An Enduring Storyteller

National Gallery - The Last Caravaggio

We queued up in stages to finally enter a small darkened room with just two paintings and a manuscript. The number of people in the room at any one time was carefully monitored, which made the waiting and queuing worthwhile.

The wall texts tell the story of the sad end of Caravaggio’s life. This passage really struck home for me:

Like his life, Caravaggio’s final painting is characterised by darkness and violence, but it bears witness to the enduring power of his storytelling.

Auto-generated description: A group of people are gathered in a dimly lit room, viewing and discussing various paintings displayed on the walls.

Panorama of the room

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 'Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist', about 1609-10

Auto-generated description: A handwritten letter with visible stains and some torn or missing sections is shown.

Letter from Lanfranco Massa to Marco Antonio Doria, 11 May, 1610

Auto-generated description: A dramatic, dark-toned painting depicts several figures, including soldiers, with one holding a distressed woman draped in red, evocative of a tense and emotional scene.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 'Martyrdom of Saint Ursula', 1610.

Wall Texts

The Last Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was one of the most influential painters of the 17th century. His dramatic compositions, stark lighting and practice of using real people as models unleashed a pictorial revolution that changed painting across Europe.

Born in Milan, Caravaggio lived in Rome from the 1590s until 1606, where he won celebrity and a devoted following. But his artistic brilliance was matched by his violent temperament and in 1606 he killed a man, fleeing Rome with a death sentence on his head.

Caravaggio spent almost four years on the run - in Naples, Malta and Sicily - painting works with increasingly stark palettes and intense drama.

By May 1610 he was back in Naples and, although he didn’t know it, working on his last painting. Commissioned by the Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria (1570-1651), The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula is Caravaggio’s last documented painting.

It depicts a scene from the legend of Saint Ursula, a Christian princess whose 11,000 virgin followers were massacred in Cologne by the Huns. The Prince of the Huns threatened to kill Ursula unless she married him, but she refused to compromise her Christian faith and was martyred.

Caravaggio’s authorship was only established in 1980 by the remarkable discovery of a letter in the State Archives in Naples describing his involvement with the picture. Thanks to the exceptional generosity of two Neapolitan lenders - the Intesa Sanpaolo Collection and the Archivio di Stato - the painting and the letter are presented together for the first time in Britain here.

Just weeks after The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was finished, Caravaggio died penniless and alone in Porto Ercole, following an attempt to return to Rome. His art has inspired generations of artists and continues to do so today.

Like his life, Caravaggio’s final painting is characterised by darkness and violence, but it bears witness to the enduring power of his storytelling.

Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist (about 1609-10)

Auto-generated description: In a dark setting, an elderly woman and a young woman are depicted close together, with the elderly woman pointing and the young woman looking to her left.

This almost monochromatic composition shows Caravaggio’s ability to reduce a story to its essentials. We are confronted with the horror of the severed head, the brutish power of the executioner, the old woman’s sorrow and the complex revulsion of Salome who, at her mother’s bidding had requested Saint John’s head on a platter.

Auto-generated description: An older woman wearing a headscarf appears to be in distress while a shirtless man looks at her with a stern expression, set against a dark background.

Painted during Caravaggio’s second stay in Naples, this picture captures the stark emotional power of his late paintings and the profound impact the city had on his art. 17th-century Naples was a city of contrasts, at once the largest metropolis in Italy with vast wealth brought in by its port, but also dark, dirty and overcrowded. Violence would never have been far away.

Auto-generated description: A dramatic Renaissance painting depicts a somber scene where a man holds the decapitated head of another man by the hair, while two women stand by, one of whom is holding a plate to catch the head.

The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610)

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This martyrdom takes place in a dark, crowded space. Ursula is a lone female figure surrounded by soldiers.

Caravaggio tells the story of her death through a sophisticated interplay of hands: the guilty hands that have just fired the arrow, the outstretched hand of the bystander unable to stop it, and Ursula’s hands framing the fatal wound in her chest.

Auto-generated description: A group of figures, including a woman in a red dress and men with somber expressions and dark attire, are depicted in a dramatic, dimly lit scene typical of Baroque art.

Caravaggio includes his own self portrait looking on over the saint’s shoulder: startlingly pale and open mouthed, he makes himself a witness to, and perhaps even participant in, Ursula’s death.

Since the Middle Ages, Ursula has been seen as a figurehead for female empowerment. Her awful fate was one that she chose as testament to her faith.

This scene, an unusual subject for a painting, was almost certainly chosen by Caravaggio’s patron Marcantonio Doria, whose stepdaughter Livia was about to begin her life as a nun in a Neapolitan convent using the name ‘Sister Ursula’.

Caravaggio’s final days

Like much of his life, Caravaggio’s final months in Naples were underscored by violence.

17th-century biographies of the artist relate an incident where he was attacked leaving a tavern, his face so viciously slashed that he was almost unrecognisable. Despite ‘suffering the fiercest pain’, in July 1610 Caravaggio boarded a boat travelling up the coast towards Rome, believing that he had been granted a papal pardon.

Yet when he landed, he was mistakenly arrested and separated from his belongings. Desperate to regain his possessions - including paintings intended for his supporters in Rome - he tried to catch the boat, which had sailed further up the coast, but succumbed to fever and died.

Stay tuned for more adventures on our European Odyssey!