Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane Read Free

unusual and fortunate position of writing about one of the greatest artists ever to have lived fully four centuries after his death, yet able to draw on fresh and important documentary material unavailable to previous biographers.
    As a result, I believe I have been able to shed light on aspects of Caravaggio’s life that have until now remained shrouded in mystery to all except the scholars most closely involved – including the painter’s sexuality, the circumstances that led him to commit the murder of 1606 that cast such a long shadow over the rest of his life, and the events surrounding his imprisonment on the island of Malta. In addition I publish here for the first time some hitherto overlooked descriptions of the Osteria del Cerriglio, the establishment in Naples where he was badly assaulted near the end of his life in a vendetta attack. By returning to other previously discovered documents I believe I have also been able to offer a convincing solution to the riddle of how Caravaggio met his death in the summer of 1610.
    My principal focus throughout is on the artist’s paintings. I dwell on them at length because they are the main reason to be interested in Caravaggio, notwithstanding the tempestuous drama of his life. Attentive readers will notice that I am less generous in my attributions than many other scholars of Caravaggio’s work: I prefer to be too rigorous than over-inclusive. It may be assumed that if I do not mention a particular picture, for example the frequently proposed Narcissus from the Barberini Collection, it is because I am not satisfied that Caravaggio painted it. The main exception to this is The Annunciation in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, which is indeed a Caravaggio, but one so badly damaged as not to be worth discussing here.
    I have incurred many debts in writing this book, above all to the community of scholars whose researches have yielded so much new information over the past half-century or so, especially in recent years. I am deeply grateful to Sandro Corradini for helping to guide me through the labyrinth of Rome’s criminal archive and for sharing the fruits of his twenty years and more of research there. Maurizio Marini took me on a memorable tour of Caravaggio’s old haunts in the artist’s quarter of the city and made interesting suggestions, which I have developed, about the significance of damage done to the ceiling of a particular room in a house in the present-day Vicolo del Divino Amore. Maurizio Calvesi generously communicated his insights into the painter’s ‘pauperist’ religious orientation, and the role that members of the Colonna family may have played in the various events of his life. In Naples, Vincenzo Pacelli showed me his archival discoveries concerning Caravaggio’s last painting, The Martyrdom of St Ursula , and shared some speculations about the painter’s final days.
    My thanks are also due to Peter Robb, who met me in Naples and sent me on what proved to be anything but a wild-goose chase on the island of Malta. On Malta itself I profited from conversations with Fr John Azzopardi and Keith Sciberras, who have between them shed much light on Caravaggio’s ill-fated attempt to join the Order of the Knights of St John. John T. Spike, who received me at his home in Florence, allowed me to see an advance copy of the CD - ROM catalogue and bibliography that accompanied his monograph on Caravaggio: an invaluable guide to the vast literature on the artist. My old friend Mary Hersov, former Head of Exhibitions at the National Gallery in London, has talked and walked Caravaggio with me far beyond the call of duty.
    Helen Langdon, whose own biography of Caravaggio appeared in 1998, has also been extremely supportive throughout the writing of this book. In particular, she generously allowed me to profit from the time-consuming work that she put into combing through Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini’s sporadically fascinating but deeply flawed book