, Caravaggio was commissioned to add an altarpiece to the two side panels he had painted for the Contarelli Chapel.

The subject was Matthew and the Angel, in which the apostle was to be shown writing his gospel to heavenly dictation. For the first time, Caravaggio painted a picture that displeased his patrons within the church, and for the first time, he was forced to modify his aggressive insistence on the theme of holy poverty. Initially, he represented Matthew as the poorest of peasants, with gnarled features and rough hands, sitting in a simple Savonarola chair with the soles of his dirty feet prominent in the foreground: an evident illiterate, being miraculously guided in the act of writing by a gentle adolescent angel with luxuriant locks of hair. That picture, which survives only in black-and-white photographs (having been destroyed by fire in Berlin during the World War II ), was rejected outright and a replacement requested. Caravaggio’s second version, which still survives on the altar of the Contarelli Chapel, shows Matthew in a considerably more-decorous light, as a scholar saint in dignified robes, writing to the instruction of a more-remote, less patronizingly familiar angel.

Continued successes and the murder of Tomassoni Caravaggio continued to work at secular commissions during that period, painting a highly erotic depiction of Cupid surrounded by the tumbled attributes of science, art, music, and military might, entitled Amor Vincit Omnia. He painted the celebration of the power of love for the Roman nobleman Vincenzo Giustiniani, possibly to mark a wedding, and it was displayed in pride of place in Giustiniani’s palace behind a green curtain. The model for it was Caravaggio’s studio assistant, Cecco Boneri, and the picture would later occasion rumours that Caravaggio and Cecco had slept together. An Englishman visiting Rome about 1650, Richard Symonds, was told the story by a custodian who took him around the Giustiniani Palace. Whether the rumours were true or not, it would be a mistake to regard Caravaggio as homosexual in any modern sense of the term. The balance of evidence suggests that he did have sexual relationships with men as well as women, but it could be argued that his amorous or sexual preferences were defined by his conspicuous reluctance to settle with any one partner.

The esteem in which Giustiniani held Omnia Vincit Amor provoked the jealousy of Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter who would later write a remarkably evenhanded (albeit sometimes acerbic) account of Caravaggio’s life. In 1602 Baglione publically exhibited a parody of the work titled Divine Love, which he later followed with a second version in which Caravaggio himself is depicted in the guise of the devil plotting to sodomize a furtive figure of Cupid. This visual accusation of sodomy provoked Caravaggio and his friends, including Gentileschi, to compose a set of satiric verses mocking Baglione as Giovanni Coglione (“Johnny Bollocks”) in no uncertain terms. In late summer 1603 Baglione had Caravaggio and Gentileschi thrown into prison on charges of criminal libel, which potentially carried a sentence of life rowing in the papal galleys.

The subsequent trial, for which full transcripts survive in the Roman archive, elicited from Caravaggio his only known statement on the art of painting , a single frustratingly terse sentence: “In painting a valent’huomo [man of worth] is one who knows how to paint well and imitate natural objects well.” Probably with the help of Cardinal del Monte, Caravaggio and his coaccused were released from prison on September 25, 1603, and all charges against them were dropped. After the libel trial Caravaggio traveled to Loreto , Italy, to research a large altarpiece on the subject of the Madonna of Loreto. He returned to Rome around the start of 1604 and, at about the same time, moved into rented accommodation in the Vicolo dei Santa Cecilia e Biagio (now the Vicolo del Divino Amore). Between 1603 and 1606 he would receive only a handful of commissions for large-scale public religious paintings, a fact suggestive of the extent to which his style was out of tune with the times. At the same time, his appearances in court for various disturbances of the peace multiplied.

