Italy. 1610. Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio is on the run. Again.
No stranger to trouble, this artist's tangled with the law most of his life.
But this time, it's different.
This time, he's wanted for murder.
There's a price on his head - alive or dead.
So he does what he's always done -
does what he does best.
He tries to paint his way out of trouble.
This is what he paints - David with Head of Goliath.
It's a self-portrait.
But why doesn't Caravaggio cast himself as the hero, David?
Why does he paint himself as the villain of the piece, the monster, Goliath?
Maybe he hopes that by making this guilty plea in paint he can be spared.
Perhaps by offering his head in a painting he can save himself in real life.
We like to think, don't we, that the genius is the hero, that the good guy wins,
but this is Caravaggio. And the genius is the villain.
[choral music]
Rome. 1600.
The center of the greatest propaganda campaign Christendom has ever seen.
The Catholic Church is under siege from the Protestants of Northern Europe,
who have a new message for those in need of salvation.
"Just depend on the Word," said the Protestants, "the gospel truth in black and white.
A printed bible is a Christian's guide.
Paintings in churches are a distraction, filthy idols.
Wipe them out."
Catholics shot back - what about the millions who can't read?
Don't they deserve to be saved?
Shouldn't the poor have a vision of the sacrifice of the savior?
The life of the virgin?
In the Catholic churches war for souls paintings were not art objects.
They were the heavy artillery.
So churches are repaired, others newly built, all lavishly decorated with paintings,
the paintings responsible for defending the Catholic faith.
But away from the Vatican, outside the gorgeously decorated high-walled palaces of the aristocratic cardinals,
there was a very different Rome.
The Rome of the sweaty, yelling crowd.
A hundred thousand of them, jostling in the markets, in the piazzas,
the Rome of sour wine, old garlic, street urchins,
shifty part-time soldiers who cut your purse, or your throat, just as soon as look at you.
The Rome of beggars, buskers, tumblers, quacks and whores,
thousands of them working away in the ortaggio, the evil Eden,
down by the River Tiber.
[no dialog]
This was Caravaggio's Rome.
Cheap rooms and drunken nights with other perpetually broke painters.
Living on their wits and shady credit, art for butter, always on the fly.
Their motto as they prowled the streets - nec spe nec metu - without hope, without fear.
Of course, he wasn't born a thug. Just a boy from small town Lombardy.
The small town of Caravaggio.
His father looked after the house and the land of a local aristocrat.
Respectable. Not poor, not rich.
But plague was the enemy of expectations, even small ones.
And it killed off Caravaggio's father and his grandpa on the same day, when he was just five.
When he was 19 his mother died, so the children sold up and got out.
He put in some time as an apprentice in Milan,
but anyone who had real talent went to Rome.
Caravaggio had arrived here in 1593, and had been promptly told what he was supposed to do
if he was ever to become a great artist.
First, draw old sculpture. Plenty of that lying around.
Second, take yourself after the old masters, Raphael perhaps.
Be humbled. Copy. And learn.
What you get at the end of it all was the point of art,
an idea of perfect form and ideal beauty.
If you could make those celestial mysteries visible using your own brushes,
then you'd be ready to convey that vision of perfection where it counted,
in the War for Souls.
Oh yeah? Caravaggio didn't think so.
Visions of paradise? Who the hell knew about that?
What he knew was right in front of his nose, down here on Earth,
in the studio, the here and now - that would be the point of his art.
Drawing - who needed it?
Caravaggio never drew a thing in his life.
He just looked. Eyeballed. Then he'd paint.
When someone asked him what he was going to do for models he pointed at the street,
"Them," he said, and he brought THEM into his studio.
The rough awkwardness of Caravaggio's Boy with a Basket of Fruit was a long way from the refined beauty of the Renaissance masters.
From the start, he wasn't going to do things the way they were supposed to be done.
Here's Caravaggio's response to the slavish copying of the classics.
His painting of himself as Bacchus, the god of wine.
Now, bear in mind Bacchus isn't simply the god of binges,
he's also the symbol of youth and beauty, the inspirer of poetry, song and painting.
And this is what Caravaggio does.
Instead of eternal youth, he gives us something like the exact opposite,
someone who's really sick.
The flesh is greenish, the lips are gray, the eyes unslept,
the mouth curled into a leer.
