Caravaggio died on July 18, 1610, at Porto Ercole, a small port on the Tuscan coast then held by Spain, at the age of 38. The traditional answer is a fever, but no witness wrote down what happened, and the cause has never been settled.
His road there began in Rome. In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, a young brawler from a wealthy family, and a papal court condemned him to death.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
From then on Caravaggio lived on the run. He went south to Naples, a city ruled by the king of Spain, where the pope's courts had no power.
From there he sailed to Malta, an island governed by the Knights of Malta, a religious order of noble knights. They made him one of their own in 1608, then jailed him weeks later for wounding a fellow knight in a brawl.
He broke out of the knights' prison, crossed to Sicily and made his way back to Naples. In October 1609 four men attacked him outside a Naples tavern and slashed his face so badly that Rome heard he was dead. Some suspected the men had come from Malta.
The road back to Rome
In Rome, his protectors, the Colonna family, worked to have the sentence lifted, and by the summer of 1610 they were close. Caravaggio boarded a small boat in Naples with three paintings meant to win over the one man who could sway the pope. He never reached Rome…
What You'll Discover
Who actually saw him die.
Who wanted him dead.
Where scientists went looking for him.
What was found in his teeth.