I distinctly remember the first time I saw a painting by Caravaggio, in an art book my aunt had given me for my birthday. It was a very violent picture, which I won’t post here. But I remember being horrified and fascinated and, although I couldn’t have articulated it when I was eight, completely blown away by his realism and his use of light and dark. I’ve been semi-obsessed with him ever since.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) was a genius of a painter, but not much of a people person.

Caravaggio came from humble origins, the son of a stone-cutter, and apparently had a chip on his shoulder about that for most of his adult life.

He moved from Milan to Rome while in his twenties, looking for painting commissions in the newly built churches and palazzi that were springing up there.

Caravaggio became known as a master of realism—populating his paintings with contemporary, ordinary people—many of them rogues and ruffians from the mean streets of Rome. Here’s one called The Death of the Virgin (ca 1605-6). It caused a huge scandal:

What shocked people at the time was, for starters, the way the Virgin is portrayed. Her dead body is sprawled on a cot in a bare room at an awkward angle, her feet dirty and swollen. But what also shocked people was that the artist chose as his model a well-known Roman prostitute. You have to understand how edgy this was. People were used to looking at devotional paintings showing choirs of angels and golden shafts of light beaming down from Heaven.

A big part of Caravaggio’s problem is that he felt (correctly) that he was underappreciated as a painter. He was hot-headed and quick to pick a fight, and kept getting into trouble. In 1594 he was arrested for hurling a plate of artichokes at a waiter, and he was forever getting involved in Roman street brawls.

In 1606 he really messed up. While he was playing an early version of tennis, palla a corda, with a close friend, a wealthy acquaintance named Ranuccio Tomassoni walked by with a couple of his relatives and challenged Caravaggio to a game.  They played. Each thought he’d won. They drew swords. They chased each other around, hacking away. Caravaggio was slashed twice, but then buried his blade in his enemy’s stomach. Ranuccio died shortly thereafter, and Caravaggio’s friends dragged Caravaggio away to a nearby house to bandage him up.

The police came after him, and Caravaggio fled for the hills outside of Rome. He became a fugitive from the law. He was convicted of murder in absentia, and sentenced to death.

For the next few years, he continued to paint while on the run. His reputation as an artist was growing. Still pursued by the law, he fled to Malta in 1607, got in trouble there, and fled to Sicily. By 1609, he was widely known as a master painter, and he traveled to Naples to await word from the Pope that his petition to be pardoned might be approved. While there he was ambushed by four assassins, who stabbed him around the face and neck. (Who knows who they were exactly—the guy had made a lot of enemies.) He managed to survive the attack, but was left disfigured.

When his papal pardon finally arrived, in 1610, he set sail for Rome but fell ill on the way with a fever—probably malaria. He died in 1610.