Instead of taking a human form and making it into a god,
he takes a god and makes it all too human.
The overdressed party animal as a morning-after wreck.
And look at those grapes!
Yes, he's got the bloom just right, but definitely past their sell-by date,
and they're offered to us in an oily pour, with filth-rimmed fingernails.
No thanks.
Now, Northern Italian artists were famous for their technical skill,
their naturalistic still lives.
But Caravaggio gives us nature with a twist.
Never mind art as beauty,
he takes a basket of fruit and turns it into a life and death drama.
He's pushing the envelope, challenging the very way the painting was supposed to be.
It wasn't for the timid, but painting this sharp wasn't going to go unnoticed
by those with an eye for quality.
A cardinal, no less - Francesco Maria del Monte -
No church mouse, our cardinal.
He lives in an enormous palazzo surrounded by poets, musicians and paintings.
Del Monte of the roving eye is the biggest player on the art market.
At the art dealer's over the road, the cardinal sees something that takes his fancy,
Card sharks.
Del Monte takes in the brilliant color, the joky action,
the wink-wink nudge-nudginess of it all.
Better still, he feels the presence of these people,
the rosy-cheeked kid sucker,
and the cool bravo about to take him down,
as if they were right in front of him.
Hey!
[laughing]
The cardinal buys his painting for a song, and then makes Caravaggio an offer he can't refuse.
"Why don't you move into the palazzo? Smartest company in Rome.
Poets, philosophers. Terrific kitchen, my dear.
Never a dull moment.
And, the music! Well you do like music, don't you?
Caravaggio liked music, all right.
And here he is, at the back of this tight little group,
holding the cornet.
Do we need Cupid on the left to let us know its love songs are their thing?
Don't think so.
The lead singer is crying his eyes out,
and he's just tuning up.
Now, there were lots of paintings of young boys with lutes in Baroque Rome,
but never anything quite like this.
Nothing this close-up.
Nothing this fleshy.
And so close to us!
It's like - oh yes - four youths in a closet.
Excuse me, so sorry, don't mean to intrude.
Oh no, come on in, darling. Pull up a cushion. Join us.
We're just rehearsing.
The claustrophobia has a point, and it's not erotic.
What he's doing is demolishing the safety barrier between the viewer and the painting.
Caravaggio's art crushes the safety barrier of the frame.
It tears away the separation.
It reaches you.
[choral singing]
It was one thing painting pretty boys for del Monte.
It was quite another painting for the great churches of Rome.
But in 1599, Caravaggio won the commission to paint two scenes from the life of St. Matthew,
at the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of St. Luigi.
It would be a test of whether he could make a new kind of art for the public
in the place that really counted.
Whether he could move them to faith and salvation.
But the martyrdom of Matthew, the showpiece for the chapel, turned into a massive headache.
The commission called for big architectural settings,
the martyr with his eyes rolled to heaven,
a cast of hundreds, angels on clouds.
Now Caravaggio knew he didn't want any part of that.
But he didn't know what to do instead.
Blocked, he turned to the scene for the other wall.
Somehow, when he thought about the calling of Matthew, a light went on.
Why? Because it was about a sinner. Not a saint.
"Where have you been?"
"Me? Where have I been? I've been here for an hour. Come on. Sit down."
Suddenly it all made sense. What the church was looking for,
and what Caravaggio was born to do.
Make something sacred out of the lives of the squalid.
So instead of setting the calling in some fantasy holy land,
Caravaggio beams Jesus down to a dim room in Rome.
It's a dive, really.
Torn paper shades on the windows.
Characters from the card shops and other low-lives gathered to witness the big moment.
Half of them don't even notice when the two mysterious strangers, Christ and St. Peter,
enter the room.
Freeze-frame. The finger points.
"Who, me?"
"Yes, you, Matthew. You miserable creature.
We don't need the virtuous for this job. We need scum, like you."
And for this instant of redemptive transformation, Caravaggio had another stunning idea.
Instead of highlighting Christ, cover him up.
The less we see of him, the more we concentrate on that extended finger.
And through that finger comes a bolt of radiance, that changes Matthew the sinner into Christ's disciple.
It's all about the light.
The light that's too pure and too strong for the spiritually short-sighted.
The old man with the glasses and the cash to receive.
