January 4, 2020 • 20 mins
This classic from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina explores the controversial life of Caravaggio. He may not be as well-known as Leonardo da Vinci, but this amazing painter has been receiving more and more attention in recent times.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, and happy Saturday, everybody. Back when we were planning
our live show at the National Gallery of Art, which
was a few months ago, we were brainstorming ideas about
art history mysteries and one of the topics that came
up was Caravaggio and the murder of his rival Renuccio Thomasny. Obviously,
we went in an entirely different direction from that for
(00:22):
the show. We went with our mysteries of the color blue.
But also prior hosts Sarah and Bublina had already done
a whole episode on Caravaggio back in March, so we
are sharing it today. Everyone enjoying. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:50):
Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblane chokerate Boardy And around this
time last year, Um, Katie and I did an episode
on the artist michel Angelo. And it's a good been
that michel Angelo. He's one of the most famous artists
in history. But according to the art historian Peter Solm,
michel Angelo has been surpassed and at least one head
(01:10):
to head competition. Uh and again at least in terms
of what's being written about him. Nobody's looking at the
art show attendance or something here. But that raises the
question who is the upstart? Interestingly, it's another michel Angelo,
except this one who's named michel Angelo Maurice and he's
better known as Caravaggio and some who works at the
(01:32):
University of Toronto. He has studied books, catalogs and scholarly
papers about the two men published in the last fifty years,
everything kind of in that time range. And over time
the Caravaggio related work did in fact outpaced the writings
on Michelangelo, especially since the mid nineties or so. Yeah,
so Caravaggio is apparently quite popular right now. And um,
(01:56):
if the obsession has been growing for the past fifty years,
it's really reached new heights this year and last year,
which was the anniversary of the artist's death. But so
far we've had to art world controversies. This is in
the past year too, art world controversies which have played
out in really dramatic headline fashion. We're going to just
(02:17):
read off a few of these headline counterheadlined selections for you.
One is from the BBC Vatican reveals caravaggio painting found
in Rome, and then later Vatican paper dismiss his own.
Caravaggio claims it's a little embarrassing. We have another one
from the BBC Church Bones quote belonged to Caravaggio, researchers say,
(02:41):
but also unearthing doubts about Caravaggio's remains. Yeah, we're gonna
be talking about that one a little bit more because
obviously it's an exhimation of related point. We're going to
cover that. Um. There have also been two big exhibits
though on the artists in the past year and this
year as well. One was of Caravaggio's art at the
(03:03):
Scuttieri Quirinale and the other was of his police trail
at the Italian State Archives. And that's really the catch
of this episode, and probably the appeal of Caravaggio in general.
He's not just a compelling figure because he's so masterful
an artist, and he's not just compelling because he has
(03:24):
this realist style that is well before his time. And
he's not just interesting because he almost seems more like
a photographer than a painter who lived centuries ago. He's bad.
He's a really bad guy. He's a bad boy. That's
a good way to describe him. And the documents relating
to his life are police documents and court documents, legal statements,
(03:48):
things like that. He did leave quite a paper trail,
and it does not really paint a pretty picture. Yeah,
and so I guess that new paper trails will focus
on the most But first we'll go back to the
begin inning. He was born in fifteen seventy one and
he was the son of an architect and a majordomo
for the Marquis of Caravaggio. He was apprentice later at
(04:09):
age eleven to painter Simone Patrizano in Milan, and it
was sometime in his teens when he was sent off
to Rome, and that's where he settles into this bohemian underworld.
