When Caravaggio arrived in Malta in July 1607, he was looking for a quieter life.
The Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi, better known by the name of his home town in Lombardy, had fled Rome the year before.
A fearsome swordsman, capable of beating trained soldiers in duels, Caravaggio killed a young man from a rich family called Ranuccio Tomassoni in a violent brawl at a tennis court.
This increasingly popular artist, commissioned by cardinals and who had painted the Pope, had become a fugitive from the law.
Pope Paul V passed a bando capitale, the death sentence, on him and even said to prospective bounty hunters that they could just bring the artist’s head to claim their prize – no need to trouble themselves by dragging his body back to Rome.
After this time, Caravaggio increasingly began painting paintings along the theme of beheading, and sometimes put his own head as the severed body part.
A fresh start
As he sailed into Malta’s Grand Harbour, he was being offered something potentially life-changing – a chance to join the powerful Order of St John, also known as the Knights of Malta, men from noble backgrounds who carried great prestige throughout Europe.
Perhaps, it is speculated, he wanted to eventually use his new status to help secure a pardon from the Pope, who was the supreme leader of the Order (and still is today).
He arrived aboard a galley and the Knights quickly recognised the value of having one of Europe’s most celebrated painters on the island, giving him a warm welcome.
For a while, things went well.
Caravaggio painted some of the most important works of his career in Malta, including the enormous Beheading of St John the Baptist, his largest-ever canvas.
The latter was painted for the Oratory of St John in what is St John’s Co-Cathedral, found in the Maltese capital Valletta.
On 14 July 1608, Caravaggio achieved what he had presumably come to Malta for.
Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt admitted him as a Knight of Obedience, having obtained special permission from – ironically – the Pope to allow the appointment, following complex diplomatic negotiations.
The artist’s former life as a fugitive now seemed to have been left behind.
But Caravaggio was a man who had lived hard on the streets of Milan and Rome, mixing with violent men, drinkers, prostitutes and pimps, spending time carrying swords and fighting duels.
He never seemed to really want to leave those days behind him.
Disobedience and dishonour
Weeks after becoming a knight, his new life in Malta collapsed.
On the night of 18 August 1608, a violent brawl broke out at the house of Prospero Coppini, an organist attached to the Conventual Church of St John (the co-Cathedral today).
Several knights were involved, and one of them, the senior Fra Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, was seriously wounded, having been shot in the groin.
Caravaggio, and another knight, were arrested and taken to the formidable Fort St Angelo in Birgu.
But Caravaggio was not going to sit there quietly, waiting for his fate.
On 6 October 1608, Fra Hieronymus Varays reported to the Order’s Council that Caravaggio had escaped the fort and secretly fled Malta.
It’s still unclear as to how he did it. The most likely theory is that he obtained, or paid for, rope that he used to climb down the fort’s walls – which are about 18 metres (59 feet) high.
So he must have had help but, as was so often the case, Caravaggio played his life out in the shadows and slipped away into darkness (he had a fondness for wearing all black clothes and cloaks).
‘Rotten limb’
As a knight, leaving Malta without permission was a serious offence in itself.
The Order summoned him to answer for his actions. He failed to appear, having already disappeared into Sicily.
On 1 December 1608, the Knights formally stripped him of his habit and expelled him from the Order. The official ceremony took place in the Oratory of St John, in front of the very masterpiece that Caravaggio had painted for them.
He was described as a “rotten and fetid limb”, his Maltese adventure ending in violence, dishonour and disgrace.
You can still see The Beheading of St John the Baptist in St John’s Co-Cathedral today.
But if you do, keep in mind what happened shortly after it was finished.
Its artist would soon become a man on the run again, a status which lasted for another two years until he died suddenly when on his way back to Rome.
Looking at the broad portfolio of his work, Caravaggio’s art is so highly regarded because he changed the way European painters represented reality.
His importance isn’t simply that he painted dramatic pictures that the public, and private patrons, loved (although some patrons rejected his work due to holy figures having bare and dirty feet).
Caravaggio also combined radical realism, theatrical lighting, psychological intensity and revolutionary compositions in a way that influenced generations of artists – and still does today.
But his life was as dark and dramatic as his work, with the same amount of frequent tragedy.
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