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to Caravaggio’s last paintings is also a microcosm of his afterlife, and a parable illustrating his singularity as a painter. He had always been an outsider, a troublemaker, a difficult and dangerous man. Yet his art was so compelling, so original, so unforgettable, that people were simply transfixed by it. They fought to look at it, gathering in their hundreds every time a new altarpiece was unveiled, and they fought to acquire it, even though everything else about Caravaggio – his terseness, his weird dress sense, his violence, his sexual reputation, his unerring gift for getting into trouble – seemed so disconcerting and strange.

Caravaggio was not only the most disturbed but also the most unconventional of the truly great painters of the Italian tradition. His whole career ran counter to type, defiantly contradicting the patterns of training, patronage and even the actual practice of painting that were expected of a successful artist. It is clear that during his obscure early years, something went awry during his supposed apprenticeship to the Milanese painter Peterzano. Essentially, Caravaggio taught himself to paint. He may have picked up technical tips and clues in places like Giuseppe Cesari’s studio, but his basic method was empirical. He looked at the way light falls, and at the way people behave. The fact that he was obliged to invent himself may partly explain his deep originality. The advantage of not having been taught was that he had nothing to unlearn.

Once he had begun to find his own way, Caravaggio painted with such force, such a stunning sense of drama, such a deep sense of humanity, that prestigious commissions flooded towards him. The simple truth is that he was a far greater painter than any of his contemporaries. But, despite winning the support of Cardinal del Monte, and despite his network of protectors within the Colonna family, he never found a secure place in the hierarchies of power and patronage. He painted as if the rich and the powerful were his enemies, as if he really did believe that the meek deserved to inherit the earth. Ultimately, he acted in the same way too. Only once in his life did he come close to achieving a truly settled position, a respected place among men of real power and influence, and that was on Malta. But almost as soon as he had been knighted, he managed to have himself thrown into jail. With hindsight it looks like a complete act of self-sabotage, as if he could not bear the thought of truly belonging and of walking the corridors of power.

Caravaggio was also unique among the great Italian painters in how he went about painting. He had no studio in anything like the conventional sense. He had the odd boy to help him, Cecco in particular, but essentially he painted all by himself. He did not draw. He never established a workshop with specialist assistants to help with the painting of drapery or landscape, as other artists did. He gathered around himself no real circle of pupils, and there were no acolytes to spread the word, no one to disseminate his methods and his beliefs. There were no portfolios of his drawings to pass around. There was nothing except his pictures themselves, and there were not very many of those because he had died so young. Under the circumstances, the vast impact of his work is all the more remarkable.

For more than a century and a half after his death, the classicizing critics of Europe’s academic art tradition made a concerted and resolute attempt to blacken his name. According to their beliefs, much influenced by the strains of Neoplatonist philosophy, it was art’s duty to present an idealized version of reality, and not – as Caravaggio was held to have done – merely to represent the real world in all its unregenerate ugliness. Bellori was the arch-exponent of the anti-Caravaggist movement in academic thought, but there were many others, notably the Spanish painter and author Vicente Carducho, who demonized Caravaggio as an anti-Christ of art, the antithesis to his saintly predecessor and namesake, the ‘divine’ Michelangelo. So influential