In 1604 he was arrested, variously, for assaulting a waiter who had served him with a plate of artichokes dressed in butter rather than oil; for throwing stones in the street in the company of, among others, a perfume maker and some prostitutes; and for telling a policeman who was attempting to release him quietly, even though he was carrying a sword and dagger, that “you can stick it up your arse.” In between committing those crimes and misdemeanours, he painted the austere and monumental altarpiece of The Entombment of Christ for the Oratorian church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, in Rome. The Entombment of Christ, oil on canvas by Caravaggio, 1602–04; … SCALA/Art Resource, New York The pattern continued into 1605. In early summer he completed his altarpiece of The Madonna of Loreto, popularly known as “The Madonna of the Pilgrims,” for the Cavalletti Chapel in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino.

The sweetest and most overtly sentimental of his major religious pictures, it was greeted with such enthusiasm by the mass of Rome’s pilgrims who gathered to see it that Giovanni Baglione compared the sound of their collective approbation to “the cackling of geese.” But in late May of that same year, Caravaggio was arrested again for carrying his sword and dagger in a public place. On July 19 he was arrested once more, this time for defacing the house front of a woman named Laura della Vecchia, a crime known as deturpatio, often committed as revenge for an insult or affront. Just 10 days later he was arrested yet again for inflicting grievous bodily harm. Caravaggio skipped bail and fled to the coastal city of Genoa for the month of August . On his return he discovered that the landlady from whom he was renting his house in the Vicolo dei Santa Cecilia e Biagio, one Prudentia Bruni, had seized his possessions and changed the locks. He committed the crime of deturpatio against her, this time smearing excrement on the door of her house and singing obscene songs to the accompaniment of a guitar outside her window.

In her deposition to the court, the landlady complained that Caravaggio had damaged one of the ceilings in her house, a detail that may suggest one of the practicalities of his working method. At the end of 1605, Caravaggio signed a contract to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the papal grooms in St. Peter’s. He completed the work, The Madonna of the Palafrenieri, sometimes known as “The Madonna of the Serpent,” on April 8, 1606. Not more than a month later, it was removed from view because, according to Bellori, it was considered “offensive.” The precise cause of offence remains unknown, but the church fathers may have been disturbed by the emphatically generous bosom of the Virgin who treads on the viper , Satan, with her son Jesus as the grooms’ patron saint, Anne, looks on; or they may have learned (perhaps tipped off by one of the painter’s rivals) that she had been modeled by a known prostitute. Shortly afterward Caravaggio completed the last of his great altarpieces for Roman churches, The Death of the Virgin.

Austere, solemn, tragic in its very mundanity, the work shows the Apostles lamenting the death of Mary in the poorest of homes. In the words of the 20th-century art historian Roberto Longhi, it resembles “a death in a night refuge.” It is among the most-powerful and moving of Caravaggio’s paintings, but once more, not long after being installed in the Carmelite church for which it had been commissioned, Santa Maria della Scala, it was removed from public view. To judge by the painting commissioned to replace it, an altarpiece by Carlo Saraceni on the same theme but infinitely more decorous in effect, Caravaggio had been censored for daring to place such strident and shocking emphasis on the poverty of Mary and the Apostles. The Death of the Virgin, oil on canvas by Caravaggio, … A History of Painting Shortly after that setback, on the evening of May 28, 1606, the long-smouldering animosity between Ranuccio Tomassoni and Caravaggio flared up into a formal duel, which took place on the tennis court of the French ambassador to Rome.

Caravaggio pierced his opponent’s femoral artery with his dueling sword, causing him to bleed to death in a very short time. The nature of the injury, close to Tomassoni’s groin, may suggest that Caravaggio intended to wound his opponent sexually. Wounds were meaningful in the honour culture of the time, so, for example, a facial wound might be inflicted to avenge an insult to reputation, or loss of face, while a genital wounding or attempted castration might mark a dispute over a woman. Caravaggio and Tomassoni may still have been competing over Fillide Melandroni, or perhaps they had argued over Tomassoni’s wife—the presence of Tomassoni’s two brothers-in-law as seconds gives some credence to the latter hypothesis . Whatever the cause, the killing would have a profound effect on the rest of Caravaggio’s life. He fled Rome in its immediate aftermath. Duels themselves were against the law, and thus committing murder during a duel was a grievous offense. He was convicted in absentia of murder and made subject to a bando capitale, a capital sentence, which meant that anyone in the Papal States had the right to kill him with impunity in exchange for a reward.