Now, if you think this sounds a bit like a theatre or the movies, well, you're absolutely right.
What Caravaggio wanted was for people to come into the darkness, in this space,
and suddenly find themselves in the presence not of a painting at all,
but a real event.
Seeing is believing.
[no dialog]
With the Calling of Matthew finished, Caravaggio returned to the painting for the other wall,
Matthew's martyrdom, and his problem had gone.
He strips the scene of its remoteness, its solemnity,
and instead gives us what he knew all about - a brutal assault in a back street.
Terrified, chaotic, hysterical - the figures spin around out of control.
The scene is glimpsed as if you were running away, which is exactly what Caravaggio has painted himself doing.
It's all flicker-flicker, strobe bit, hand held, stuttering and shrieking.
And in the middle of all this manic action, there is one fixed point.
Flood-lit, so you can't miss him, the naked assassin, finishing off his hit.
Caravaggio makes the sinner, not the saint, the hub on which everything spins.
It's all shockingly mixed up, with the painter as a fleeing coward.
And yet, it was a triumph.
Caravaggio must have thought, "What can't I get away with?"
He's 30 years old. The Matthews have made him an overnight sensation.
The church commissions roll in.
But it all starts to go to his head.
The other Caravaggio shows up.
Violent, abusive, unpredictable.
[Shouting and laughing]
And the more successful he is, the weirder his behavior gets.
His brother, Giovanni Battista, a priest, comes to see the painter in del Monte's palace.
"I've got no brother. Never had one," says Caravaggio.
Brother leaves, crushed, bewildered.
He gets himself up in a fancy black outfit, but then he wears it until it's in tatters.
Then there's his dog, Crow, which he teaches to walk on its hind legs.
[laughing]
If you're another painter and you see this lot coming towards you, watch out.
Caravaggio and his mates particularly get off on abusing rivals and imitators.
"We'll fry your balls in oil," was one of the choice insults recorded in court.
Whether he meant it or not, all this physical aggression,
all this sweaty closeness on the borderline between pathos and trouble,
carried over into Caravaggio's art, with shockingly moving results.
Only someone who rubs shoulders with the poorest people in Rome could produce painting like this.
Christ grabs Doubting Thomas's wrist, guiding his finger deep into his wound.
Burying it in his body, until Thomas believes.
Caravaggio says, "You don't just look at my pictures, you don't just stare,
You feel them."
"OK," we say. "OK, we feel it. We believe. We believe."
He doesn't do it just for effect.
It's because no one else painting in Rome takes the message of Christianity more seriously than this sinner.
Christ says, "The wretched of the Earth can be saved,"
and they are what Caravaggio gives us.
The gospel is happening right here. Right now.
When people come into church and see them, they are thunderstruck.
Their lives change. Their eyes open, their hearts pound.
In the presence of sacred drama, so vivid, so physical,
they think they can stretch out and touch them.
The most hardened sinner, the worst sneerer, believes.
This was the painter the church had been waiting for.
Here's St. Paul, flat on his back, his eyeballs scorched yellow by the blinding light of revelation.
Next to him, St. Peter bears his load of cowardly guilt, crucified upside down, unworthy, he says,
to be martyred the same way as Christ.
No one could touch Caravaggio for capturing the sheer weight of the gospels.
His faith is carnal. The bodies in his masterpieces are trapped in flesh,
even when they're the son of God.
But wasn't that the point of the gospel?
Christ's presence on Earth.
Not just a weightless angel, but in the flesh of man.
The point is, he's not just an art revolutionary.
This sinner is also a devout Christian, an evangelist for the unwashed.
Can you imagine how pilgrims coming to Rome, their Italian Jerusalem,
felt when confronted by this image of themselves?
Here's a painter who understood what it was like to live inside the grimy skin of the poor and the pious.
His street casting is astounding!
His Madonna of Loreto is just a local girl, standing in her doorway.
And instead of the usual crowd of the reverent, all we have kneeling before her are two old pilgrims who've plodded miles.
on their bare and calloused feet.
Faced with this homage to filthy feet, some in the church may well have felt that Caravaggio had gone too far,
the dreaded word - indecent - began to crop up whenever his name was mentioned.
Perhaps that's why Giovanni Baglione, one of his imitators, got the plum job of painting the resurrection
in the new Jesuit church, and Caravaggio didn't.
