The king of chiaroscuro

These days, it is easy to take it for granted that Caravaggio (1571-1610) is the most popular of the old masters, yet it was not ever thus. In my Baedeker’s Central Italy (published exactly 100 years ago), he is acknowledged as having been ‘the chief of the Naturalist School’, but it is pointed out that from the outset ‘it was objected that his drawing was bad, that he failed in the essential of grouping the figures in his larger compositions.’ The first major exhibition of his works — in what has only very recently been established as the city of his birth, Milan — did not take place until 1951. Its catalogue contained an introduction by Roberto Longhi, the greatest Italian art historian of the 20th century, who had done so much to champion his work. In the intervening years, a whole array of very different knights in shining armour, ranging from the late Derek Jarman to Sir Denis Mahon (still going strong at the age of 99), have pleaded his cause, to such an extent that his triumph is now entirely and rightly assured.

With the wisdom of hindsight, the combination of a luridly colourful life and a genuinely remarkable body of work meant that it was inevitable that Caravaggio’s day was bound to come. In these terms, the biographical high point was his murder of his tennis opponent Ranuccio Tomassoni on 28 May 1606, which makes the tantrums of John McEnroe seem distinctly half-hearted. In defence of McEnroe, it is worth adding that the row was in all probability over a bet rather than a line-call, since tennis players commonly gambled large sums of money on the outcome not just of matches, but of individual points.