Caravaggio throughout Italy, by Daniel Gallagher
The truth is that Caravaggio did not die along the beach of Feniglia, but in the hospital of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice in Porto Ercole on July 18th, 1610, after having received the sacraments. The exact cause of his death remains a mystery. Textbooks say syphilis, meteorologists sunstroke. Simon Schama, in his BBC series The Power of Art, suggests that it may have been partly due to sheer exhaustion as Caravaggio desperately pursued the ship carrying paintings that were supposed to be the key to his papal pardon.
In typical Italian fashion, a team of scholars has recently capitalized on this special anniversary by announcing that the painter’s remains have been identified by DNA testing, and that, presuming the bones really are his, Caravaggio seems to have died of lead poisoning: a fact, they claim, which would also explain Caravaggio’s erratic and violent behavior: common symptoms of lead poisoning. That Caravaggio was an irascible character is fairly certain; whether his irascibility is evidence for death by lead poisoning is another matter. Yet perhaps the more pressing task this year is to understand who the man was rather than how he died.
Much of what we presume about Caravaggio comes to us by way of a biography written by Giovanni Baglione, a mediocre painter who once had Caravaggio summoned to court after taking offence at an ironic sonnet the latter had composed in Baglione’s honor. Indeed, Baglione’s account often reads like a tale of jealousy motivated by a slight inferiority complex, helping to perpetuate the image of Caravaggio as an impulsive, undisciplined, sexually distraughtmaledetto who was hostile towards the church, dismissive of tradition, and generally indignant towards authority. No surprise, therefore, that Caravaggio is also championed as a precursor of Nietzschean nihilism.
An attentive study of written records together with the paintings themselves has led several respected Italian scholars, including Maurizio Calvesi, Maurizio Marini, Alessandro Zuccari, and Marco Pupilio, to present Caravaggio in more subtle, though no less complex, terms. Born of a moderately noble stock, Michelangelo Merisi’s father Fermo was tutor to Francesco Sforza, the marquis of the area from which Caravaggio takes his name. As a lad, Michelangelo was privileged to receive a fine Milanese education that was then furthered by the patronage of the Colonna and Borromeo families. The latter in particular had a lasting influence on both the religious climate of Lombardy and Caravaggio’s own spiritual sensibilities. The painter’s abiding sympathy for the weakness and sinfulness of the human condition began in Milan as he witnessed first-hand the solicitous care that the Borromeo family gave to the victims of the severe plague that ravaged the city in 1575. Caravaggio learned from the Borromeos that acts of mercy accord with the Gospel counsel to care for the sick, and he was reportedly introduced to a northern-Italian, counter-Reformation spirituality that emphasized identifying Christ in the poor.