If they were unable to produce his body, his severed head would suffice . Naples, Malta, Sicily, Naples, Porto Ercole: 1606–10 Having fled from Rome, Caravaggio found shelter in the territories of the Colonna, in the Alban Hills above the city. Bellori and Mancini place him in Zagarolo, where the daunting fortress of the Colonna Palace still stands today. While there, he painted the affectingly bleak Supper at Emmaus, a far-more-somber treatment of the theme than his earlier version (1601) of the subject, which may reflect his penitential mood after the murder of Tomassoni. At the same time, he painted a compelling David with the Head of Goliath, in which Cecco is cast as the adolescent David and the grisly severed head of Goliath bears Caravaggio’s own agonized features. This picture has often been dated to the end of the painter’s life, but its style places it far closer to 1606, and its presence in the Borghese collection, together with its subject matter, suggests that it was intended as a form of plea bargain.

Scipione Borghese, the papal nephew, was also in charge of the papal justice system and a keen collector of Caravaggio’s work. David with the Head of Goliath was most likely a gift from the painter sent in hope of a pardon.. There is evidence to suggest that Borghese was inclined to show clemency—a pardon for Caravaggio was rumoured in Rome in the autumn of 1606—but Tomassoni’s powerful connections may have blocked a pardon. In any event, feeling that it was unsafe for him to return to Rome, Caravaggio traveled farther south to Naples , where he remained under the protection of the Colonna family and stayed in their palace. He painted one of his most-impressive altarpieces for the Neapolitan confraternity of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, devoted to the care of the sick and the poor. The Seven Acts of Mercy is a tall, dark, claustrophobically congested composition, in which the nominal seven good deeds, ranging from burial of the dead to clothing of the naked, are performed in a world so squeezed and teeming that it resembles some dark corner of Naples itself, the most famously crowded city in Italy.

Three other altarpieces are associated with Caravaggio’s time in the city: a harrowingly direct Flagellation of Christ, a harsh and brutally simplified Crucifixion of St. Andrew, and The Madonna of the Rosary, a picture so sweet in mood and so awkwardly theatrical that he probably painted it earlier in his career, around 1603–04, and took it to Naples with him from Rome. From Naples Caravaggio traveled to Malta , where he hoped to join the feared and respected Knights of the Order of St. John (or Hospitallers ), Christian soldiers waging guerrilla warfare against the forces of Islam from their island fortress in the Mediterranean . To be accepted into the order would mean automatic pardon for the murder he had committed in Rome and therefore redemption from his sins. The idea of traveling to Malta was probably suggested to Caravaggio by Costanza Colonna, whose own son Fabrizio Sforza Colonna had committed a crime and gained a pardon for it by entering the order, rising to become admiral in chief of the Maltese galleys.

Documents have emerged to show that the marchesa and Fabrizio both arrived in Naples a matter of days before Caravaggio left for Malta. Fabrizio then sailed for Malta at exctly the same time that Caravaggio set out for the island, so it is all but certain that the painter actually traveled there on his galley and under his protection. On Malta, Caravaggio painted a number of pictures to win the favour of senior figures in the order. Among them were an austere and ascetic St. Jerome Writing, for Ippolito Malaspina; the Portrait of Fra Antonio Martelli, so expressive and abbreviated a depiction of resolute old age that it prefigures the late portraiture of Rembrandt by more than half a century; and the Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt, with His Pageboy, a depiction of the grand master of the order himself, which so pleased Wignacourt that he petitioned the pope in Rome for permission to make Caravaggio a Knight of Obedience of the Order of St. John, despite his having killed a man. Permission was granted, and Caravaggio began work on the largest of all his paintings, The Beheading of St.

