Caravaggio - Model of Painterly Restraint

Of course, if the paintings are among the most extraordinary of clear-eyed technical accomplishments there is some evidence of passion in Caravaggio's personal life, as excerpted from a paper on "Black Hole Personality" disorder. The ball-game referred to below was an early form of tennis and involved at least 4 swordsmen.

"After some years of apprenticeship in Milan, Michelangelo Caravaggio left for Rome. The first years in the capital were hard, meager and grim. At first, Caravaggio was employed by a Sicilian painter, Lorenzo, for whom he worked long hours for a pittance. Afterwards, he was engaged by the miserly Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci. Caravaggio nicknamed him 'Monsignor Insalata,' because all he fed his employee was vegetable salad. [3] At about that time he became seriously ill and was hospitalized in Santa Maria della Consolatione, where he stayed quite a while; it was there that he painted some of his earlier works, including, quite probably, Bacchino Malato, the sick Bacchus, with himself as model.

"Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Cardinal Del-Monte bought Caravaggio's painting "The Cardsharps", and subsequently invited Caravaggio to join the homosexual menagerie of young musicians and painters that he kept in his mansion. Caravaggio's homosexual preferences are evident from his paintings, and are known from other independent sources. We also have ample evidence of the painter's quarrelsome, violent sword and predilection for brawling. He had the psychopathic trait of ever looking for stimuli, be they creative or merely sensation-rousing. He would throw stones at his landlady, hurl artichokes at a waiter, and fight a notary at Piazza Navona, over the amorous attentions of a woman. [4] Caravaggio killed one Ranuccio Tomassoni after a quarrel in a ball game. This happened in 1606, after which he was banished from Rome. In all likelihood, his journey from Milan to Rome in 1592 was actually a flight following a murder he committed. His short fuse and pathological need to seek violence and dispute landed him in trouble all his life. Oftentimes he abused and assaulted his benefactors. Consequently, he was frequently obliged to flee from one place to the other, and even his death was the result of a skirmish.

"In August 1603, the painter Baglione sued Caravaggio for disseminating defamatory poems about him. The courts decided for the plaintiff and [End page 67] Caravaggio was jailed. He was released by the intervention of the French ambassador since he was engaged in painting the side-wall of the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. In October 1604, he was arrested again for assaulting a police officer, and in 1605 he injured a lawyer in the face and fled to Genoa. After his banishment from Rome, following the murder of a ball-game partner, he fled to Naples and thence to Malta. He was made a Knight of the Maltese Order of St. John, only to be expelled from it following his offending the Grand Master. He fled to Sicily, was fatally wounded in Naples, and died in Civita Vecchia on the 18th of July, 1610. This history of murder, assault and courting of violence would shame many a violent psychopath in a contemporary maximum-security prison. Indeed, we hypothesize, by a rather problematic post-facto inference, that Caravaggio suffered from an ever hungry, insatiable 'black-hole' personality."

I should add that His final wound involved the loss of his boat, with all his possessions, which may have broken his will to live.