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Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, led a restless and wandering life, and his career was marked by his choice of street models.
Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, led a restless and wandering life that ultimately brought him to Porto Ercole, where he died at the age of just 38. His unconventional choice to use ordinary men and women as models for his works earned him the disfavor of Pope Paul V.
Despite this, thanks to his fame and numerous influential friendships —such as that with the Colonna family—he was able to practice his art freely until May 29, 1606, when, after killing his rival Ranuccio Tomassoni in a duel at Campo Marzio, he was sentenced to death. Pursued by the Pope’s assassins and those of the victim’s family, eager to collect the bounty on his head, he fled first to Naples, then to Sicily, and finally to Malta.
There, he renounced all his possessions in order to join the famous Order of Knights, which is based on this island, and to save his life. However, his turbulent nature had not subsided, and he was expelled from the order for fighting on December 12, 1608. Arrested and imprisoned in Valletta, he managed to escape to Sicily, and then to Naples, where, in October 1609, near a tavern, he was attacked and challenged to a duel. He survived the clash, but, seriously wounded and hunted down, tired of hiding, he sought a pardon to return to Rome.
To finalize the agreement, he contacted Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an old friend of his and the Pope’s cousin. The deal called for a pardon in exchange for three paintings. Caravaggio then set sail with the works on a felucca bound for Porto Ercole, where he planned to await his pardon on Spanish territory. During a stopover in Palo Laziale, however, he was mistaken for a fugitive and immediately arrested.
Once the mistake was acknowledged, he was released the following morning and tried in vain to recover the works that had been left on the ship. Upon his arrival in Porto Ercole, gravely ill, he was taken to the Santa Croce Hospital, where he died just two days later, on July 18, 1610. His death certificate was not immediately recorded and remained on a small slip of paper, lost for centuries among the church’s records until recently. He was buried in a mass grave alongside the poor, behind what was then the beach of San Sebastiano. Among the three lost paintings was also St. John the Baptist, the only one that, a year after the painter’s death, came into the possession of Scipione Borghese.