He's really poor and working for painters at that time
who were less able than him. They're less talented. Yeah,
definitely struggling. And these are kind of the lost years
as far as his record goes, which I guess with
(04:30):
Caravaggio that's a good thing, um, But they're not lost
years as far as his work goes. He painted about
forty pieces during this period, including Boy with a Fruit Basket,
and the Young Bacchus. Those are probably two of his
most famous works. And finally, in Fi, works like that
must have caught the attention of certain eyes, because he
(04:52):
sets out on his own and he's brought to the
attention of Cardinal Francesco Damante, who was a big shot
in papal court. So this is his inn into the
more elite world of Rome, and he's soon invited to
live at the cardinals palace, and uh, he's got room
and board and all these commissions. And by seven he
(05:14):
has a commission to decorate the Contrally Chapel in Rome,
which really puts him into the big league. He's only
twenty four years old, so he put in his his
difficult years early. Yeah. And it's not a really totally
smooth road all the way though. His work for the chapel,
which included scenes from the life of Saint Matthew, they
(05:34):
cost quite a stir at the time, and that's because
these scenes he painted, they weren't idealized in any way.
Matthew basically looks like a laborer off the street, a
common person, not a very pretty saint. Yeah. And from
there on out, though he does stick with these religious
subjects though that's mostly what he's working on. But um,
I mean, like you mentioned, the Matthew thing gives a
(05:55):
pretty good foreshadowing of this. His His work isn't pretty,
it's violent, and it's dark. Stylistically, he supposedly would use
a lantern hung in a dark studio to achieve this
(06:16):
really dramatic lighting effect. I mean, if you've, I'm guessing
probably most of you, if you're listening to this episode,
you've seen Caravaggio paintings, but they often look like a
photo where there's a big, strong beam of light shining
on the subject from one direction. Um. And another thing
he would do is pick poor models, so maybe st.
Matthew was right off the street. Um. He would use
(06:38):
laborers and and just people he ran into, perhaps even prostitutes,
which obviously that's gonna sometimes cause some trouble for him.
And sometimes his work was consequently rejected by its original commissioners. Yeah.
The Caramel Lights, for example, thought that his death of
the Virgin looked a little too common and also a
(06:59):
little too dead. Yeah. They didn't want her to look
like a normal woman who had just died. They wanted
her to be shooting straight up to heaven. And this
kind of rejection, though, didn't really hurt Caravaggio's reputation. You
would think that that having your commissions rejected would be
a bad thing, but private buyers were very eager to
(07:20):
snatch up the rejected pieces, and his success really continued
to grow. He was moving and mingling in the highest
circles of Roman society, hanging out with cardinals, hanging out
with princes. So it seemed like he had risen above
that rough and tumble bohemian life that he started out in. Yeah,
but he never really totally left that hard knock life
(07:42):
behind either. It said that he was given to wrath
and riot, and probably the best way to understand him
might be to first look up some images of his
art and then take a look at his police record,
which we're going to get into a little bit right now.
It is pretty ridiculous. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. Actually,
May fourth fifteen, for example, he's arrested for carrying a
(08:03):
sword without a permit between two and three am. November nineteen,
six hundred, he's sued over beating a man with a
stick and cutting the guy's cape with his sword at
a three am brawl then October two, sixteen oh one,
he's accused of attacking a man with a sword and
insulting him, adding insult to injury. April sixteen o four,
(08:24):
he was accused of attacking a waiter over an artichoke
related dispute, which, because I kind of love that one
so much, we're going to talk about it a little
more in a second October nineteenth, sixteen o four, arrested
for pelting policemen with stones. That's never good. May sixteen
o five he's arrested for carrying a sword and a
(08:44):
dagger too, this time without a permit. July sixteen oh
five he's accused by a Vatican notary of striking him
with a weapon from behind. So this gives dirty pretty
good idea of the kind of shenanigans that Caravaggi was
up to, and um the documents on view of the
archives actually give us a closer look at some of
(09:06):
these incidents. I mentioned the artichoke one. We have the
waiters statement, which it'll let you know that a lot
is based on tone, and it's kind of hard to
tell here what exactly happened, but here it goes about
seventeen o'clock lunchtime, the accused, together with two other people,
was eating in the Moor's restaurant where I work as
a waiter. I brought them eight cooked artichokes, four cooked
(09:28):
in butter and four fried in oil. The accused asked
me which were cooked in butter and which fried in oil,
and I told him to smell them, which would easily
enable him to tell the difference. That's where tone is important.
