Caravaggio: The ‘boozing, whoring, brawling and bisexual bad boy of baroque'

Irish Times

a day ago

Caravaggio
's early paintings are an incitement to pleasure. Beautiful, scantily clad boys prepare a concert for their – and Caravaggio's – patron, Francesco Cardinal Maria del Monte, in The Musicians. The ageing Joseph holds up music for an angel violinist in the pastoral Rest on the Flight to Egypt. Bacchus lures the viewer with a chalice of wine.
Beware, though. All is vanity. The Fortune Teller steals a young man's ring as she flirts with him. There's a worm in the apple in Basket of Fruit, and leaves are withered or eaten by insects. The Boy Bitten by a Lizard recoils in pain as the reptile sinks its sharp teeth into his finger. Sick Bacchus shows
an ashen-faced Caravaggio, making a mockery of his own Bacchus painting. The exquisitely beautiful, buxom virgins and saints of numerous paintings were prostitutes in real life.
Caravaggio's paintings grow darker and more violent as his short life progresses. The pale and alluring John the Baptist who posed naked, wrapped in theatrical red cloth, must inevitably be beheaded.
Fillide Melandroni, the courtesan who posed as St Catherine of Alexandria, Judith and Mary Magdalene – and who was probably one of Caravaggio's lovers – wrinkles her brow with disgust and determination as she slices through Holofernes' neck. Blood gushes from the wound, and we see horror in the eyes of the dying Assyrian general.
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Caravaggio: The Musicians. Photograph: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
Caravaggio: The Fortune Teller. Photograph: Capitoline Museums, Rome
Caravaggio: Sick Bacchus
Photograph: Mauro Coen/© Galleria Borghese
The Renaissance was over, and Caravaggio refused to live in the shadow of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. He threw out all sense of decorum to create a pictorial revolution characterised by 'stark realism, dramatic lighting and unparalleled emotional depth', says Thomas Clement Salomon, the director of Italy's
National Gallery
at the Palazzo Barberini, in Rome.
Salomon has co-curated Caravaggio 2025 at the Barberini, where most of these paintings can be seen. The exhibition was scheduled to close on July 6th, but he hopes to extend it by at least two weeks and remain open until midnight some nights to accommodate unprecedented crowds. The Barberini is showing 24 paintings, more than a third of the approximately 65 known works by the artist. Nine are from foreign lenders.
Salomon convinced the anonymous Florentine owners of Portrait of Maffeo Barberini to lend the rare painting, which had never been shown, by arguing that the public had a right to see it. He hopes they can now be convinced to sell it to the museum.
Caravaggio: Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Photograph: Nelson-Atkins Digital Production and Preservation
Caravaggio: St Catherine of Alexandria. Photograph: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Caravaggio: Portrait of Maffeo Barberini
The Palazzo Barberini sold more than 350,000 entry tickets in the first two months of the show, a record. Caravaggio, born Michelangelo Merisi in Milan in September 1571, is a superstar. The success of the exhibition follows a long-term trend that has seen endless queues and packed museums. Painters have become part of our fascination with celebrity. The French writer André Malraux was perhaps right when he predicted that art would become the new religion.
'Isn't it great that people want to look at and enjoy these masterpieces?' says
Caroline Campbell
, the director of the
National Gallery of Ireland
, who visited Rome to see the NGI's Taking of Christ at the Barberini. 'I hope that an exhibition like this will encourage people to look not only at Caravaggio but also at other wonderful baroque artists.'
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Fifteen more Caravaggios can be seen in museums and churches elsewhere in Rome. They include the artist's first important commission: three paintings recounting the life of St Matthew, at the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi; The Virgin of the Pilgrims, at the Basilica of Sant'Agostino; the enchanting, above-mentioned Rest on the Flight to Egypt, at the
Galleria Doria Pamphilj
; and Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Madonna of the Palafrenieri, at the
Galleria Borghese
. The Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi has a ceiling fresco where Caravaggio painted himself, nude, as Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, with a surprising view from below of the painter's genitalia.
The cult of Caravaggio has been fanned by his reputation as the boozing, whoring, brawling and bisexual 'bad boy of baroque'. But ultimately it is the paintings that attract the public, Campbell says. 'Crowds form outside Roman churches before they open in the morning. People gravitate to the Caravaggios and dwell for a long time on each painting. You can't just walk away from these pictures.'
Caravaggio had a talent for capturing what the great photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson
