For a painter whose name we're not even sure of, who aggressively discouraged imitators, whose stormy, rumbustious life was curtailed by an early death, partly as a result of his own violent, impetuous nature, Caravaggio occupies an extraordinarily important role in the history of European painting. It's hard to imagine Rembrandt's work without him, for example, and Rubens and Velasquez were among an army of admirers.
In our own time, the American painter Frank Stella credits him with instituting a decisive, revolutionary new kind of pictorial space. His judgment is echoed by the critic Robert Hughes who, in 1985, wrote: "Caravaggio was one of the hinges of art history: there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same." When, he wondered, would the mini-series appear?
There has been no mini-series, though Derek Jarman did produce a moody and, for him, unusually disciplined film tribute, and there is a continuous stream of academic literature. Now Australian Peter Robb has produced a blockbuster biography, called simply M, that sets out to exhaustively recreate the artist and his milieu.
The original publication of his book, in Australia, coincided with a much shorter study, tantalisingly called Caravaggio's Secrets, by two American academics, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit.
Of course we have a particular local interest in Caravaggio since he hit the headlines here in 1992, when Sergio Benedetti of the National Gallery of Ireland, invited to check over some paintings in a Jesuit house in Dublin, spotted a "lost" masterpiece by him. The right man in the right place, Benedetti had a particular interest in Caravaggio and his followers, and immediately recognised The Taking of Christ as a superior version of a painting in Odessa. In fact the picture he identified, now in the National Gallery, is one of the artist's finest, most complex works.
Born in 1573, Caravaggio was a surprisingly modern artist in that he lived fast, died before he reached 40 and relished shocking his public. The name we use for him derives from the town near Milan where he lived as a child. A more accurate appellation is Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, but even that is less than certain. When, after his apprenticeship, he moved south to Rome he brought the stylistic trappings of northern genre painting with him, but transformed them into a uniquely vivid, forceful brand of realism, accurately but disparagingly termed naturalist.
His broodingly dark religious and genre compositions are theatrically staged and erratically lit, usually by a harsh, unseen and unexplained light source. He used his models, including himself, not as the basis for idealised figures in the Renaissance manner but, warts and all, as actors in elaborate multi-figure tableaux, worked directly and urgently from life. Fantastically heightened chiaroscuro further cranked up the drama.
In late 16th and early 17th century Rome, painting was a fiercely competitive business. Caravaggio swaggered through this world, a sword at his side, accompanied by his black poodle and a servant, as cocky, arrogant and quick-tempered as the best or worst of them. He guarded his position jealously. "His friends were never talented painters, and therefore never possible rivals," Benedetti remarks.
Though his ecclesiastical commissions frequently met with hierarchical opposition, Caravaggio usually had an influential patron to serve as a protector. He and Annibale Carraci opened up equally radical though divergent paths out of the impasse of late Mannerism, which had become an absurdly inflated travesty of Renaissance innovations.
However, his brilliant career in Rome, already marked by several messy brawls, altercations and court appearances, ended disastrously in 1606 when he killed a young man in a row that erupted at a tennis match. Caravaggio received a bad gash on the head. He ran, first to Naples where, always in demand, he settled and worked for a time before going on, by invitation, to Malta, where he was also well received, and was made a Knight of the Order of St John. Imprisoned for an unspecified misdemeanour, he escaped, fled again and was expelled from the Order. But the Knights did not let matters rest. Against a background of diplomatic manoeuvring, he was tracked all the way back to Naples via Syracuse, Messina and Palermo. In Naples he was attacked, probably by his pursuers.
He escaped with his life but was badly slashed across the face. With a pardon apparently imminent in Rome he set off on the move again. Briefly imprisoned, perhaps in error, in the Spanish enclave of Porto d'Ercole, he mistakenly thought that his paintings and possessions had been dispatched back to Naples. In a state of agitation he set off overland, through a malarial region, became ill and died.
That, at any rate, is the rather vague account of his final movements offered by contemporary sources. Practically all of these details are unconfirmed and widely contested.
Essentially, he disappeared, for there is no official record of his death. It could easily be that he was murdered by one or other of the factions he'd managed to antagonise. Certainly Peter Robb, who sets out to identify Caravaggio as the hapless victim of sinister political machinations, presumes that with the withdrawal of the protection of influential patrons, he became easy prey, but the evidence offered is extremely vague and circumstantial at best.
It's a problem that besets his book throughout. He rages against not knowing but, though he provides us with a huge amount of information about the painter and the paintings, about those around him and the world he inhabited, his colloquial style and penchant for redundant speculation quickly become irritating (as does his practice of calling Caravaggio "M"). For much of the time, as well, he seems fatally undecided as to whether he's writing a novel or a biography and consequently ends up producing something that works as neither.
The myriad uncertainties about Caravaggio's life and work have left plenty of room for us to reinvent him for our own age, as a political as well as an artistic revolutionary, as a sexual outlaw as well as a law-breaker, and even, lest we forget, as a devout Christian. The constant revision of our views of him is partly to do with the changing emphasis in art history. To a large extent, the old art history regards the story of painting as a stylistic progression. In a related way, connoisseurship is concerned with the identification, attribution and authentication of works of art. But the new art history lays greater emphasis on the context within which art is made, it explores a wider range of meanings rather than pursuing one kind of meaning, one narrative relating to style.