A killer himself, Caravaggio died at 38 – desperate, disfigured and on the run from the Knights of St John. His greatest works – with which he bargained for his life – cast light on one of art’s darkest mysteries
The National Gallery’s haunting new exhibition The Last Caravaggio has at its heart a sepulchrally toned painting called The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. Caravaggio includes himself in it as a witness to a brutal murder – a pale, bleak farewell of a self-portrait set against Stygian darkness. An extravagantly armoured man, the chief of the Huns, has been rejected by the beautiful young Ursula. His response is to shoot her with an arrow at point blank range. She contemplates the shaft between her breasts as if she can’t believe what she is seeing: her own death.
Soon after painting this, Caravaggio too would be dead. Sailing north from the Naples area to Rome in the heat of summer in a triangular-sailed felucca, he was arrested at a coastal stop and by the time he was released his luggage, including new paintings, had left without him. He seems to have run or hitched a ride along the coast to catch up with it and probably caught malaria. He was 38 when he died at Porto Ercole in southern Tuscany on 18 July 1610.
