His life was reckless and his painting scandalous. Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (after the name of his hometown, near Bergamo), was a true scoundrel. Other artists before him had run-ins with the law. Duccio was a drunkard and a brawler. The contentious Perugino had participated in street brawls and, when young, had been imprisoned. The sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, who was accused of embezzlement, murder, and sodomy, was imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo.
Caravaggio had been repeatedly arrested and imprisoned. He confessed to the murder of a rival in a kind of tennis game because he suspected that he was stealing from him, while there were rumors that he had committed other crimes. A brilliant painter, he worked with extraordinary speed, painting directly onto the canvas without even sketching the basic forms.
His powerful patrons increasingly struggled to get him out of jail, where he often ended up. Caravaggio risked his life by escaping from his last prison in Malta, just as Cellini did when he escaped from the Castel Sant'Angelo. The evidence suggests that he was convicted of what we today call 'pedophilia.' He died, hunted and underground, on a beach north of Rome, perhaps as Pier Paolo Pasolini did in 1975, who was murdered.