called 'the decisive moment'. In The Taking of Christ, Christ and Judas are locked in a fatal embrace of love and betrayal, seconds before or after the kiss. We see Matthew at the precise moment when Christ points to him, ordering in a beam of light: 'Follow me.' The startled tax collector points at his own chest, asking incredulously, 'Me?' The painting was the late
Pope Francis
's favourite.
Caravaggio: The Taking of Christ. Photograph: Fine Art/Bridgeman/National Gallery of Ireland
Caravaggio: The Conversion of the Magdalene. Photograph: Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Images
Melandroni, the model for Mary Magdalene, was, like the biblical saint, a woman of easy virtue. Richly dressed in early-17th-century costume, she appears suspended in time, at the moment when Christ's love, symbolised by the white flower at her bosom, enters her heart. Saul lies on the ground, almost trampled by his horse and blinded by divine light, at the very instant he becomes Paul the Apostle. The bestial torturers in The Flagellation of Christ are about to present the Son of God to the baying crowd with the words 'Ecce homo'. A wistful David holds Goliath's head by the hair as he enters King Saul's tent to display the trophy.
The self-portraits Caravaggio inserted in his works, often in an unflattering way, were a way of saying, 'I, Caravaggio, made this painting.' David with the Head of Goliath is a double portrait of Caravaggio as the screaming giant and his companion and apprentice, known as Cecco del Caravaggio, as the young David.
Richard Symonds, an English visitor to Rome around 1650, recorded being told that the erotic cupid of Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia bore 'ye body and face' of the painter's 'own boy or servant that laid with him'. In 2001 the art historian Gianni Papi identified Cecco as Francesco Boneri, a Lombard artist who accompanied Caravaggio for the last decade of his life. Because the paintings are organised in chronological order in the Barberini exhibition, we see Cecco pass from preadolescence to young adulthood.
'Homosexuality was a mortal sin, but it was tolerated,' the historian Stefano D'Amico, of Texas Tech University, says. 'Most men had affairs, often with very young boys.' Documents from the baroque period indicate that Caravaggio had affairs with both men and women.
Caravaggio: Conversion of St Paul. Photograph: Foto Scala, Firenze
Caravaggio: The Flagellation of Christ
Photograph: Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
Caravaggio: David with the Head of Goliath. Photograph: Mauro Coen/© Galleria Borghese
When Caravaggio arrived in Rome at the end of the 16th century 'it was the cultural capital not only of the Italian peninsula but of the western world, like Paris in the 19th century or New York in the 20th,' Salomon says. Aristocrats and prelates undertook the baroque building binge that endowed the city with its present architecture.
But Rome was also a place of huge income disparity, where the rich lived in well-guarded palaces and violent gangs roamed the streets. 'Romans survived on a diet of bread and wine. Shoes were a luxury,' D'Amico says. 'Prostitution was a substantial part of the urban economy. Murder was not uncommon.'
In May 1610 Caravaggio killed a man called Ranuccio Tomassoni with a sword. The fight may have been over a tennis game, an unpaid debt owed by Caravaggio or the men's rivalry for Melandroni's affections. The British art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon interprets the fact that Caravaggio severed Tomassoni's femoral artery as evidence that he may have attempted to castrate a romantic rival.
Caravaggio was convicted in absentia of murder and spent the last four years of his life on the run. He painted on an estate belonging to his protectors, the Colonna family, in Naples, Sicily and Malta. A bounty was offered for anyone who could produce his severed head, a possible explanation for his obsession with decapitation.
Caravaggio's life, like his distinctive chiaroscuro style, was made of dramatic contrasts of light and dark. He was attempting to return to Rome when he died of uncertain causes on a beach 150km north of the city, in July 1610, at the age of 38.
Caravaggio went out of fashion for 200 years, because of his dissolute life, because people didn't like the darkness of his paintings. Since he was rehabilitated in the 20th century, in Italy by Roberto Longhi and in Britain and Ireland by
Denis Mahon
, of the Guinness family, lost Caravaggios have been discovered at regular intervals.
'There was an Italian book entitled Caravaggio's Mother Is Always Pregnant, because you hear about 'Caravaggio, Caravaggio, Caravaggio',' Salomon says. 'But it's almost never Caravaggio – once every five or 10 years, if you're lucky.' Authentication is an extremely complicated matter, he says, involving consensus among art historians and scientific analysis.
Lost Caravaggios include a nativity stolen by the Sicilian Mafia in 1969 and a crucifixion of St Peter believed to have gone to Spain in the 17th century. 'We know he did a lot of portraits, but we have only four or five,' Salomon says. 'He trained in Milan before he went to Rome in the early 1590s, but we have no paintings from that period. I am sure we will have great surprises about new paintings by Caravaggio, because there are so many missing.'
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Caravaggio 2025 is at
Palazzo Barberini
, in Rome, until July 6th