He got angry and without saying anything more, grabbed an
earthenware dish and hit me on the cheek at the
level of my mustache, injuring me slightly. And then he
(09:48):
got up and grabbed his friend's sword which was lying
on the table, intending perhaps to strike me with it.
But I got up and came here to the police
station to make a formal complaint. So you a guy
who's who's easy to anger, I guess yeah. He seemed
to get riled up pretty easily. He was even accused
of throwing stones at his landlady's window after she sued
(10:10):
him for cutting holes in his ceiling to make his painted.
That's the best part. So you know this is this
is obnoxious behavior, violent um, potentially lethal behavior, and carrying
illegal swords around is not a good way to stay
out of trouble. But he reached a new level May
(10:30):
sixteen or six when he killed a man. You can't
really take that back. And um, the circumstances behind this
murder are kind of interesting. Uh. The deceased was Rernuccio Thomassini,
and he was murdered on a tennis court in Rome.
And so you've probably heard that because the location was
(10:51):
a tennis court, the dispute was somehow related to a
game of tennis, or some historians have suggested that it
was related to a dispute over a woman. But either way,
something that happened in the heat of the moment um.
You just let your passions get to you and get
into a fight, and then Rernuccio is suddenly dead. But
(11:12):
court documents from the time show that it really looked
a lot more like an organized war, not just this
argument that started suddenly. Right. For one thing, it's not
exactly a tennis court where this happens. It's a palacorta
court in the Campo Marzio area, which was Caravaggio's neighborhood.
Paul Acorda is kind of like tennis, except there's somehow
(11:33):
string involved. We're not really sure how it works. Like
an explanation of Palacorta for any still practicing sport enthusiasts. Yes,
email us. The other thing was there were eight men
who participated in this fight, and they were chosen ahead
of time. They weren't just random onlookers. So as you said,
it wasn't just in the heat of them moment. It
wasn't people who got mad about something that happened to
(11:55):
a game and decided to become part of this. It
was planned. Caravaggio himself was there with three other guys.
One was a captain in the Papal army, again showing
he does have friends in high places. And one of
(12:15):
his friends was also badly injured and arrested after the fact.
And it's during this guy's trial where it comes out
that the fight was probably started over a gambling debt,
so something that they could mull over for a little
while and get their friends together. But Caravaggio is injured
in this, but he escapes. He's not injured bad enough
(12:36):
that he's arrested. He gets out of Rome. He's terribly
concerned about what will happen to him, and rightly so,
because he's condemned to death and absentia by Pope Paul
the Fifth. So the first place he goes is to
the estate of the Marquis of Caravaggio's relative so Um,
a friend of his dad's friend. Essentially. From there it
(13:00):
goes to Naples in early sixteen and seven, and he
starts painting again. And just remember, throughout his entire flight,
he's still painting, which I think is so interesting. I mean,
obviously it's partly to make a living, but that you
would still have it in you when you're running for
your life, right, and he has to keep moving. He
moves on from Naples to Malta, where he not only
(13:21):
keeps painting, but he's received into the Order of Malta,
which is kind of confusing because it's something that requires
papal permission. Yeah, and the Pope has just condemned him
to death. I think that's interesting. And of course, all
the while his friends back in Rome we're working to
get a papal dispensation. That's the only way he could
be pardoned. But I would kind of want those fouls
(13:43):
to be handled in reverse order, I think, and and
get my life spared before I received into the Order
of Malta. But either way, he's expelled from the Order
of Malta not that long after, and he's jailed. He
escapes from jail and goes to Syracuse in Sicily in
October sixteen eight, and from there he goes on to
Messina and then to Palermo, all the while still working.
(14:06):
And it's kind of interesting. Art historians have commented on
this work because obviously you're going to look at at
anything done under such for circumstances, but apparently he really
simplifies things and scales it down, but it's still just
as skilled and well executed as ever. The only way
(14:28):
for him to really get arrest is to get the
Pope's pardon at this point, but Caravaggio has friends in
high places, like we mentioned, so they've been working on this.