John, for the oratory of the conventual church, now cocathedral, of Valletta in Malta. The painting was to be accepted in lieu of his passaggio, the payment due from any knight on entering the order. It shows St. John ’s gruesome beheading taking place under the gaze of a Turkish Janissary , as if the saint were a modern knight of Malta suffering cruel martyrdom in some hostile corner of the Islamic world. The executioner has botched his first attempt at decapitation and is about to finish the job by slicing through the flesh of the saint’s neck with a sharp knife. The oratory for which the painting was intended was where prospective knights received instruction in the rules and expectations of the order. Caravaggio’s painting is to be understood as a cautionary image of the cruel fate they might expect to meet were they to fall into captivity. Its message was brutally straightforward: be ready to face a death like this, or leave. The canvas bears his only signature, spelled out in the blood that gushes from St. John’s neck. The meaning is neither sinister nor morbid. “F.

Michelangelo,” it announces, standing for Fra Michelangelo, as the painter would be entitled to style himself as a knight of Malta and henceforth a free and pardoned man—the blood on his hands washed clean by the blood of his new patron saint. In the event, Caravaggio’s stay on Malta culminated not in triumph but in disaster. On the eve of the feast day commemorating St. John’s beheading, when his painting was to be unveiled, he assaulted a more-senior knight of justice, Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, wounding him with a pistol, and was thrown into jail for the offence. The place of confinement was the guva, a rock-cut cell on the Castel Sant’Angelo from which escape was deemed impossible. However, with the aid of an accomplice, Caravaggio did escape, evading the castle guard, scaling the ramparts, and lowering himself down a sheer 200-foot (61-metre) precipice and into a boat awaiting him below. By the end of October 1608, he was in Syracuse , Sicily—a free man, but now doubly under threat, both of justice from Rome and of reprisals from Malta.

On December 1, 1608, an effigy representing him was ritually defrocked beneath his own painting of The Beheading of St. John in the oratory of St. John on Valletta, and he was declared to have been “expelled and thrust forth like a rotten and diseased limb from our Order and Society.” Caravaggio spent the short remainder of his life on the run, pursued, according to the usually reliable Baglione, by the man whom he had affronted and injured on Malta. Caravaggio nevertheless had time enough to create a number of haunting masterpieces: notably, in Sicily in 1608–09, a large altarpiece of The Burial of St. Lucy for the Basilica di Santa Lucia al Sepolcro in Syracuse; a heartbreakingly desolate Adoration of the Shepherds ; and a starkly simplified, almost neo-Byzantine Resurrection of Lazarus.

By the autumn of 1609, he had returned to Naples, where he stayed once more at the Colonna Palace, painting a now-lost altarpiece of The Raising of Lazarus for a chapel in the church of Sant’Anna dei Lombardi that was later destroyed in an earthquake . Soon after finishing that picture, he was attacked by four men outside the Osteria del Cerriglio, a Neapolitan tavern of ill repute, and so severely wounded in the face that he remained close to death for several months. The names of his attackers remain undocumented, but Baglione believed that they were from Malta, and the nature of Caravaggio’s injuries—a sfregio, or facial wound, being a traditional sign of revenge, leaving a lasting scar on both the victim’s face and his honour—suggests that Baglione’s supposition is probably true. If so, the most-likely candidates are Roero and three henchmen. Caravaggio created his last two paintings in 1610, while he was attempting to recover from the attack: The Denial of Peter and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula.

Both are painted in such a shaky, attenuated version of Caravaggio’s robust late manner as to suggest that he was suffering from some form of terrible tremor, or perhaps an eye complaint. At the time he was creating those works, the painter was, with the help of Costanza Colonna, continuing to negotiate for his pardon with Scipione Borghese. On about July 9, 1610, hopeful that it had finally been granted, Caravaggio set off for Rome in a felucca, or skiff, laden with several paintings that he hoped to offer to Borghese in exchange for arranging his reprieve. His destination was the port of Palo, a staging post where he might hire a wagon to complete his journey by land. For reasons that remain unexplained—papers not in order, or perhaps a disagreement with the captain of the garrison there—he was arrested and detained at Palo. His paintings were carried away on the felucca, which traveled on with its other passenger or passengers to its final destination of Porto Ercole, a small harbour town on the coast of Tuscany , some 50 miles (80.5 km) north.

