Michelangelo Merisi, the painter known as Caravaggio, was born in Milan in 1571 and died at 38 in 1610. Around 1600 he was the most talked about artist in Rome, because he gave saints the faces of ordinary people.
His fame rests just as much on a killing. In 1606 he ran a man through with a sword in a Roman street and spent his last four years on the run. Among the pictures he made in flight is a severed head.
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The name Caravaggio is a place. His family, the Merisi, came from Caravaggio, a small town east of Milan in Lombardy, the region of northern Italy around that city. As a boy he was apprenticed in Milan to the painter Simone Peterzano, and in 1592, at 21, he left for Rome.
The first years there were hard. He worked for other painters, among them Giuseppe Cesari, filling their pictures with fruit and flowers. On his own he painted single figures seen from the waist up, such as a boy holding a basket of fruit, and sold them on the street.
Around 1595 one of those street pictures caught the eye of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a great collector with a place close to the pope. It showed a card game. A well-dressed boy studies his hand, and the two men playing with him are working together to rob him.
A cardinal's palace
Behind the boy, the older cheat reads his cards over his shoulder and signals across the table to his partner, whose other hand reaches back for cards tucked into his belt. Del Monte bought the picture, and its painter came with it. Caravaggio would need the cardinal's protection more than once…
What You'll Discover
Whose face he gave to a severed head.
Why a church refused his Virgin.
Why Rome kept arresting him.
What the fight was really about.
Why the knights threw him out.
How his last journey ended.