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have been the sole reason for the rejection of the painting. One painted face can easily be substituted for another, a detail that could have been altered in less than a day’s work. It seems it was Caravaggio’s fundamental approach to the subject – essentially, his blunt portrayal of the Virgin as an actual dead woman – that the fathers could not bear. In the autumn of 1606 Mancini talked to the Carmelite fathers and subsequently wrote a letter to his brother in Siena in which he alluded to the picture being ‘compromised by its lasciviousness and lack of decorum’. Later in the same document he reiterated that it was ‘well made but without decorum or invention or cleanliness’.116 To say a picture had been created ‘without invention’ was shorthand for saying that it had been painted from reality rather than the imagination. The other two objections, about cleanliness and decorum, were versions of the same criticism. This was the heart of the fathers’ objections. The Madonna had been made to look dirty and indecorous. She had been made to look real.

The best evidence for this is the picture that eventually ended up on the altar of the church. Having sacked Caravaggio, the church fathers passed the commission on to an artist called Carlo Saraceni. Taking his cue from images of the Virgin as the Queen of Heaven, such as Annibale Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Cerasi Chapel, he depicted an ecstatic Mary being translated to heaven at the moment of her death. But even that was not a sufficiently happy ending for the Madonna. The Carmelites of Santa Maria della Scala wanted a choir of angels to waft her to heaven, so Saraceni had to cook up a second version of his own sweet confection, adding a topping of cherubs. His picture, finally completed in 1610, can still be seen in the church today. Caravaggio’s painting is in the Louvre.

Coming so soon after the rejection of his altarpiece for St Peter’s, this second disappointment must have cut Caravaggio to the quick. Looking back on it years later, Mancini wondered if the refusal of The Death of the Virgin might not have been the tilting point of the painter’s whole life. ‘Perhaps consequently Caravaggio suffered so much trouble,’ he wrote. It is just an aside, but it should not be taken lightly. Mancini was there at the time. He had seen what happened next. In the immediate aftermath of the two rejections, Caravaggio committed the darkest of his many crimes, the crime that would blight the rest of his life. He killed a man.

DEATH ON A TENNIS COURT

For several years Caravaggio and Ranuccio Tomassoni had been heading obscurely towards their final confrontation on the streets of Rome. Exactly what happened, and why, has been the subject of much speculation, but one thing is certain. On 28 May 1606 Caravaggio killed his enemy in a swordfight.

The earliest account of the murder is contained in a document in the Roman archives, which dates to the day of the killing itself. It was a Sunday, and the anonymous author saw Caravaggio’s crime as part of a sinister pattern, as rowdy festivities across the city threatened to spiral dangerously out of control:

The celebrations began for the [anniversary of the] coronation of the Pope … towards evening at Ripa Grande there were celebrations and fighting with boats. In the midst of the festivity and the contest, someone gave somebody else a knock, and was stabbed to death. In Campo Marzio the same evening the painter Michelangelo Caravaggio wounded and killed Ranuccio da Terni with a sword-thrust through the thigh; he had barely confessed before he died, and was buried in the Rotonda [the Pantheon] the next morning. After that his brother, Captain Giovan Francesco, unsheathing his sword, killed another soldier (formerly a captain) of the Castel Sant’Angelo. The above-mentioned Giovan Francesco, Michelangelo and one other were also wounded in the same quarrel.117

Until quite recently the only known accounts of the murder were those given by Caravaggio’s three principal biographers. They were written long after the event itself,