Caravaggio paid his way out of jail and rode post to Porto Ercole. With a change of horse, he may have covered the distance in a day or a little longer. But the effort, the heat of the summer, and his parlous state of health were against him. He made it to Porto Ercole but died soon after arriving there, probably on July 18 or 19, at the age of 38. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Doubting Thomas by Atle Naess · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Fiction Literature Coming somewhere between Peter Ackroyd and Perfume, Doubting Thomas is an innovative and fascinating novel about the renowned Italian painter Caravaggio. The plot centers around the events of a May evening in Rome in 1606, when Caravaggio was challenged to a duel and killed a man. Who was this man Caravaggio? What happened on that fateful night? What was the cause of the fight that forced him to flee Rome?

Different narrators, including a drunken architect, the painter's own brother, some ladies of the night, a town clerk, and a close friend of Caravaggio all present their versions of the events that took place that night, shedding light on what happened and, as a result, on the painter's revolutionary art. Doubting Thomas is a book about ideas and about a period in time that witnessed the coming of enlightenment and dramatic changes in thinking. It is first and foremost a novel about human destiny, sensuality, and purpose of mind; brutality and love, exploration, and devotion. How far can a painter go? Where is the line between what is sacred and what is profane? How can a drunkard and a womaniser such as Caravaggio create art that speaks of fervent aesthetics and even religious devotion? Adobe PDF eBook 586.2 KB Adobe EPUB eBook 1.5 MB Atle Naess (Author) Atle Naess was born in Norway in 1948 and is one of that country's foremost writers. He gained cult status with his first novel, Gun, in 1975.

Doubting Thomas is his ninth book and was a best-seller in the author's homeland, it has been translated... The List: Five things to know about Caravaggio The List: Five things to know about Caravaggio Read next July 16, 2010 by: Andrew Graham-Dixon Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), who died 400 years ago this week, was one of the greatest painters ever. He was also a violent and lawless individual, who famously murdered a man in Rome in the summer of 1606. A myth has grown up that he was a psychotic gay outsider in thrall to the dictates of his own illicit sexuality. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. Here are five things not many people know about him: 1. His tragic childhood The artist lost most of his family to the plague that ravaged Milan when he was aged six. In October 1577, the artist’s father, his paternal grandfather and his unnamed grandmother died within a day of each other. The art of Caravaggio’s maturity would be saturated in the ineradicable memory of night terrors. 2.

His violent lifestyle There was invariably a logic behind the violence Caravaggio displayed in later life. He was highly dangerous but he was not mad, and he lived his life by an elaborate honour code, with specific insults punishable by particular injuries. When a Roman waiter questioned Caravaggio’s taste, he responded by smashing a plate into the man’s mouth. When a young painter insulted him behind his back, Caravaggio stalked him by night and then attacked his rival from behind with a sword. 3. His duel to the death The pivotal event of Caravaggio’s life, the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni, was itself dictated by the logic of vendetta. The origin of the quarrel between the two involved a woman, almost certainly Tomassoni’s (probably unfaithful) wife Lavinia. The fight between Caravaggio and Tomassoni was a prearranged duel, in the course of which the painter not only killed his enemy but may also have sought to castrate him. 4. His artistic rivalry There are subtle traces of the same vendetta mentality in Caravaggio’s paintings.

