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By Root 1362 0

works, while forceful, are relatively gauche and crude. Those pictures were done after 1592 and they were done in Rome. If someone with his gifts really had applied himself to the study of art in Milan for four whole years from 1584 to 1588 – working ‘day and night’, as the contract says – he should have been far better than he actually was by then. The breakneck pace of Caravaggio’s subsequent acceleration, from uncertain beginnings to full-blown mastery, begs further questions. Was it perhaps only in the early 1590s that he first took painting seriously? Is it possible that he began his career with the merest smattering of an education, and taught himself most of what he knew about painting on the job? Could it be that he spent much of his presumed apprenticeship playing truant?

The hypothesis has the virtue of helping to explain Caravaggio’s extreme technical originality. It is easier, in some ways, for a man to reinvent painting if he has almost nothing in the way of conventionally ingrained techniques to impede him. His contemporaries described him as a difficult young man who liked to settle disagreements with violence and who was prone to disappear for days on end. There is no reason to believe that he was anything but an unruly teenager. Even if he did absorb some of the rudiments of art, he is unlikely to have been a model student. What evidence we have suggests that he was probably a very bad one.

‘THEY COMMITTED A MURDER’

The bare bones of the archive – and they are pretty bare, for this part of the painter’s story – indicate that these were difficult years for the whole Merisi clan. On 25 August 1584 the richest and most influential member of the family, Giovan Giacomo Aratori, went to his grave. On 7 June 1588 Caravaggio’s youngest brother, Giovan Giacomo, died of unknown causes. By this time the painter’s apprenticeship, such as it was, had finished. He was back in Caravaggio by 25 September 1589, to sell a parcel of land. He was not quite eighteen, so the sale could take place only with his mother’s permission, which she gave. There were more land sales the following year. On 30 May and 20 June 1590 Caravaggio and his brother, the future priest Giovan Battista, parted with all of their remaining property in Canigio Nuovo, ‘to clear debts [accumulated] by them or their mother, or by the said Michelangelo by entering into a contract’. The brothers had no option, it seems, but to eat into their rapidly dwindling capital.

There is a hint of trouble too in the fact that legal responsibility for this sale had been suddenly passed from the brothers’ mother, Lucia, to their uncle, the priest Ludovico Merisi, who was their next closest relative. Was Lucia ill or incapacitated in some way? It seems so. On 29 October 1590 she made her will, bequeathing her entire property in equal proportions to her three surviving children. Exactly a month after that she died.

There were two more sales and then – on 11 May 1592 – the final division of Lucia’s estate between Caravaggio and his two siblings. Giovan Battista got some land and the family’s two houses in Porta Folceria. Caterina got some land as well as an undertaking from Giovan Battista that he would pay her dowry of 200 lire. Caravaggio was excused from any obligation to either of them and took nothing except the cash from one last land sale. It looks like the behaviour of a man who wanted to cut all ties with his past. Not long after the division of the property, he would leave Caravaggio and Milan, never to return.

By the middle of 1592 he had raised altogether 1,957 imperial lire from the family’s capital – the equivalent of 600 gold scudi, or about six times the cost of his apprenticeship. By the end of the same year, he would have run through it all. No one knows what he did with the money, just as no one knows exactly what he was doing with his life during and after his apprenticeship. He was twenty-one years old in 1592. By the same age his namesake, Michelangelo Buonnarotti, had established himself as one of the leading artists in Italy. Yet, as far as