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All this suggests he was not so much a slow developer as a reluctant one. Perhaps he did not even want to be an artist. Perhaps he explored other possibilities, such as becoming a mercenary or soldier of fortune. He was good with a sword, and the alacrity with which he would later jump at the chance to become a Knight of Malta suggests he may always have nurtured romantic fantasies about becoming a knight at arms. Another distinct possibility is that he had got into bad company and was just living it up during these years, with no thought to the future – until the money finally ran out. Children often define themselves in opposition to one another, and the fact that Caravaggio’s brother was chosen for the priesthood is in itself suggestive. If Giovan Battista was the good little boy, maybe Caravaggio had taken the role of the rogue. It would not have been surprising. He had grown up with barely a single close male role model. In fact almost all the men closest to him – the men who might have controlled him, helped him, shown him how to live – had died of the plague.

There was no shortage of opportunities for getting into trouble in Milan. Carlo Borromeo was not just flourishing his priestly rhetoric when he called it a city of sin. Milan had a reputation as a violent place, infested with vagabonds, conmen, pimps and whores. Street crime was rife and the murder rate soared during the 1580s and 1590s. The Spanish governor was constantly issuing proclamations about the need to clean up the city and offering rewards for the capture of bandits, muggers and murderers. There are passages in the writings of Caravaggio’s biographers which suggest that he got involved – and got out of his depth – in this dangerous Milanese underworld. Bellori baldly states that ‘being disturbed and contentious, because of certain quarrels he fled from Milan.’51 But that is not the last word from him on the matter, because on the front page of his copy of Baglione’s biography of Caravaggio (still preserved in the Vatican Library), he wrote a further note, just as bald but more informative: ‘he ground colours in Milan and learned to colour and because he had killed one of his companions he fled the country.’52

Baglione, who seems to have known nothing about Caravaggio’s life in Milan, is silent on the subject. Mancini, in his life, was keen to tell the version of the story that Caravaggio himself wanted the world to believe, sweeping any suggestions of ill-doing under the carpet of a single brisk sentence: ‘At a young age he studied diligently for four to six years in Milan, though now and then he would do some outrageous thing because of his hot nature and high spirits.’53

Mancini too left some scribbled, marginal mutterings that throw more light into this dark corner. There is a manuscript copy of Mancini’s life of Caravaggio in the Marciana Library in Venice that contains a number of barely legible lines of disconnected prose: ‘They committed a murder. Prostitute tough guy gentleman. Tough guy hurts gentleman prostitute slashes insult into the skin with knife. Policeman killed. They wanted to know what the accomplices … He was in prison for a year and then he wanted to see his property sold. In prison he didn’t confess he came to Rome and said no more about it.’54

It is with this gnomic, fragmented record – this mangled account of mysterious skulduggery and impenetrable misdeeds – that Caravaggio’s life in Milan comes to a close.

PART TWO

Rome, 1592–5

VIOLENT TIMES

‘Whore, bitch, tart! I throw a bowl of shit in your face! Go on, fuck yourself with a horsewhip! I’ll stick the handle of my paintbrush up your arse!’

These are the words of an artist scorned, addressed to a courtesan who refused to sleep with him. They are preserved in a deposition in the State Archives of Rome for 1602.1 The man was before the magistrates for abuse and physical assault. As well as insulting and beating her, he had actually knifed the