Seems like a pardon might actually be on the horizon. Finally,
Caravaggio ends up moving to Naples again, but when he's there,
he's attacked at the door of an inn and horribly
disfigured on his face, and people even get reports that
(14:50):
he's dead. By July six ten, though he's finally well
enough to sail again, so he sails for Rome, but
he's arrested along the way and the boat with all
his stuff leaves him behind while he's in jail, so
he's trying to chase down this boat. He gets as
far as Porto Arcole, where he dies at thirty eight,
so he never reaches the boat, never gets his pardon
(15:12):
while he's alive. He is actually pardoned three days later.
After three days later. So yeah, that's that's sad to
say the least, and it's interesting though, but the circumstances
around his death are appropriately controversial too. He's often believed
to have died alone on the beach, which is terribly
depressing and probably seems plausible right, But his first biographer,
(15:38):
Giovanni Biony, sort of made things even worse. He panted
a picture um saying quote, finally having arrived in a
place on the beach, he was put in bed with
a high fever and having no human help. Within a
few days, he died as miserably as he had lived.
I think that makes it worse. It makes it seem like,
not only does he die alone on the beach, somebody
(15:59):
puts him in bed and then leaves him and then
abandons him. Then he dies alone, definitely taking it up
a notch, but his death was really not quite that dramatic.
Records from the archives exhibit show that Caravaggio was found
delirious on the beach, but then he was taken to
the hospital and he died there two days later, presumably
not entirely abandoned by everyone at the hospital. Um. It's
(16:22):
still unclear though what killed him, right, Maybe it was malaria,
could have been that, maybe the Knights of Malta, or
maybe even the Pope. I mean, during his successful, though
very stressful career on the run, he was kind of
afraid that papal hit men were after him. Yeah, it
was a concern of Caravaggios at least, But we also
(16:43):
have to address those bones that were supposedly Caravaggios and
identified as his last summer um. First of all, though,
why would this even be an issue here? You know,
presumably an artist as famous as Caravaggio would have a
monument and a marker set up immediately after his death.
But even though it's pretty hard to believe, after Caravaggio's death,
(17:06):
he faded into obscurity almost immediately. I mean, he had
an influence on later artists, but people pretty much forgot
who he was until he had this big resurgence at
the beginning of the twentieth century. So that's why we
knew he definitely died in Porto Coole, but we didn't
know exactly where he was in Silvio Vincetti, who is
(17:30):
the president of a private organization that seems to go
around and I d the remains of illustrious deceased Italians,
which as Dante announced that his team had identified bones
of Caravaggio from the Porto Coole crypt. Yeah, and you
may be asking how did they do this? So here's
a little bit about their method. They examined skeletons at
(17:52):
the crypt, eliminating ones that didn't fit Caravaggio's specs. Basically,
they carbon dated things down to one skeleton, and then
they tested that sample against the DNA from families who
were named MAURICEI or Mauricio from Caravaggio. So they did
this basically because Carvaggio didn't have any kids of his own,
(18:13):
and the committee couldn't find his actual descendants, his siblings descendants,
I should say, So they kind of had to take
their best guests. Yeah, and that's one thing that makes
people a little uncomfortable with this spinding. But the group
also concluded that the presumed Caravaggio skeleton had suffered from
lead poisoning, which would would also add up for an
(18:35):
artist at the time had suffered from syphilis and had
died from sunstroke. But art historians have been really, really
skeptical of this claim, to say the least. The New
York Times article that we mentioned earlier had quotes from
quite a few art historians with varying tone of dismissal,
(18:57):
but I included one trim tomas So Montinari of the
University of Naples, who said, quote in the four hundredth
anniversary of Caravaggio's death, this committee has concocted a compelling discovery,
thinking it will attract tourists. It's all very depressing threeis yeah,
so not very confidence inspiring. No, not at all. So
(19:20):
I guess I'm hoping that we'll find out more in
the four hundred and first anniversary of caravaggias death, because
I don't like my my exclimations to be depressing in
up in the air, Thank you so much for joining
us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard
(19:42):
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(20:05):
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your favorite shows.
