↑ Floris Claes van Dijk, a contemporary of Caravaggio in Rome in 1601, quoted in John Gash, "Caravaggio", p.13. The quotation originates in Carl (or Karel) van Mander's Het Schilder-Boek of 1604, translated in full in Howard Hibbard, "Caravaggio". The first reference to Caravaggio in a contemporary document from Rome is the listing of his name, with that of Prospero Orsi as his partner, as an 'assistente' in a procession in October 1594 in honour of St. Luke (see H. Waga "Vita nota e ignota dei virtuosi al Pantheon" Rome 1992, Appendix I, pp.219 and 220ff). The earliest informative account of his life in the city is a court transcript dated 11 July 1597 where Caravaggio and Prospero Orsi were witnesses to a crime near San Luigi de' Francesi. (See "The earliest account of Caravaggio in Rome" Sandro Corradini and Maurizio Marini, The Burlington Magazine, pp.25-28).
↑ Confirmed by the finding of the baptism certificate from the Milanese parish of Santo Stefano in Brolo: Rai International Online. Traditionally it was believed that he was born in the Lombardy hill town of คาราวัจโจ, hence his name.
↑ Rosa Giorgi, "Caravaggio: Master of light and dark - his life in paintings", p.12.
↑ Quoted without attribution in Robb, p.35, apparently based on the three primary sources, Mancini, Baglione and Bellori, all of whom depict Caravaggio's early Roman years as a period of extreme poverty (see references below).
↑ Giovanni Pietro Bellori, “Le Vite de' pittori, scultori, et architetti moderni”, 1672: "Michele was forced by necessity to enter the services of Cavalier Giuseppe d'Arpino, by whom he was employed to paint flowers and fruits so realistically that they began to attain the higher beauty that we love so much today."
↑ Catherine Puglisi, "Caravaggio", p.79. Longhi was with Caravaggio on the night of the fatal brawl with Tomassoni; Robb, "M", p.341, believes that Minniti was as well.
↑ The critic Robert Hughes memorably described Caravaggio's boys as "overripe bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream."
↑ Donald Posner's "Caravaggio's Early Homo-erotic Works" (Art Quarterly 24 (1971), pp.301-26) was the first to broach the subject of Caravaggio's sexuality and its relationship to his art. The gay biographers and commentators generally take a homoerotic content for granted, but the subject is complex. For a perceptive and well-sourced discussion, see Brian Tovar's "Sins Against Nature:: Homoeroticism and the epistemology of Caravaggio" For an opposing viewpoint, see Maurizio Calvesi's "Caravaggio" (ArtDossier 1986, in Italian). Calvesi argues that the early work reflects the Del Monte's taste rather than Caravaggio's, in the era before the advent of the modern concept of self-expression.
↑ Robb, p.79. Robb is drawing on Bellori, who praises Caravaggio's "true" colours but finds the naturalism offensive: "He (Caravaggio) was satisfied with [the] invention of nature without further exercising his brain."
↑ Bellori. The passage continues: "[The younger painters] outdid each other in copying him, undressing their models and raising their lights; and rather than setting out to learn from study and instruction, each readily found in the streets or squares of โรม both masters and models for copying nature."
↑ For an outline of the Counter-Reformation Church's policy on decorum in art, see Giorgi, p.80. For a more detailed discussion, see Gash, p.8ff; and for a discussion of the part played by notions of decorum in the rejection of "St Matthew and the Angel" and "Death of the Virgin", see Puglisi, pp.179-188.
↑ Mancini: "Thus one can understand how badly some modern artists paint, such as those who, wishing to portray the Virgin Our Lady, depict some dirty prostitute from the Ortaccio, as Michelangelo da Caravaggio did in the Death of the Virgin in that painting for the Madonna della Scala, which for that very reason those good fathers rejected it, and perhaps that poor man suffered so much trouble in his lifetime."
↑ Baglione: "For the [church of] Madonna della Scala in Trastevere he painted the death of the Madonna, but because he had portrayed the Madonna with little decorum, swollen and with bare legs, it was taken away, and the Duke of Mantua bought it and placed it in his most noble gallery."
↑ While Gianni Papi's identification of Cecco del Caravaggio as Francesco Boneri is widely accepted, the evidence connecting Boneri to Caravaggio's servant and model in the early 1600s is circumstantial. See Robb, pp193-196.
