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Simone Peterzano was an eclectic and mediocre artist who was originally from Bergamo but preferred to stress his links with Venice, where he may have been trained. He claimed to be a disciple of Titian, the most celebrated painter of Renaissance Venice, and sometimes even signed his pictures titiani alumnus, ‘pupil of Titian’. A number of contemporary sources refer to him as Simone Veneziano.49 The most extensive surviving example of his art is to be found in the presbytery of the Certosa di Garegnano, north-west of Milan. There, he and his workshop painted a monumental fresco cycle depicting scenes from the life of Christ. Work was begun in 1578 and finished in 1582, so the resulting pictures are a reasonable guide to Peterzano’s style as it was when he took Caravaggio on as his apprentice just two years later. It is a flaccid, bloodless late variant of Mannerism, exemplified by The Adoration of the Shepherds at Garegnano – an exercise in saccharine piety, complete with a cast of lumpen shepherds whose decorously draped forms, in various postures, were perhaps meant to demonstrate virtuosity but only reveal Peterzano’s inadequacies as a painter of the human anatomy. At the centre of the picture a sober and dignified Joseph, the sole convincing figure, is joined by a slack-jawed, pinheaded Mary. Both kneel in adoration of a mannequin baby Jesus, while unconvincing angels circle overhead.

What Peterzano’s fresco cycle communicates more vividly than anything else is his determination not to cause offence. His pictures embody the Tridentine timidity that infected so much Italian painting in the years that immediately followed the Counter-Reformation. Before he had begun work on the Garegnano fresco cycle, the artist had been made to sign a contract obliging him to follow the new rules of decorum laid down by the Council of Trent: ‘All the human figures, and above all the saints, should be executed with the greatest honesty and gravity, and there should not appear torsos, nor other limbs or parts of the body, and every action, gesture, clothes, attitude and drapery of the saints should be most honest, modest and full of divine gravity and majesty.’50 Peterzano was careful to follow these instructions – all the more careful, no doubt, because Carlo Borromeo himself was known to visit the charterhouse at Garegnano to practise the spiritual exercises. It might be said that he painted according to the negative principles of Borromean piety, in the sense that his overriding priority was to avoid courting controversy or violating decorum. It would be Caravaggio’s genius to express that same piety in boldly positive terms, to create an art of agonized humility and bleeding flesh that would stir up controversy wherever it was seen. In short, there is no trace of a debt to Peterzano’s work in the art of Caravaggio’s maturity. Were it not for the existence of the actual contract of apprenticeship, there would be no reason whatever to connect the two men.

So what did Caravaggio learn during his apprenticeship? It might be supposed – it is the conventional view – that he received a traditional grounding in the techniques of Renaissance painting. In other words, he learned to prepare and grind colours; he learned how to draw; and he learned how to paint in buon fresco, the ‘true fresco’ technique, like Peterzano himself. But Caravaggio never painted a fresco and no single drawing exists by his hand. X-rays of his oil paintings show that he did not even use preparatory drawings on the canvas, as a guide for the brush. In other words, there is almost no resemblance between his daringly improvisatory techniques and those that would have been taught in the studio of an artist such as the safe, dull and cautious Simone Peterzano.

It seems that something must have gone awry during Caravaggio’s apprenticeship. He was a painter of extraordinary innate talent, a unique virtuoso when it came to conjuring the illusion of three-dimensional reality within the two dimensions of painting. Yet his earliest known