Hello, and happy Saturday, everybody. Back when we were planning
our live show at the National Gallery of Art, which
was a few months ago, we were brainstorming ideas about
art history mysteries and one of the topics that came
up was Caravaggio and the murder of his rival Renuccio Thomasny. Obviously,
we went in an entirely different direction from that for
(00:22):
the show. We went with our mysteries of the color blue.
But also prior hosts Sarah and Bublina had already done
a whole episode on Caravaggio back in March, so we
are sharing it today. Everyone enjoying. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:50):
Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblane chokerate Boardy And around this
time last year, Um, Katie and I did an episode
on the artist michel Angelo. And it's a good been
that michel Angelo. He's one of the most famous artists
in history. But according to the art historian Peter Solm,
michel Angelo has been surpassed and at least one head
(01:10):
to head competition. Uh and again at least in terms
of what's being written about him. Nobody's looking at the
art show attendance or something here. But that raises the
question who is the upstart? Interestingly, it's another michel Angelo,
except this one who's named michel Angelo Maurice and he's
better known as Caravaggio and some who works at the
(01:32):
University of Toronto. He has studied books, catalogs and scholarly
papers about the two men published in the last fifty years,
everything kind of in that time range. And over time
the Caravaggio related work did in fact outpaced the writings
on Michelangelo, especially since the mid nineties or so. Yeah,
so Caravaggio is apparently quite popular right now. And um,
(01:56):
if the obsession has been growing for the past fifty years,
it's really reached new heights this year and last year,
which was the anniversary of the artist's death. But so
far we've had to art world controversies. This is in
the past year too, art world controversies which have played
out in really dramatic headline fashion. We're going to just
(02:17):
read off a few of these headline counterheadlined selections for you.
One is from the BBC Vatican reveals caravaggio painting found
in Rome, and then later Vatican paper dismiss his own.
Caravaggio claims it's a little embarrassing. We have another one
from the BBC Church Bones quote belonged to Caravaggio, researchers say,
(02:41):
but also unearthing doubts about Caravaggio's remains. Yeah, we're gonna
be talking about that one a little bit more because
obviously it's an exhimation of related point. We're going to
cover that. Um. There have also been two big exhibits
though on the artists in the past year and this
year as well. One was of Caravaggio's art at the
(03:03):
Scuttieri Quirinale and the other was of his police trail
at the Italian State Archives. And that's really the catch
of this episode, and probably the appeal of Caravaggio in general.
He's not just a compelling figure because he's so masterful
an artist, and he's not just compelling because he has
(03:24):
this realist style that is well before his time. And
he's not just interesting because he almost seems more like
a photographer than a painter who lived centuries ago. He's bad.
He's a really bad guy. He's a bad boy. That's
a good way to describe him. And the documents relating
to his life are police documents and court documents, legal statements,
(03:48):
things like that. He did leave quite a paper trail,
and it does not really paint a pretty picture. Yeah,
and so I guess that new paper trails will focus
on the most But first we'll go back to the
begin inning. He was born in fifteen seventy one and
he was the son of an architect and a majordomo
for the Marquis of Caravaggio. He was apprentice later at
(04:09):
age eleven to painter Simone Patrizano in Milan, and it
was sometime in his teens when he was sent off
to Rome, and that's where he settles into this bohemian underworld.
He's really poor and working for painters at that time
who were less able than him. They're less talented. Yeah,
definitely struggling. And these are kind of the lost years
as far as his record goes, which I guess with
(04:30):
Caravaggio that's a good thing, um, But they're not lost
years as far as his work goes. He painted about
forty pieces during this period, including Boy with a Fruit Basket,
and the Young Bacchus. Those are probably two of his
most famous works. And finally, in Fi, works like that
must have caught the attention of certain eyes, because he
(04:52):
sets out on his own and he's brought to the
attention of Cardinal Francesco Damante, who was a big shot
in papal court. So this is his inn into the
more elite world of Rome, and he's soon invited to
live at the cardinals palace, and uh, he's got room
and board and all these commissions. And by seven he
(05:14):
has a commission to decorate the Contrally Chapel in Rome,
which really puts him into the big league. He's only
twenty four years old, so he put in his his
difficult years early. Yeah. And it's not a really totally
smooth road all the way though. His work for the chapel,
which included scenes from the life of Saint Matthew, they
(05:34):
cost quite a stir at the time, and that's because
these scenes he painted, they weren't idealized in any way.
