The Man Who Killed Caravaggio

I can hardly believe that I knew Caravaggio. We met in 1593, really as boys. I was scarcely 16 and he, 21, although he lied and said he was 19. In those days, the younger you were the better if you wanted to be a painter. To think he was to become the most sought after and revered painter of his time in all of Italy. Yet, when I first met him, I knew that he was headed for tragedy.

I am Mario Minniti, and I write this in 1640 when I am approaching 63. Everyone knew that Caravaggio's death was mysterious. Some say that he died of fever; others say that he was murdered. I know what happened. For fear of my life for thirty years I have had to hold my tongue. Now when many are dead, I want to tell the story—the story that I know to be true. I do not know who will read this, but I want a record to exist.

First, I will tell you a bit about me. I am Sicilian, born on 8 December 1577. I am a painter, and over the last thirty years I have developed an excellent reputation in Sicily.

Carvaggio taught me a lot, but I think I developed a distinctive style. There is no question though that I benefited enormously from my association with him. With passing years his name has become increasingly magical not only in Italy but all over Europe.

I do not claim to be a great painter, but I have an excellent workshop. I think I have mastered the style di maniera, the Mannerist style, with its idealizing of life and spiritualizing of being, and blended and moderated it with the realism that Caravaggio initiated. Yet my blend, and Caravaggio would be very critical of it for this, is designed not to ruffle the feathers of those responsible for religious commissions because in Italy there is much concern with the restrictions on religious thought imposed by the Council of Trent over seventy years ago. These restrictions greatly affect art. It is enough to say that there are rules about what you can and cannot paint. For example, they explicitly state that “all lasciviousness be avoided … that figures shall not be painted with a beauty exciting to lust … nothing (can be) profane or indecorous … pagan imagery must be avoided.” I must say that they do like the saints’ eyes rolled up in ecstasy (or I add facetiously in organismo), and you can only get away with showing any flesh if it is an act of torture.

My father died when I was 15, and I decided to leave Sicily to go to Rome. My collectors like to say that I went to Rome to study art. That is quite a stretch of the facts. Actually, I was always in trouble as a child and a young man. Unfortunately, I liked confrontations and fights.

My getting to Rome was fateful in my meeting Caravaggio. I considered crossing the narrow straits of Messina into Reggio di Calabria. At the port in Messina, I ran into a ship’s captain. He must have been about 50 years old. He offered to take me to Rome if I would help him on the ship as a hand.

It was not until the first night aboard that I learned what the cost of my passage was really to be. The captain approached me in a way that was clear what he wanted. I felt degraded, but I must confess that before long I realized that I had a profession. It was for this newly acquired profession that I staked out a territory near the Fontana del Moro in the south end of the Piazza Navona.

I am not sure how long I had been in Rome largely hustling when I noted sitting at the fountain’s edge a short, dark, heavy eye-lidded young man with thick dark eyebrows and unruly black hair. That chance meeting was to become an unbelievably fateful event.

We met occasionally in the Piazza. He told me that he was an artist and that he made a small living painting still lifes and simple street scenes to sell in the Piazza. He said that he was 19 and had come to Rome because there was much artist work available in Rome. I lied and said that was why I was there too. We both knew that each was lying and that we actually made our livings on the hustle.

We ran into each other a number of times. I liked to watch him paint and noted that he didn’t draw but painted directly on his small canvases. Easily I could see that he had unusual talent. His still lifes of fruits and vegetables had a luscious, almost erotic life in them. I liked to draw and took to drawing near him.

In the beginning, he was difficult to talk with. I learned that his name was Michelangelo Merisi, but in Rome he was called Caravaggio because he came from the small village of Caravaggio not far from Milan. Always he was surly, but I was drawn to him. I think the true bond was that we were both lost souls hanging onto each other. It is how we survived.

Sometimes we would talk into the early hours of the morning. I wasn’t long before he confessed that in fact he was 21. He said that he had learned to lie about his age—“old men really like their artists and their puttani young.”

Caravaggio told me that he was born on the feast day of San Michele Archangelo and that is why he was named Michelangelo. He liked to say, “Little did they know that I would be a painter greater than the Divine Michelangelo.”

Caravaggio was born in 1571, not 1573 as he told everyone. I think he was born in Milan. Sometimes he said he was born in the village of Caravaggio and that he and his family moved back to Milan after his birth. He did say that because of the threat of the plague in Milan, in 1577 the family quickly moved from Milan to his mother’s family’s small farm in Caravaggio. The move was not successful because both his grandfather Bernardino and his father died in Caravaggio of the plague when Caravaggio was 6. Caravaggio said that they died within hours of each other, but that may be part of his tendency to be dramatic. He often called himself an orphan, but that also may be part of his dramatic nature. What was true was that he felt himself alone in the world.

It is all a little unclear, but I know that when I was 13, Caravaggio was apprenticed to Simone Pederasini in Milan for four years. Although Caravaggio was always unruly, disrespectful, and given to argument even as a boy, the old master was able to teach Caravaggio much of the style of the great Titian and other great Lombardy painters. It probably was in the tradition of Titian that Caravaggio painted directly onto his canvases, never drawing, sketching, or pre-transferring his designs.

Like Titian, Caravaggio never signed his paintings. Arrogantly he quoted Titian, “They can tell it is mine from the way it is painted.” The exception was a very late painting, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted in 1607 in Malta. It is signed in the spilled blood of the Baptist.

In his mid-teens, Caravaggio’s mother died. Here the story gets really vague because I believe he was in prison in Milan for a year. At times the rumor in Rome was that he had killed a man in Milan; others said that he was imprisoned due to family indebtedness after his mother died. Clearly, the move to Rome was an attempt to get away from something.