One of his greatest works, “The Conversion of St Paul” in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, was painted in direct competition with Annibale Carracci, whose saccharine “Assumption of the Virgin” still hangs over the altar. To stress his disdain for Carracci’s brand of vapid magnificence, Caravaggio contrived a cunning insult: the rump of St Paul’s proletarian carthorse is pointedly turned to the face of Carracci’s Madonna. 5. His bloody demise Caravaggio’s violence eventually caught up with him and, in the autumn of 1509, he was attacked by a man seeking revenge for an earlier assault who slashed the painter in the face so badly with a knife that he was almost unrecognisable. Caravaggio never recovered from the wounding and died months later while attempting to return to Rome, aged 38. ‘Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane’ (£30, Allen Lane), by Andrew Graham-Dixon, has just been published Sample the FT’s top stories for a week You select the topic, we deliver the news.

Select topic New Caravaggio biography casts light on Renaissance hellraiser - Telegraph Art New Caravaggio biography casts light on Renaissance hellraiser As one of history's most enigmatic and influential artists, Caravaggio's short but colourful life has been the subject of wild speculation and conspiracy theories for four centuries. Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio Photo: REX The Conversion of Mary Magdalene by Caravaggio, c. 1599 By Roya Nikkhah, Arts Correspondent 3:57PM BST 19 Jun 2010 But a new book on the Renaissance's most tempestuous artist sheds fresh light on the Italian painter whose hot temper was as renowned as his work, and who died after a violent life aged 38 . Since his death 400 years ago, mystery has surrounded the painter of such masterpieces as The Death of the Virgin and David Victorious over Goliath , who influenced the likes of Velázquez and Rembrandt. Historians have remained in the dark about the final years of his life, during which Caravaggio committed murder and fled to Malta, instigating a fateful chain of events which led to his death.

Last week, scientists in Italy searching for Caravaggio's remains claimed that he may have died from lead poisoning from his paints, but admitted that fragments of bones they tested might not be Caravaggio 's and that they were still struggling to discover the truth about his death. But now, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon, the art critic, uncovers new details on pivotal events during the artist's turbulent career, suggesting that the artist was sexually adventurous, worked as a pimp and may have fathered an illegitimate child. Related Articles Caravaggio remains 'found' 16 Jun 2010 Scholars have previously suggested that Caravaggio killed a man over an unpaid debt, while others have speculated that the crime followed a disputed point in a game of tennis, but in his new book published on 1 July, Graham-Dixon claims it was a matter of love and jealousy and that his uncontrollable lust led to his downfall. He asserts that Caravaggio's murder of the notorious Roman pimp, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in 1606, was the result of a duel between the two men over the honour of Tomassoni's wife, Lavinia.

Graham-Dixon points to recently uncovered documents in Rome's archives which show that shortly after her husband's death, Lavinia gave up their baby daughter for adoption, raising the possibility that Caravaggio may have actually fathered the child. He also suggests that Caravaggio pursued a career as a pimp and had stolen a prostitute from Tomassoni, Fillide Melandroni, who became his favourite muse and appeared in several of his greatest paintings. A report from the barber-surgeon's where Tomassoni's body was taken shows that during the duel, Caravaggio inflicted a fatal sword blow to his rival's groin. "There was a simmering enmity between the two men, and that Tomassoni chose to fight in the presence of his brother and two brothers-in-law suggests it was a matter of family honour," said Graham-Dixon. "Caravaggio's low blow may well have been a sexual insult implying his rival is a cuckold, so it is not unlikely that he had started something with Lavinia." The book also presents recently uncovered evidence about Caravaggio's misadventures on the island of Malta, where he fled after the murder to join the Knights of Malta.

He was imprisoned after just one year on the island, leading previous historians and scholars to speculate that the artist may have been jailed after his murder conviction was discovered, or for committing various sex crimes. But the book, which will be published during the anniversary of the artist's death, details recent findings by the Maltese scholar, Dr Keith Sciberras, who used an X-ray machine to examine previously obscured pages in documents from the library of the Order of St John in Malta, which describe the crime for which Caravaggio was imprisoned. They reveal that he assaulted Fra Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, one of Order's the most senior knights, in July 1608, and was subsequently jailed in an underground cell, from which he made a daring escape one month later. Graham-Dixon claims that it was Roero who pursued Caravaggio to Naples in 1609 and exacted his revenge by cutting and disfiguring the artist's face outside the Osteria del Cerriglio tavern. Until now, the attack has puzzled many historians. The author's research of archival material in Italy also shows that the tavern was frequented by homosexual men.

