The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Must an artist die before we love them?
From Caravaggio to Basquiat, we remain enchanted by the painters cut down in their prime
Twang! A warriorprince unleashes an arrow. Thwack! It pierces his target, a pretty young woman with a face as pale and silvery as the moon. As his bowstring quivers, she stares at the blood that spurts from a wound on her chest, framed perfectly by her hands. Does she scream? Or even grimace? Not a bit of it. Rather, she appears detached – like someone about to flick a housefly from their clothes.
Behind her, though, a shocked, chalky-skinned witness seemingly gulps for air. His features are distinctive. This is a self-portrait by the artist, an ugly so-and-so (according to one early biographer), who painted this brutal scene:
Michelangelo Merisi, whom we know – after the Lombardy town, 25 miles east of Milan, from which his family came – as Caravaggio.
Notorious for his volatile temperament as much as the way he upended art history by sullying Renaissance idealism with a new, grimy realism and on-the-edge-ofone’s-seat immediacy, Caravaggio painted The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula in 1610, when he was 38 years old. “Within 10 weeks of making it,” says Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, which is about to show the canvas, “he was dead”.
For centuries, the painting, which Finaldi describes as Caravaggio’s “last will and testament”, was unknown; art historians believed that it was by a follower. Yet, the discovery, in 1980, of two letters written in May 1610 resulted in a rethink.
They confirmed that Caravaggio had painted a martyrdom of Saint Ursula: a legendary British or Breton Christian princess, popular during the Middle Ages, who, on her way back from a pilgrimage to Rome accompanied by 11,000 virgins, was murdered after refusing to marry the leader of the Huns. (What did he expect? As seduction techniques go, ordering the execution of someone’s friends, before asking for their hand in marriage, was never likely to work.)
The letters also revealed that the painting was commissioned by a Genoese nobleman, Marcantonio Doria, whose initials (“M.A.D.”), surmounted by a cross, appear in a 17th-century inscription on the back of the picture which will be shown in London (and which is now owned by Italy’s largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo). Most likely, Doria wanted to honour his stepdaughter, Livia Grimaldi, who was living in a Neapolitan convent, and had taken the name “Sister Ursula”.
Earlier artists had depicted this rare subject by imagining battlefields scattered with virgin corpses; Caravaggio’s typically shadowy and claustrophobic take implicates the viewer in the thick of the action.
“It’s horrible and brutal and very up-close,” says Francesca WhitlumCooper, the curator of the exhibition at the National Gallery, which will present The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula alongside Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (c160910), a late Caravaggio from its own collection: two gruesome pictures by an artist who often painted cruel and dramatic scenes of mutilation, including beheadings as well as martyrdoms. Tellingly, Caravaggio signed his work only once, as if the letters of his name were formed from splashes of gore falling from another John the Baptist, painted in 1608, who is being decapitated.
In life, too, he provoked violence, even by the standards of his hottempered times. Supposedly, as his reputation grew in Rome from the 1590s, he liked to swagger about with a sword and dagger; he was forever getting into brawls, and frequently arraigned. Once, in a temper, he hurled a plate of scalding
artichokes in a waiter’s face.
In 1606, during a fight over a wager on a tennis match, he thrust at the groin of an adversary, the pimp Ranuccio Tomassoni, who bled to death. Now a wanted criminal, with a “bando capitale” (death warrant) upon his head, Caravaggio fled the Eternal City, and spent the rest of his short life on the run.
After spells, still painting, in Naples, Malta (where he hoped to become a “Cavaliere”, or Knight, of Saint John) and Sicily, he arrived back in Naples, then ruled by a Spanish viceroy, where, in the autumn of 1609, he was attacked outside a tavern. Seemingly, his assailant intended to dishonour Caravaggio by disfiguring his face – “with such severe slashes”, says an early biographer, “that he was almost unrecognisable”. Not that you’d know it, looking at his ghoulish likeness in The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. Where are the scars?
What is Caravaggio gazing at in this final self-portrait? Perhaps he’s contemplating his future. By the spring of 1610, he’d probably heard from powerful friends in Rome that a papal pardon was in the offing. Shortly after The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was sent to Genoa, he, too, packed up his things, and set sail up the Italian coast.
Was he dreaming of a triumphant homecoming? In Rome, where he’d painted the dirty fingernails and grubby soles of lowlife models supposedly picked off the street, his scandalous artistic innovations (and behaviour) had made him a celebrity; according to one biographer, for his Death of the Virgin, a large altarpiece now in the Louvre, he even employed “some dirty prostitute”, possibly his mistress, to pose as the mother of Christ, whom he depicted as a barefoot, swollen corpse.
Yet, when Caravaggio stepped ashore at Palo, the closest port to Rome, he was arrested by mistake (“For the first time in his life,” says Whitlum-Cooper, “he hadn’t done anything!”), and that sailing boat continued – with his belongings (including some paintings), but without him.
Furious, according to a 17th-century biographer, and desperate to retrieve his possessions, he started chasing along the beach, “under the fierce heat of the July sun”.
He never caught up with that vessel but, we’re told, fell ill with a “raging fever” (possibly malaria); a few days later, on July 18 1610, he “died as miserably as he had lived”, penniless and alone, at the Spanish enclave of Porto Ercole. Like that arrow transfixing Ursula, the shaft of his destruction had finally struck.