Not long afterwards a poem did the rounds of Rome's rougher taverns.
>> Giovanni Baglioni, you are a know-nothing. Your pictures are just dogs.
You will not earn a brass farthing with them.
>> [laughing]
>> So you'll have to go 'round with your arse in the air,
>> [laughing] [Inaudible].
[drink pours]
>> Awfully sorry. I won't be able to join in with a chorus of praise,
but you are quite unworthy of the chain that you are wearing,
and a disgrace to painting.
>> Yes.
Whether the verses were written by Caravaggio or one of his pals we'll never know.
Baglioni sues for libel, and Caravaggio is arrested and thrown in jail.
The court record of the trial is the only time we hear Caravaggio's words directly.
>> Poems? What poems?
So they're read aloud to the whole court.
>> [laughing] Oh, those poems!
Months roll by, with Caravaggio still in jail.
Then, finally, without a verdict, he's released to house arrest.
If he leaves without written permission, he gets a stint rowing as a galley slave.
Does this stop him in his tracks?
Hardly.
>> Five hours after nightfall, Michelangelo de Caravaggio, carrying a sword and dagger, was brought in by my men.
When asked if he had a license he said yes, and presented it, so was dismissed.
I told him he could leave and said, "Good night, Sir," to which he replied, "Shove it up your arse."
So arrested him, since I could not tolerate such fee.
>> I was seized on the Corso outside the Church of St. Horatio, because I had a sword and a dagger.
I have no written license to carry a sword or a dagger.
However, the governor of Rome had given verbal orders to the captain and corporal
to let me carry them.
I have no other license.
Even his closest friends couldn't work out how the painter of religious marvels and the psycho
could inhabit the same person.
>> We're having dinner in the tavern of the mall,
>> And across the room was
>> Michelangelo de Caravaggio.
>> The famous painter.
>> He asked the waiter if the artichoke's been done in butter or oil.
>> Being on the same plate.
>> Reasonable question.
>> Are these done in oil or butter?
>> I don't know. Smell it yourself.
>> Do you think you're talking to some sort of bum?
[laughing]
[screaming]
>> Smell the artichoke! What does it smell like? Smell it! Smell it yourself, eh?
Smell the artichoke! Smell it!
Smell it!
>> Michelangelo took this somewhat amiss, and he says, "You've made a mistake, you damn cuckold, you think you're servin' some sort of bum!"
>> And he picked up the artichokes and he threw them at the waiter.
>> At no point did he take out a sword and threaten the waiter.
>> Smell it!
[gates closing]
Of course, Caravaggio doesn't just pick fights with people in restaurants,
He's fighting tradition, with painting past and present.
He lands a commission for the Church of Santa Maria, here in Trastevere.
It should have been right up his street.
One of the poorest areas of Rome.
At its heart was the Coat of the Virgin Mary,
to whom the women of the district fervently prayed
to cure the sick, make the barren fertile, and save the plague-stricken.
Who better than Caravaggio to paint the death of Mary?
According to Christian tradition, Mary's death wasn't a death at all,
but a sleep before her ascent to heaven.
Just as the conception and birth of her son had been a fleshless miracle,
so her death was a fleshless exit.
Well, Caravaggio didn't do fleshlessness.
He did flesh.
In this case, dead flesh.
That was the first thing the Carmelite sisters of the church noticed.
His Mary was dead.
Her skin was green, her body bloated under a screaming red dress.
Once that appalling shock had registered, worse was rumored.
That Caravaggio had taken a drowned whore from the morgue
and made her into the Madonna.
For me, this picture is the most moving of any painted of this scene.
The apostles brought to the death bed, heads bowed in sorrow.
Mary Magdalene crumpled with grief.
Of course, if the virgin's just having a nice snooze prior to the lift to paradise,
why should anyone be so distraught?
But the weight of grief here is measured by the sense of a real death.
It's a response not to immortality, but mortality.
Wherever Mary is going, she's leaving our world,
and that's reason enough to mourn.
Not everyone saw it that way, and once they got over their shock,
the Carmelite sisters who commissioned the painting gave it back.
[heavy breathing]
It must have been a bitter rejection, and it marks a major turning point.
