Caravaggio, One of the Greatest Painters of the Italian Renaissance, was a Murderer

Do we judge him for it? Is it right or wrong to apply purity tests to artists?

David and Goliath, by Caravaggio, 1609-1610. The head that David gazes upon with surprising compassion is Caravaggio’s.

There are few hip-hop stars with a rap sheet like Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio’s. His exploits weren’t the stuff of indulgent sighs or “Oh, here we go again” eyerolls. He was a stone-cold murderer who first fled from Milan, from Rome, then Malta, then Sicily, then Naples where he died under extremely shady circumstances.

But the talent. The paintings. The psychological depth of his masterpieces. Caravaggio was a star in the firmament of the High Renaissance whose genius was in inverse proportion to his sanity. Undoubtedly an alcoholic, he once threw a plate of artichokes at a tavern waiter’s face. Having failed to pay his rent, he rebutted his landlady’s demands by hurling rocks through her window. He was in constant legal trouble, the subject of police records and trial proceedings. If a bystander offered the slightest criticism of his work, he ripped the painting to shreds.

When he wasn’t creating in front of audiences of breathless admirers, Caravaggio liked to get drunk, strap on his sword, and swagger about town with a band of murderous thugs. On 28 November, 1600, while living at the Palazzo Madama with his patron, the Cardinal Del Monte, Caravaggio savagely attacked one of his patron’s guests, leading to his arrest and imprisonment in Tor di Nona.

The Beheading of John the Baptist, by Caravaggio, 1608. It is widely considered to be his masterpiece. Tellingly, it is the only work he ever signed his name to—gruesomely, in the red blood spilling from the Baptists’s cut throat.

More than once, Caravaggio was arrested for possessing illegal weapons and insulting city guards. In 1605, he seriously injured a notary in a dispute over a woman named Lena, Caravaggio’s model and lover. As always, his benefactors intervened and managed to smooth things over, but Caravaggio’s blackout rages and inability to control himself were becoming more and more of a liability.

Push came to shove on 29 May, 1606, when Caravaggio crossed paths and swords with Ranuccio Tommasoni, the scion of a wealthy family, and the pimp of one of Caravaggio’s favorite models, Fillide Melandroni. There are several versions of what happened: that Caravaggio owed Tommasoni a ruinous amount of money, that there was a possible gambling debt, or that they came to blows over Melandroni herself. According to these rumors, Caravaggio castrated Tommasoni in a fit of rage before deliberately plunging a sword through his thigh, severing the femoral artery.

Portrait of a Courtesan (Fillide Melandroni) by Caravaggio. Painted between 1597 and 1599, it was destroyed in Berlin in 1945 and is known only from photographs.

This time, no one could intervene on Caravaggio’s behalf. He was sentenced to beheading for this murder, a sentence that could be legally carried out by anyone who laid eyes on him. Caravaggio was haunted by this, and painted a series of severed heads—Judith beheading of Holofernes, Salome with the head of John the Baptist, David and Goliath. In all three masterpieces, it is Caravaggio’s own head that he paints. To a fevered mind like his, the paranoia must have been crippling.

He fled, first to the south of Rome, and then to Naples where he carried out a number of church commissions, such as The Seven Works of Mercy. From there, he traveled to Malta where, hoping to procure a papal pardon for the murder of Tommasoni, Caravaggio curried favor with the country’s de facto ruler, Alof de Wignacourt, who foolishly made him a knight in 1607 and then stripped him of the title in 1608 after Caravaggio battered down the door of a fellow knight and savagely beat him.

In what was now becoming a pattern, Caravaggio fled to Sicily where his behavior grew increasingly erratic. It was noted by contemporaries that after Malta, Caravaggio, always dangerously unbalanced, rarely enjoyed a moment’s peace. He slept fully armed with his clothes on, dogged by the obsession that someone was out to kill him.

And this obsession was reflected in his art. In Helen Langdon’s biopic, Caravaggio: A Life, she notes: "His great Sicilian altarpieces isolate their shadowy, pitifully poor figures in vast areas of darkness.” Chased by an unseen enemy, Caravaggio left Sicily for Naples, where with the help of his old patrons, the Colonnas, he once again attempted to procure a papal pardon. Buoyed by reports that a pardon might be forthcoming, Caravaggio started on his journey to Rome. He never made it. Caravaggio died on July 18, 1612, in Tuscany, of causes that remain a mystery to this day.

The Taking of Christ, by Caravaggio, 1602. Judas’s kiss.

Some historians claim Caravaggio sustained a flesh wound while brawling that later putrefied, killing him. Others say he died of lead poisoning, since the paint at that time contained a high amount of leaded salts. But in 2002, the Vatican released a cache of documents supporting the theory that the bloodthirsty Tommasoni family hunted Caravaggio down and murdered him in cold blood. To me, this makes sense. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Caravaggio must have felt that death was breathing down his neck. Felt it, painted it, and then finally succumbed to it.

It is impossible to fully appreciate the paintings of Caravaggio without understanding the fear, paranoia, and rage that sat on his shoulders at all times. The line between genius and madness is often razor thin. Adding to the pressure of mental illness and alcoholism, Caravaggio was, according to recent historians, almost assuredly bisexual during a time when sodomy was a crime punishable by death.

The Penitent Magdalene by Caravaggio, 1594-1595.

Caravaggio not only introduced psychological realism to a style of painting that had previously been allegorical, mythological, religious, he was at the vanguard of tenebrism, which is the use of violent contrasts of light or dark to underscore dramatic tension. Perhaps tenebrism was a metaphor for the artist himself. Caravaggio was both darkness and light. The events he depicted were ones of great anguish, and standing before one of his paintings is to share that anguish.

Unusual for the time, Caravaggio pulled people off the streets and painted them live on the canvas, instead of using the time-honored tradition of making sketches first. No one had ever seen a painter work in this way before. Therefore, the beautiful Roman prostitute Fillide Melandroni was transformed into St. Catherine of Alexandria, Judith beheading Holofernes, Mary Magdalene wailing in the Entombment of Christ. Was this conflation of the profane with the sacred intended as an insult to religion itself, or was Caravaggio a proto-humanist? Perhaps we’ll never know.

The Cardsharps by Caravaggio, 1594.

A more urgent question, especially now, might be this: does Caravaggio’s moral failings invalidate his importance as an artist? If not, why not? Personally, I’ll never watch another Woody Allen film because I find his casual misogyny and hebephiliac obsessions stomach turning, but as far as I know, Woody’s never killed anyone. But I do find myself wondering why it’s easier to forgive Caravaggio for his homicidal rages than I do Harvey Weinstein for sexual assault. Is it the softening effect of time? A romanticization of the past? Or am I indulging the “foibles” of an artist whose work feels as though it is the first natural representation of human suffering?

Applying a purity test to any artist might be an exercise in futility. No one is without sin; artists least of all.

What is your opinion on the impact moral transgressions have on an artist’s legacy? I would love to hear. Please leave your comments below.