Caravaggio’s may be among art history’s most dramatic deaths, but many others still captivate our imagination – thanks to a primal sense of injustice when a creative power is cut down in its prime. The long list of important artists who died young stretches back, beyond Caravaggio, to the 15th-century Florentine Masaccio (a nickname that means “hulking Tom”), who died at 27, yet was swiftly hailed as the founder of Italian Renaissance painting.
According to the 16th-century Italian artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari, Masaccio died from the plague, and, inevitably, illness has carried off lots of other talents, too. Giorgione, the Venetian Renaissance painter, who died in his early 30s, was probably another plaguevictim; tuberculosis likely did for the French Rococo artist Antoine Watteau, who was a year or two younger than Caravaggio when he died in 1721, as well as the 19th-century British prodigy Aubrey Beardsley, who was dead at 25. The French Post-Impressionist Georges Seurat kicked the bucket suddenly at 31, possibly from a form of meningitis; in 1918, the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele was picked off, when he was still only 28 years old, by the Spanish flu. Keith Haring, the prolific American pop artist, died, aged 31, of Aids-related complications in 1990, only a few years after he’d emerged from New York City’s graffiti subculture.
In all these cases – and there are many more (Théodore Géricault, Eva Hesse, Yves Klein, Amedeo Modigliani, and Henri de ToulouseLautrec all died in their 30s; Francesca Woodman did so when she was just 22 years old) – knowledge of the brevity of their lives stimulates melancholic speculation about what they might have achieved, had they lasted to the venerable age of, say, Titian, who passed away in his 80s. The curious thing about Caravaggio is that, even though he snuffed it in his 30s, scholars still talk about his “late style”, ie a pronounced shift towards the end of his career – in his case involving freer brushstrokes, a reduced palette, and a more sombre atmosphere – just as they do with Titian or Henri Matisse, who also lived into his 80s.
An especially early death can confer upon an artist a sort of morbid glamour, like that associated with movie stars and musicians who died prematurely, such as James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, or, of course, Amy Winehouse. There’s still an aura of cursed genius about, say, JeanMichel Basquiat, the street-art whizz-kid (and Haring’s friend), who died, aged 27, of a heroin overdose in 1988. Perversely, such artists are almost lucky, in that they don’t live to see their powers wane, or experience the anguish of falling out of fashion.
Henry Wallis’s Chatterton (1856) captures that macabre allure. It depicts the 18th-century Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton, with marmoreal skin but incandescent red hair, sprawled in his London garret after poisoning himself with arsenic at the age of 17. When the painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy, it was accompanied by these lines by Christopher Marlowe: “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight / And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.” Wallis’s painting isn’t the only artwork inspired by an artist’s death: in 1818, the French neoclassical painter Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres depicted Leonardo da Vinci, with a long white beard, being cradled upon his deathbed by Francis I of France.
Occasionally, other factors can account for our fascination with certain artists’ deaths. The Death of an Artist podcast series in 2022, which revisited the charged case of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, and the allegations that she was murdered by her husband, the American minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (who was acquitted in 1988), was a hit – because it channelled post-MeToo feminism and sated our appetite for “true crime”.
Prurience has long tainted our reaction to the passing, at the age of 37, on Good Friday in 1520, of Raphael. According to Vasari, this “prince of painters”, who specialised in serene Madonnas, was undone by a fever caused by the “immoderate” pursuit of “amorous pleasures”. Was he a womaniser? Today, experts believe that, after toiling frantically over 12 years for two popes, Raphael probably died from overwork – but the suggestion of sex addiction persists.
Then, there’s Vincent van Gogh, the short-lived but prolific Dutch post-impressionist painter, whose suicide still commands more attention than the death of any other artist. When, in 2019, a rusty revolver was offered at auction, which the 37-year-old may have used to shoot himself in the chest in a field near the village of Auvers-sur-Oise in northern France in 1890, it went for €162,500 (£144,000), almost three times its estimate – despite doubts about its authenticity.
With Caravaggio, none of whose letters (if he ever wrote any) has survived, there is, as it were, no smoking gun – just that forlorn image of an isolated man, stumbling across a sun-scorched beach, wretchedly railing against the fates. Why does his death still entrance us?
The answer is bound up with the bad-boy-of-the-Baroque appeal of his sensational biography, riddled with sufficient mysteries to pique the most ardent true-crime enthusiast; it also reflects the fact that Caravaggio was an early artistcelebrity, perhaps even the prototype of the avant-garde artist, who lived only a few decades after Vasari had stimulated great public interest in artists’ lives.
Maybe, too, the violence and darkness associated with Caravaggio resonated in the violent and dark 20th century, when he was rehabilitated following centuries of neglect. According to the art historian Sebastian Schütze, whose “complete” study of the artist was recently reissued by Taschen, Caravaggio is “perhaps the most modern of the Old Masters”.
But, suggests Whitlum-Cooper, something deeper and more psychological may also be at work. Although they didn’t know each other, William Shakespeare, she notes, was Caravaggio’s contemporary, and wrote several of his greatest tragedies when the Italian was already on the run. In Caravaggio’s belligerence and propensity for self-destruction, she senses something akin to a Shakespearean tragic flaw.
“There aren’t many artists who completely change the course of art – but Caravaggio is one,” she explains. “And we love stories of people who were brilliant but also self-sabotaging.”
The bad boy of the Baroque once hurled scalding artichokes in a waiter’s face
The Last Caravaggio is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (nationalgallery.org.uk), ThursJuly 21