Caravaggio never fully recovered from his injuries at the Cerriglio, and died less than a year later. His two final paintings – The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula and The Denial of Saint Peter – show that his vision and brushwork were seriously impaired following the attack. Caravaggio died in July 1610 in the Tuscan town of Porto Ecole, while en route from Naples to Rome where he hoped to secure a papal pardon for the murder of Tomassoni. But his body has never been found, and scholars have speculated that he may have died from malaria or lead poisoning or may even have been assassinated in another revenge attack. After studying letters and documents in the Naples state archives, however, Graham-Dixon believes that Caravaggio, weakened by his facial injuries, probably died from a heart attack or exhaustion following an arduous 100-mile chase on horseback to Porto Ecole from the town of Palo, where a boat carrying three of his paintings had set sail without him. "Caravaggio's hot-headed temperament could not cope with the discipline of the military Order and he appears to have been undone by his own volatility," said Graham-Dixon.

"The latest lead poisoning theory just doesn't fit the facts. Caravaggio did not slowly deteriorate before his death as he would have done with lead poisoning, but was immensely physically fit, escaping from prison, running across Sicily and painting huge paintings right up until just before his death. "I hope I have proven in the book that his behaviour was not that of an irrational mad man, as has been suggested, but of a violent man living in violent times whose tragic story is certainly the most extraordinary of any artist to have lived." Dr Helen Langdon, an art historian and the author of Caravaggio: A Life, said: "The mixture of sex and violence in Caravaggio's life makes him a terrifically fascinating character, and his story certainly has the structure of a great tragic plot. "His work was astonishing and despite his troubles, he was able to portray human emotion more movingly than any other artist. Caravaggio Caravaggio Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio September 28, 1573 – July 18, 1610(Porto D’erkole) Italian painter of early baroque period. Studied with Simone Peterzano in Milano.

Around 1590 moved o Rome where worked in Cavaliere D'arpino workshop and found the guardian in the face of cardinal del Monte. In 1606 Caravaggio has killed his opponent in a duel and had to leave Rome. He moved to Napoli, then visited Malta and Sicily. In 1610 tried to return to Rome, but on his way back got ill with malaria and died. Caravaggio lived in epoch of stylistic break, which affected his creativity. Examples for his early creations were figural illustrations of secular characters that were influenced by paintings of Tiziano and Gorgone. Lute Player and a fortune teller. Caravaggio Fruit Basket of 1596 was one of the first pure still life painting in European art. This works already show style characteristic for Caravaggio, denial of idealistic compositions on historical topics, turning to a single figure, display of attributes representing figures character, bright coloring and realistic delivery of the model. Painting made after 1600 are marked as with grown handling of realism, as “Madonna With Beads” shows (1605-1607, museum of art history in Vienna).

They became example of baroque altar compositions. The main creation of roman period are the composition intended for decoration of two capels, capel of Contarelli and in church of San Luigi dei Francesi, St. Mathew with an angel (the painting was destroyed during the Second World War). In his later period worked on altar compositions for the churches of the west of Italy (Napoli, Messina). His last creation is David with Goliath Head (1610 Borghese Gallery, Rome). Caravaggio freed himself from mannerism influence and gave new meaning of light and space. His compositions are characterized with underlined diagonals; directed ray of light highlights the figures in the darkness and models them with their plastic palpably. His style is pronouncedly realistic, even when he turns to religious subjects. Caravaggio was criticized with the lack of generosity of images, but they were wining in dignity and depth. Influence of Caravaggio and his dramatic chiaroscuro marks the entire European art of XVII including Rembrandt.

Question: Which Italian painter killed an opponent in a duel in 1606?
Answer: CARAVAGGIO