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A lot has been made of Caravaggio’s presumed homosexuality, which has in more than one previous account of his life been presented as the single key that explains everything, both the power of his art and the misfortunes of his life. There is no absolute proof of it, only strong circumstantial evidence and much rumour. The balance of probability suggests that Caravaggio did indeed have sexual relations with men. But he certainly had female lovers. Throughout the years that he spent in Rome he kept close company with a number of prostitutes.

The truth is that Caravaggio was as uneasy in his relationships as he was in most other aspects of life. He likely slept with men. He did sleep with women. But he settled with no one. From a very young age, and with good cause, he suffered from a deep sense of abandonment. If any one thing lay behind the erratic behaviour that doomed him to an early death, it was the tragedy that befell him and his family when he was still just a little boy. The idea that he was an early martyr to the drives of an unconventional sexuality is an anachronistic fiction.

To understand the emotions that drove him and the experiences that most deeply shaped him, it is necessary to begin where he was born: in the town of Caravaggio, in Lombardy, from which he would later take his name. He lived both there and in the nearby city of Milan for the first twenty-one years of his life. His youth is the least documented period of his existence – the darkest time, in every sense, of this life of light and darkness. But in its shadows may be found some of the most important clues to the formation of his turbulent personality.

FACTS AND FICTIONS

There are three early biographies of Caravaggio. All were composed after his death, and each is unreliable for different reasons. The first was written during the second decade of the seventeenth century by Giulio Mancini, a physician from Siena who met Caravaggio in Rome, probably in about 1592, and who knew him well between 1595 and 1600. The second was published in 1642 by Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter who had competed and quarrelled with Caravaggio during his years in Rome, in particular between 1601 and 1606, on one occasion suing him for libel in response to some scabrous verses, on another going so far as to accuse him of hiring paid assassins to kill him. The third was written, three decades later, by an antiquarian and art theorist named Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who had never known Caravaggio and who based his own account on those of the two earlier authors.

Mancini is sporadically informative but frustratingly brief. Baglione is more circumstantial and surprisingly objective, given that he was writing the life of a man whom he suspected of having plotted to murder him. As a rule of thumb, Baglione is the most trustworthy early source. His biography has been shown to be extremely accurate in its presentation of the bare facts. Many later discoveries of original documents concerning Caravaggio have simply confirmed the truth of his original account. Baglione is only really unreliable in his smug, moralizing conclusions, which are plainly coloured by Schadenfreude. This is particularly evident in the mean-spirited passages that tell the story of Caravaggio’s various falls from grace.

Bellori wrote his life of Caravaggio considerably later. It was published in 1672, more than sixty years after the painter’s death. Bellori plainly drew much of his material from Baglione. But he did glean some new facts. He also went to much trouble to see the painter’s works in situ. He was seduced by their power and their drama, and fascinated by the novelty of Caravaggio’s technique. Bellori wrote about the painter’s art with far greater sensitivity than either Mancini or Baglione. Yet he was also fundamentally appalled by it. Caravaggio’s vivid capturing of poverty and violence – his depictions of Christ and the Virgin Mary as barefoot paupers, his bloodily realistic portrayals of Christian martyrdom – went directly