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The painting’s subject is drawn from the life of St Ursula, as recounted in The Golden Legend. A chaste princess led 11,000 virgins on an ill-fated pilgrimage through Germany:

And then all these virgins came … to Cologne, and found that it was besieged with the Huns. And when the Huns saw them they began to run upon them with a great cry, and enraged like wolves on sheep, and slew all this great multitude. And when they were all beheaded, they came to the blessed Ursula, and the prince of them, seeing her beauty, so marvellous, was abashed, and began to comfort her on the death of the virgins, and promised to her to take her to his wife. And when she had refused him and despised him, he shot at her an arrow, and pierced her through the body, and so accomplished her martyrdom …

The convention was to paint a vast crowd scene, an orgy of death. Caravaggio did the opposite. He envisaged the scene of Ursula’s martyrdom as a horribly intimate ritual wounding. The murderous Hun, who seems horrified by the result of his own actions, has just shot Ursula at point-blank range in the stomach. The victim of a sexual insult – ‘she had refused him and despised him’ – responds by subjecting the woman who had scorned him to a vile parody of pregnancy. Her swollen belly has been impregnated by the tip of an imperfectly painted arrow. She looks down with an expression of quiet surprise as blood spurts from the entry point, making a gesture with her hands that suggests she wants to part the flesh of her stomach still further. She is about to give birth to her own death.

Three others complete the group. Ursula’s shocked maidservant hovers like a ghost between the killer and her mistress. In her left hand she holds the pole of a Christian banner, while with her right she reaches, too late, for the Hun’s bow. A soldier in black armour, shown in half-profile, approaches to catch the martyr should she swoon or fall. Directly behind Ursula’s stooped white mask of a face, another ghoulish face stares sightlessly into space. It is as if she has grown a second head. This is the last of all Caravaggio’s self-portraits.

What did he mean by this strange, haunting device? To suggest his own sympathy for the martyr, his wish to die like her? Or was he painting his realization that he was actually dying – and dying, like her, from a revenge wound inflicted at close quarters? His mouth is half open, as though to suggest that he is gasping, that he feels the arrow piercing his flesh too. Had Caravaggio turned the whole scene into a proxy for his own traumatic ordeal at the Osteria del Cerriglio? The assassin has the weatherbeaten face of a warrior. Is he too a portrait, an image dredged up from painter’s worst memories?

There are no answers to these questions. With the completion of the picture, darkness closes in on Caravaggio.

THE BOATMAN’S STORY

Caravaggio painted his last picture for Prince Marcantonio Doria of Genoa, who had probably sheltered him when he briefly fled Rome in the summer of 1605 after assaulting the notary Mariano Pasqualone. The prince, who had once tried to commission an entire fresco cycle from Caravaggio, had to content himself with a single canvas. He probably chose the subject of The Martyrdom of St Ursula in honour of his beloved stepdaughter Ursula, who like her namesake had committed herself to a lifetime of chastity by taking religious vows.

A small comedy of errors attended the delivery of the painting. It had been finished by 10 May 1610. But the very next day Doria’s procurator in Naples, Lanfranco Massa, apologized to his master for having nearly ruined it: ‘I thought to send you the painting of Saint Ursula this week, but to be sure that it was dry, I put it in the sun yesterday, and this instead caused the thick varnish which Caravaggio put on to liquefy; I want to obtain Caravaggio’s opinion on how to do it so as not to harm it. Signor Damiano has seen it and was amazed, like all the others who saw it …’135

It took more than two weeks to put the picture right,