The tumultuous story behind Caravaggio’s last painting

00:00 09:33

Laura Gascoigne has narrated this article for you to listen to.

For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had hung unnoticed in a succession of noble palazzi in the Italian province of Salerno, with its deep chiaroscuro and close-cropped composition, looked like a Caravaggio – but after Caravaggio almost every painting in Naples did.

When it entered the collection of the Banca Commerciale Italiana in 1973 it was attributed to Mattia Preti, a Calabrian Caravaggista of the next generation who had caught the tenebrist bug. But in 1980, a letter discovered in the Naples State Archive changed the picture. Written on 11 May 1610 by Lanfranco Massa – the Naples agent of the Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria – it explained a delay in the transportation of a painting of Saint Ursula to Genoa. Massa had left it out in the sun to dry more quickly and the varnish had gone soft ‘because Caravaggio puts it on very thick’. He was going to talk to the artist about it.

Why the hurry? Caravaggio was preparing to leave Naples, the city which had been his refuge, on and off, since his flight from Rome on a murder rap four years earlier. A rumble on a tennis court in May 1606 with local pimp Ranuccio Tomassoni – reportedly over a bet or a woman – had begun with tennis rackets and escalated to swords, and Tomassoni had been fatally wounded. His Roman patrons were prepared to forgive the artistic genius with the cervello stravolto – the deranged brain – a multitude of sins, but this time he had gone too far. He left Rome with a price on his head – a bando capitale entitling anyone in the Papal States to perform a citizen’s execution and produce his head in evidence – and fled south to the Spanish-ruled Kingdom of Naples.