Matthew basically looks like a laborer off the street, a
common person, not a very pretty saint. Yeah. And from
there on out, though he does stick with these religious
subjects though that's mostly what he's working on. But um,
I mean, like you mentioned, the Matthew thing gives a
(05:55):
pretty good foreshadowing of this. His His work isn't pretty,
it's violent, and it's dark. Stylistically, he supposedly would use
a lantern hung in a dark studio to achieve this
(06:16):
really dramatic lighting effect. I mean, if you've, I'm guessing
probably most of you, if you're listening to this episode,
you've seen Caravaggio paintings, but they often look like a
photo where there's a big, strong beam of light shining
on the subject from one direction. Um. And another thing
he would do is pick poor models, so maybe st.
Matthew was right off the street. Um. He would use
(06:38):
laborers and and just people he ran into, perhaps even prostitutes,
which obviously that's gonna sometimes cause some trouble for him.
And sometimes his work was consequently rejected by its original commissioners. Yeah.
The Caramel Lights, for example, thought that his death of
the Virgin looked a little too common and also a
(06:59):
little too dead. Yeah. They didn't want her to look
like a normal woman who had just died. They wanted
her to be shooting straight up to heaven. And this
kind of rejection, though, didn't really hurt Caravaggio's reputation. You
would think that that having your commissions rejected would be
a bad thing, but private buyers were very eager to
(07:20):
snatch up the rejected pieces, and his success really continued
to grow. He was moving and mingling in the highest
circles of Roman society, hanging out with cardinals, hanging out
with princes. So it seemed like he had risen above
that rough and tumble bohemian life that he started out in. Yeah,
but he never really totally left that hard knock life
(07:42):
behind either. It said that he was given to wrath
and riot, and probably the best way to understand him
might be to first look up some images of his
art and then take a look at his police record,
which we're going to get into a little bit right now.
It is pretty ridiculous. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. Actually,
May fourth fifteen, for example, he's arrested for carrying a
(08:03):
sword without a permit between two and three am. November nineteen,
six hundred, he's sued over beating a man with a
stick and cutting the guy's cape with his sword at
a three am brawl then October two, sixteen oh one,
he's accused of attacking a man with a sword and
insulting him, adding insult to injury. April sixteen o four,
(08:24):
he was accused of attacking a waiter over an artichoke
related dispute, which, because I kind of love that one
so much, we're going to talk about it a little
more in a second October nineteenth, sixteen o four, arrested
for pelting policemen with stones. That's never good. May sixteen
o five he's arrested for carrying a sword and a
(08:44):
dagger too, this time without a permit. July sixteen oh
five he's accused by a Vatican notary of striking him
with a weapon from behind. So this gives dirty pretty
good idea of the kind of shenanigans that Caravaggi was
up to, and um the documents on view of the
archives actually give us a closer look at some of
(09:06):
these incidents. I mentioned the artichoke one. We have the
waiters statement, which it'll let you know that a lot
is based on tone, and it's kind of hard to
tell here what exactly happened, but here it goes about
seventeen o'clock lunchtime, the accused, together with two other people,
was eating in the Moor's restaurant where I work as
a waiter. I brought them eight cooked artichokes, four cooked
(09:28):
in butter and four fried in oil. The accused asked
me which were cooked in butter and which fried in oil,
and I told him to smell them, which would easily
enable him to tell the difference. That's where tone is important.
