Death stalks the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Here was an artist drawn irresistibly to executions and corpses, dismemberment and putrefaction. He painted one gruesome martyrdom after another. Saint Matthew, run through by a sword at his own church altar. Saint Peter, nailed to an upside-down crucifix. Saint Lucy, buried on the site where a soldier cut her throat. Decapitation was a Caravaggio speciality, hence his paintings of John the Baptist and Salome, the Gorgon Medusa, Judith and Holofernes, David and Goliath.Biographers surmise that Caravaggio’s preoccupation with the separation of heads from bodies was most likely enhanced by a bando capitale death sentence served on him after he murdered a man, most probably in a duel, in 1606. It basically permitted anyone to kill him on sight.
Which brings us to Caravaggio’s last known painting, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, that opened this week. The work was completed in Naples just weeks before the artist left for Rome, in 1610, hoping to lift the death sentence by acquiring a papal pardon. The trip would prove lethal for Caravaggio. The best guess at what happened? After getting himself arrested en route, and having all his possessions confiscated, Caravaggio died, probably of sepsis, in the small Tuscan town of Porto Ercole, where he was attempting to retrieve the three paintings he had brought with him to buy papal favor.