From now on, Caravaggio was even quicker to take offense,
and his life was about to spiral into a series of disastrous encounters
that would culminate in an act of appalling bloodshed.
It all started with a woman. Her name was Lena, a real flesh-and-blood Roman beauty.
Much the most voluptuous of all of Caravaggio's models.
She'd also caught the eye of another man, Mariano Pasqualone.
So Pasqualone goes to see Lena's mama,
says he's in love, wants to marry her,
wants to make a respectable woman of her, and oh - by the way -
does she know what goes on in those long modeling sessions in Caravaggio's studio?
Mama goes to see the painter.
Doesn't take much to imagine what happens next.
Honor besmirched, Caravaggio explodes in fury, wants to challenge Pasqualone to a duel,
but the coward won't wear a sword by day.
There is a huge shouting match on the Corso.
That night, in the Piazza Novone, Pasqualone is attacked from behind.
Blood, screams. Victim miraculously still alive. Assailant flees into the darkness.
No one is in any doubt who it is.
By late May 1606, he's just a homicide waiting to happen.
[sword clanking]
[powerful music]
[heavy breathing]
[screaming]
And you think, well, it was always going to turn out badly, wasn't it?
Tomassoni's taken to his house, where he makes his final confession, and bleeds to death.
Wanted for murder, Caravaggio goes on the run.
In his absence he is sentenced to abande capitale.
There's a price on his head. Literally.
Show up with his head in a basket and you get the reward.
[rippling water]
Once again his network of patrons and admirers rallies round to keep him afloat.
Throughout the summer of 1606 they help him hide out,
and in return, sick and sober by what he's done, Caravaggio makes paintings.
Paintings that help him on his way far beyond the jurisdiction of the papal state.
Somewhere the police and bounty hunters won't find him.
Naples.
Here, in a city where cutting your throat is nothing to get worked up about
Caravaggio is a celebrity.
But his paintings are full of pity, tenderness, and mercy.
Hardly surprising, since as a murderer he knows his immortal soul is in grave danger.
A year goes by since the murder and escape from Rome.
The Neapolitans can't get enough of him.
Caravaggio is doing great work, and guess what?
No fights.
So why does he suddenly leave, and end up in Malta, of all places?
Not to be a crusader against the Turks, that's for sure.
But there was one thing that Malta, the Christian island in the Muslim Mediterranean, could give him which Naples couldn't -
Status. Respect. A knighthood.
One of his patrons makes the right noises, and introduces Caravaggio
to the Holy Order of the Knights of St. John.
One of most rich and powerful organizations in Europe.
Becoming a knight would mean not only honor and respect,
but also a chance to wipe the bloody slate of his past clean.
Now, normally being a convicted murderer would be an insurmountable obstacle to admission.
Not for Caravaggio.
On 14 July 1608 the robe with the Maltese Cross is put around the fugitive's shoulders,
and he is officially proclaimed one of the greatest of painters, living or dead.
[choral singing]
In exchange for all this, Caravaggio undertook a painting for the knights' cathedral.
You have to imagine this place filled with robes and incense,
and echoing with deep, dark anthems.
The beheading of John the Baptist is the biggest thing Caravaggio had ever done.
Seventeen feet long, filling the entire eastern wall of the oratory.
It's movie screen-sized.
He wanted the knights to feel it not as a painting, but as a living drama going on right in front of them.
No wonder it sends a shiver through us, this thing.
This infamous butchery.
Taking place in a grim prison yard, where the body of John the Baptist has been dragged
to have his head hacked off.
It's a scene of remorseless cruelty that tears your insides out and turns art upside down.
Art is supposed to bring us beauty, but just look at that semicircle of figures,
and you'll see something has gone terribly wrong.
That perfect lily-white arm carries the golden bowl into which the Baptist's head will drop.
The solemn soldier, the embodiment of authority,
is giving the order for an atrocity.
That perfect nude is a cold-blooded hit man with a knife.
The action seems to go on forever.
Until, like that anguished old woman,
all you can do is scream.
Caravaggio gives us death, twice over.
The death of John the Baptist, and the death of our most cherished illusion about art,
that it can make us finer, more humane.
"Dream on," says Caravaggio.
In the face of this barbaric power, all we can ever be are impotent spectators, just like those prisoners in the grim darkness,
screwing their necks to get a look.
It's this ruthless honesty that makes this such a modern work.