He got angry and without saying anything more, grabbed an
earthenware dish and hit me on the cheek at the
level of my mustache, injuring me slightly. And then he
(09:48):
got up and grabbed his friend's sword which was lying
on the table, intending perhaps to strike me with it.
But I got up and came here to the police
station to make a formal complaint. So you a guy
who's who's easy to anger, I guess yeah. He seemed
to get riled up pretty easily. He was even accused
of throwing stones at his landlady's window after she sued
(10:10):
him for cutting holes in his ceiling to make his painted.
That's the best part. So you know this is this
is obnoxious behavior, violent um, potentially lethal behavior, and carrying
illegal swords around is not a good way to stay
out of trouble. But he reached a new level May
(10:30):
sixteen or six when he killed a man. You can't
really take that back. And um, the circumstances behind this
murder are kind of interesting. Uh. The deceased was Rernuccio Thomassini,
and he was murdered on a tennis court in Rome.
And so you've probably heard that because the location was
(10:51):
a tennis court, the dispute was somehow related to a
game of tennis, or some historians have suggested that it
was related to a dispute over a woman. But either way,
something that happened in the heat of the moment um.
You just let your passions get to you and get
into a fight, and then Rernuccio is suddenly dead. But
(11:12):
court documents from the time show that it really looked
a lot more like an organized war, not just this
argument that started suddenly. Right. For one thing, it's not
exactly a tennis court where this happens. It's a palacorta
court in the Campo Marzio area, which was Caravaggio's neighborhood.
Paul Acorda is kind of like tennis, except there's somehow
(11:33):
string involved. We're not really sure how it works. Like
an explanation of Palacorta for any still practicing sport enthusiasts. Yes,
email us. The other thing was there were eight men
who participated in this fight, and they were chosen ahead
of time. They weren't just random onlookers. So as you said,
it wasn't just in the heat of them moment. It
wasn't people who got mad about something that happened to
(11:55):
a game and decided to become part of this. It
was planned. Caravaggio himself was there with three other guys.
One was a captain in the Papal army, again showing
he does have friends in high places. And one of
(12:15):
his friends was also badly injured and arrested after the fact.
And it's during this guy's trial where it comes out
that the fight was probably started over a gambling debt,
so something that they could mull over for a little
while and get their friends together. But Caravaggio is injured
in this, but he escapes. He's not injured bad enough
(12:36):
that he's arrested. He gets out of Rome. He's terribly
concerned about what will happen to him, and rightly so,
because he's condemned to death and absentia by Pope Paul
the Fifth. So the first place he goes is to
the estate of the Marquis of Caravaggio's relative so Um,
a friend of his dad's friend. Essentially. From there it
(13:00):
goes to Naples in early sixteen and seven, and he
starts painting again. And just remember, throughout his entire flight,
he's still painting, which I think is so interesting. I mean,
obviously it's partly to make a living, but that you
would still have it in you when you're running for
your life, right, and he has to keep moving. He
moves on from Naples to Malta, where he not only
(13:21):
keeps painting, but he's received into the Order of Malta,
which is kind of confusing because it's something that requires
papal permission. Yeah, and the Pope has just condemned him
to death. I think that's interesting. And of course, all
the while his friends back in Rome we're working to
get a papal dispensation. That's the only way he could
be pardoned. But I would kind of want those fouls
(13:43):
to be handled in reverse order, I think, and and
get my life spared before I received into the Order
of Malta. But either way, he's expelled from the Order
of Malta not that long after, and he's jailed. He
escapes from jail and goes to Syracuse in Sicily in
October sixteen eight, and from there he goes on to
Messina and then to Palermo, all the while still working.
(14:06):
And it's kind of interesting. Art historians have commented on
this work because obviously you're going to look at at
anything done under such for circumstances, but apparently he really
simplifies things and scales it down, but it's still just
as skilled and well executed as ever. The only way
(14:28):
for him to really get arrest is to get the
Pope's pardon at this point, but Caravaggio has friends in
high places, like we mentioned, so they've been working on this.