↑ The circumstances of the brawl and the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni remain mysterious. Several contemporary avvisi referred to a quarrel over a gambling debt and a tennis game, and this explanation has become established in the popular imagination. But recent scholarship has made it clear that more was involved. Good modern accounts are to be found in Peter Robb's "M" and Helen Langdon's "Caravaggio: A Life". An interesting theory relating the death to Renaissance notions of honour and symbolic wounding has been advanced by art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon.
↑ The discovery of the evidence for this brawl was reported by Dr Keith Sciberras of the University of Malta, in "Frater Michael Angelus in tumultu: the cause of Caravaggio’s imprisonment in Malta", The Burlington Magazine, CXLV, April 2002, pp.229-232, and "Riflessioni su Malta al tempo del Caravaggio", Paragone Arte, Anno LII N.629, July 2002, pp.3-20. Sciberras' findings are summarised online at Caravaggio.com.
↑ This was the formal phrase used in all such cases. The senior knights of the Order convened on 1 December, 1608 and, after verifying that the accused had failed to appear although summoned four times, voted unanimously to expel their putridum et foetidum ex-brother. Caravaggio was expelled, not for his crime, but for having left Malta without permission (i.e., escaping).
↑ Caravaggio displayed bizarre behaviour from very early in his career. Mancini describes him as "extremely crazy", a letter of Del Monte notes his strangeness, and Mario Minniti's 1724 biographer says that Mario left Caravaggio because of his behaviour. The strangeness seems to have increased after Malta. Susinno's early 18th century Le vite de' pittori Messinesi, "Lives of the Painters of Messina", provides several colourful anecdotes of Caravaggio's erratic behaviour in Sicily, and these are reproduced in modern full-length biographies such as Langdon and Robb. Bellori writes of Caravaggio's "fear" driving him from city to city across the island and finally, "feeling that it was no longer safe to remain," to Naples. Baglione says Caravaggio was being "chased by his enemy," but like Bellori does not say who this enemy was.
↑ Baglione says that Caravaggio in Naples had "given up all hope of revenge" against his unnamed enemy.
↑ According to a 17th century writer the painting the head of Goliath is a self-portrait of the artist, while David is il suo Caravaggino, "his little Caravaggio". This phrase is obscure, but it has been interpreted as meaning either that the boy is a youthful self-portrait, or, more commonly, that this is the Cecco who modelled for the Amor Vincit. The sword-blade carries an abbreviated inscription which has been interpreted as meaning Humility Conquers Pride. Attributed to a date in Caravaggio's late Roman period by Bellori, the recent tendency is to see it as a product on Caravaggio's second Neapolitan period. (See Gash, p.125).
↑ A letter from the Bishop of Caserta in Naples to Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome, dated 29 July 1610, informs the Cardinal that the Marchesa of Caravaggio is holding two John the Baptists and a Magdalene which were intended for Borghese. These were presumably the price of Caravaggio's pardon from Borghese's uncle, the pope.
↑ The avvisi placed Caravaggio's death at Porto Ercole while on his way from Naples to โรม. The letter from the Bishop of Caserta to Scipione Borghese on 29 July, one day after the first avviso, says that Caravaggio died "not in Procida but at Porto Ercole." The bishop goes on to deny an earlier (lost) report that Caravaggio had died in Procida, and to say that instead Caravaggio's boat had stopped in Palo, where he had been imprisoned; the boat had returned to Naples, and Caravaggio had bought his release and gone on to Porto Ercole, "perhaps walking," where he died. None of these are intelligible as landing places for a man on his way to โรม: Procida is an island near Naples, Palo was a garrison in the marshes near the mouth of the Tiber but not well connected to the city — Rome's port was at Civitavecchia, a little further north — and Porto Ercole lay a further hundred kilometres north of, and away from, โรม. See Robb, "M", p.473ff.
↑ Much of the documentary evidence for Caravaggio's life in โรม comes from court records; the "artichoke" case refers to an occasion when the artist threw a dish of hot artichokes at a waiter.
↑ Robb, passim, makes a fairly exhaustive attempt to identify models and relate them to individual canvases.
↑ Caravaggio's self-portraits run from the Sick Bacchus at the beginning of his career to the head of Goliath in the David with the Head of Goliath in Rome's Borghese Gallery. Previous artists had included self-portraits as onlookers to the action, but Caravaggio's innovation was to include himself as a participant.
↑ Also see criticism by fellow Italian Vincenzo Carducci (living in Spain) who nearly bemoans Caravaggio as an "Antichrist" of painting with "monstrous" talents of deception.
↑ Roberto Longhi, quoted in Lambert, op. cit., p.15
