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Young Sick Bacchus (Self-Portrait)

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was the genius who launched Baroque art, and left us lots of really gruesome paintings. Most notably, he gave us tenebrism, the dramatic use of chiaroscuro which uses violent contrasts of dark and light. He never sketched anything, painting directly onto canvas. And he painted quickly, turning out masterpiece after masterpiece in ridiculously short periods of time.

By the time he was 30, at the height of church construction in Rome, he was the city’s most famous painter, the go-to guy for dramatic, pop-off-the-wall Bible-related scenes. But he did not depict these scenes as people imagined they occurred hundreds of years earlier. He staged the events in the present day, working from live models wearing modern dress. If his clients wanted people to learn lessons from these scenes, Caravaggio’s work drove home the point.

Unfortunately, he had a personality problem. He was, to put it mildly, ‘touchy’. In the days when brawling was common, he was notorious. He killed a man in Milan, beat a Roman nobleman with a club, and did time for assault and possession of illegal weapons. In one duel, he stabbed himself; in another, he stabbed a policeman. He was sued for defamation and debt, for stoning his landlady, and for hurling a plate of artichokes at a restaurateur.

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Incredibly, through all of his, he was painting pictures. So he’d paint a torture scene, go to jail, get out of jail, paint a beheading, go to jail etc. So far, there are 90 known Caravaggios, but experts believe that there are many more which have yet to be attributed.

Finally, he went too far. In the course of a duel over the mistreatment of a prostitute, he tried to castrate a pimp and accidentally killed him. Said pimp was from a wealthy and well-connected family. Caravaggio’s patrons had always protected him, but not this time. He was sentenced to beheading, and an open bounty permitted anyone to carry out the sentence. He fled to Naples.

One theory about Caravaggio's personality problems is that he was tormented by conflicted sexuality (he was fascinated by both young boys and female prostitutes). Another is that, all along, he was suffering from lead poisoning. Whatever it was, it was making his behavior worse and, by 1610, everyone in Naples believed that he was irredeemably crazy. That year, he was badly disfigured in a fight, so he decided to return to Rome and beg for clemency. He never made it; he died on the road, likely via the hand of a murderer. He was just 38.