Seems like a pardon might actually be on the horizon. Finally,
Caravaggio ends up moving to Naples again, but when he's there,
he's attacked at the door of an inn and horribly
disfigured on his face, and people even get reports that
(14:50):
he's dead. By July six ten, though he's finally well
enough to sail again, so he sails for Rome, but
he's arrested along the way and the boat with all
his stuff leaves him behind while he's in jail, so
he's trying to chase down this boat. He gets as
far as Porto Arcole, where he dies at thirty eight,
so he never reaches the boat, never gets his pardon
(15:12):
while he's alive. He is actually pardoned three days later.
After three days later. So yeah, that's that's sad to
say the least, and it's interesting though, but the circumstances
around his death are appropriately controversial too. He's often believed
to have died alone on the beach, which is terribly
depressing and probably seems plausible right, But his first biographer,
(15:38):
Giovanni Biony, sort of made things even worse. He panted
a picture um saying quote, finally having arrived in a
place on the beach, he was put in bed with
a high fever and having no human help. Within a
few days, he died as miserably as he had lived.
I think that makes it worse. It makes it seem like,
not only does he die alone on the beach, somebody
(15:59):
puts him in bed and then leaves him and then
abandons him. Then he dies alone, definitely taking it up
a notch, but his death was really not quite that dramatic.
Records from the archives exhibit show that Caravaggio was found
delirious on the beach, but then he was taken to
the hospital and he died there two days later, presumably
not entirely abandoned by everyone at the hospital. Um. It's
(16:22):
still unclear though what killed him, right, Maybe it was malaria,
could have been that, maybe the Knights of Malta, or
maybe even the Pope. I mean, during his successful, though
very stressful career on the run, he was kind of
afraid that papal hit men were after him. Yeah, it
was a concern of Caravaggios at least, But we also
(16:43):
have to address those bones that were supposedly Caravaggios and
identified as his last summer um. First of all, though,
why would this even be an issue here? You know,
presumably an artist as famous as Caravaggio would have a
monument and a marker set up immediately after his death.
But even though it's pretty hard to believe, after Caravaggio's death,
(17:06):
he faded into obscurity almost immediately. I mean, he had
an influence on later artists, but people pretty much forgot
who he was until he had this big resurgence at
the beginning of the twentieth century. So that's why we
knew he definitely died in Porto Coole, but we didn't
know exactly where he was in Silvio Vincetti, who is
(17:30):
the president of a private organization that seems to go
around and I d the remains of illustrious deceased Italians,
which as Dante announced that his team had identified bones
of Caravaggio from the Porto Coole crypt. Yeah, and you
may be asking how did they do this? So here's
a little bit about their method. They examined skeletons at
(17:52):
the crypt, eliminating ones that didn't fit Caravaggio's specs. Basically,
they carbon dated things down to one skeleton, and then
they tested that sample against the DNA from families who
were named MAURICEI or Mauricio from Caravaggio. So they did
this basically because Carvaggio didn't have any kids of his own,
(18:13):
and the committee couldn't find his actual descendants, his siblings descendants,
I should say, So they kind of had to take
their best guests. Yeah, and that's one thing that makes
people a little uncomfortable with this spinding. But the group
also concluded that the presumed Caravaggio skeleton had suffered from
lead poisoning, which would would also add up for an
(18:35):
artist at the time had suffered from syphilis and had
died from sunstroke. But art historians have been really, really
skeptical of this claim, to say the least. The New
York Times article that we mentioned earlier had quotes from
quite a few art historians with varying tone of dismissal,
(18:57):
but I included one trim tomas So Montinari of the
University of Naples, who said, quote in the four hundredth
anniversary of Caravaggio's death, this committee has concocted a compelling discovery,
thinking it will attract tourists. It's all very depressing threeis yeah,
so not very confidence inspiring. No, not at all. So
(19:20):
I guess I'm hoping that we'll find out more in
the four hundred and first anniversary of caravaggias death, because
I don't like my my exclimations to be depressing in
up in the air, Thank you so much for joining
us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard
(19:42):
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