Art without any vision of consolation or redemption.
It's a chilling scene.
For me, it's about the most powerful statement an artist could possibly make
about the human condition.
About the brutality of state murder.
But it's also autobiography.
Caravaggio has signed this picture, writing his name in the blood of John the Baptist.
Only a guilt-stricken killer could possibly feel this desperately about wanting the violence to stop.
Only Caravaggio could want so badly for the blood of the martyr to wash away his crime.
[saintly singing]
Now it would be nice, wouldn't it, if that was the end of the story?
Outlaw painter redeemed by knockout masterpiece.
Art changed forever. Sinner saved.
But in Caravaggio's case, salvation doesn't come that easily.
The painter who wants violence to stop can't even control his own.
Barely a month after he's been admitted to the Order of St. John, Caravaggio's imprisoned for assaulting a brother knight.
But, incredibly, he manages to escape from his underground cell,
over the castle walls, and into a boat
which takes him to Sicily.
He returns to the safety of Naples, and it's here his enemies finally catch up with him.
He's jumped, leaving an inn,
his face and head slashed and gashed so badly, he's left for dead.
But he doesn't die, and in this, his darkest moment, recovering from his beating,
news reaches him from Rome.
The pope's nephew, Scipione Borghese, is arranging a pardon.
So Caravaggio sets about repaying him, the only way he can,
the only way he's ever got anywhere.
It's a self-portrait, unlike any painted before.
Usually when artists looked in the mirror they liked what they saw,
and what they saw were men, young or old, whose features were ennobled by their calling,
to bring virtue, beauty and grace into the world.
Now, look at Caravaggio.
A decapitated head. He's Goliath.
A bloody grotesque. A monster.
In the beheading of John the Baptist, evil was done by other people.
Here it's Caravaggio who's the embodiment of wickedness.
In this victory of virtue over evil, David is supposed to be the center of attention,
but have you ever seen a less jubilant victor?
On his sword is inscribed, "humilitas occidit superbiam", humility conquers pride.
A battle that's been fought out inside Caravaggio's head, between the two sides of the painter portrayed here.
There's the devout, courageous David Caravaggio,
and then there's the criminal sinner, Goliath Caravaggio.
"I know who I've been," says the pathetic head, unable to look us in the eyes,
"I know what I've done." It's a desolate vision, offered to us in utter blackness,
no virtue, no grace. Just the dark truth from the inside of Caravaggio's head,
flooded with tragic self-knowledge.
For me, the power of his art is the power of truth,
not least about ourselves.
For if we're ever to have a chance of redemption,
it must begin with an act of recognition that in all of us the Goliath competes with the David.
In July 1610, Caravaggio rolled up his paintings and set sail from Naples,
finally heading home.
Sailing north, his boat stopped at the tiny harbor of Parlo, on the coast just west of Rome.
Here, the local captain of the guard either hadn't heard about his pardon
or mistook him for some other fugitive.
Either way, he's thrown in jail.
By the time he's managed to pay his way out, his boat has sailed off, along with his paintings,
his offering to Borghese.
Desperate to catch up with his ship with its precious cargo,
Caravaggio sets off north towards Porto Ercole, 100 km through the malarial infested swamp country, the Miramar.
[trudging footsteps]
Here, the final disaster awaited.
In pathetic attempt to hail a ship, Caravaggio starts running along the beach under the broiling July sun
before collapsing in the sand.
By now he's suffering from a raging fever, and is taken to a local monastic hospital.
There, according to a contemporary report, without the aid of God or man,
he died, as miserably as he'd lived.
>> No!!!!!
It's sometime later that the pope's nephew, Scipione Borghese, finally receives the paintings
with which Caravaggio had hoped to win his pardon.
The cardinal finds himself face to face with the picture of the painter
as the slain Goliath.
The cardinal isn't used to this.
Artists had been given their gift by God to bring beauty into the world,
to put mortal creatures in touch with their higher selves.
That's the way it was supposed to be.
But Caravaggio never did anything the way it was supposed to be.
"Here I am," says this dead face which seems still alive,
"They said whoever delivers my head will get a reward. Well, I'm turning myself in.
Will that do? Can I have my reward?
Can I have my pardon?"
"Sorry," says the cardinal. "So sorry. You're too late."