Italian researchers said last Friday that they may be close to identifying the remains of Caravaggio, the great Italian painter whose death 400 years ago is shrouded in mystery.
The researchers have dug up and studied bones found in a Tuscan town where Caravaggio died 400 years ago in 1610.
This past week, ARTKABINETT collector members have had a glimpse of Caravaggio's short and brilliant life -- all in honor of his 400th birthday this month!
According to results of carbon dating and other analyses released Friday, one set of bones is compatible with Caravaggio's remains.
The bones belonged to a man who died in the same period as the artist at an age between 37 and 45. Michelangelo Merisi - known as Caravaggio after his hometown - died at 39.
Team leader Silvano Vinceti said the bones also have high levels of lead and other metals associated with painting.
"We are closing in," Vinceti said in an interview with Associated Press Television News. "Have we or have we not found the great Caravaggio?" The results, while promising, are not conclusive.
That's why the group is conducting DNA testing, with results expected in about two weeks. The DNA extracted from the bones will be compared with samples from possible male kin in Caravaggio, in Lombardy northern Italy (seen right).
Even though Caravaggio had no known children, Vinceti said the group has studied the town's death registry and found some 20 possible male relatives.
A risky life
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Cardinal Del-Monte bought Caravaggio's painting "The Cardsharps" (seen above), and subsequently invited Caravaggio to join the homosexual menagerie of young musicians and painters that he kept in his mansion.
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.
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 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.
Caravaggio died in Porto Ercole, a beach town on the Tuscan coast. His death after a dissolute life of street brawls, affairs with prostitutes and even murder, remains an enigma. To this day, his remains are officially missing.
Posthumous crtiticism
Shortly after his death in 1610, he was already being sniffed at as a populist. He invented his naturalist style, implied a bitter rival, in order to get noticed. It still works. Caravaggio, born in 1571 and dead before he was 40, a murderer and - it would appear from his paintings - openly homosexual in an age when you could be burned alive for the devilish crime of "sodomy", painted with an unprecedented realism.
He rejected both the smooth, all-over lighting and classical balance of Raphael and the distorted mannerism of Michelangelo and his followers - rejected, that is, the dominant traditions of Italian painting in the late Renaissance. Instead, he painted scenes from pagan myth and Christian belief as if they were happening here, now, in the street or in his dingy room.
You will see grotty feet everywhere in Caravaggio's paintings, the shoddy soles of people who spend their days and nights barefoot, running or limping through dusty city streets, selling fruit or their bodies, begging alms.
You see them in his Madonna of the Rosary in Vienna (seen right), in which the filthy, battered feet of the poor face us as their humble possessors kneel and raise their hands beseechingly towards black rosary beads offered by the church. In his Cupid, toenails are filthy.
At the bottom of a sculpted, Michelangelesque leg is a foot that ends in stubby toes, reddened by the pressure of the pose, with worn, broken, brown nails. Those nails suddenly establish what is really happening in the painting. Caravaggio is painting this boy, who is maintaining the pose even as his face creases in laughter at the absurdity of it all. His toes are red with the strain of pretending to be a Michelangelo, his dirty nails betray where he comes from - the street.
The actors in his paintings are recognisable as actual people - often you can follow the same model from one canvas to another, posing now as Cupid, now as Saint John. They are not well-to-do people, either. They are the scum of the city - prostitutes, rent boys, beggars. Caravaggio's marginal existence is fully reflected in his art, its drama conveyed by his extreme optical style, all brightness and blackness, as a single source - light coming through a window, or filtering into a narrow street - casts deep and menacing shadow.
In the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Caravaggio's painting of the god of wine is a portrait of a fleshy youth (seen left), with rouged cheeks and heightened black eyebrows. The shallow, broad glass he offers contains dark wine, purple, inviting. Will you drink? And where will that lead?
Caravaggio is the most insidious of tempters. The acutely convincing way he can paint wine, or fruit - he was, almost incidentally, the greatest still life painter who ever lived - is a trick that he uses to lure you into his dangerous, violent reality. Yet I was to discover another, introspective and compassionate, Caravaggio.
Cause of death
The researchers say he was buried in the town's San Sebastiano cemetery. His bones were dug up when the graveyard was moved in the 1950s to make space for a public park. According to the researchers, the remains were at that point moved to another cemetery nearby.
The cause of Caravaggio's death has also not been established. Possibilities raised by scholars range from malaria to syphilis to murder at the hands of one of the many enemies Caravaggio made during his tumultuous existence.
Vinceti's team includes historians, anthropologists and other scientists. His project has drawn interest as Italy marks the anniversary of Caravaggio's death, but also some skepticism because so much time has passed.
courtesy; Jonathan Jones (The Guardian); Giora Shoham (Tel Aviv University)
