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If you were to die tomorrow, how would you be remembered?

What have you done that has any significance?

Will God welcome you to heaven?

Did you do him justice?

He tested the hell out of me.

He gave me hands that can create great beauty

yet cursed me with a deep anger.

A murderous anger.

And now my enemies have multiplied in the dark.

These wounds are testament to that.

Idiot! Wow.

Look at me.

Hiding like a sewer rat

on a boat sailing to a city that

once embraced me as the greatest,

exalted me like those of old:

Michelangelo, Raphael, da Vinci.

My paintings, my passion,

set on the highest altar an artist can desire.

They loved me.

And now they condemn me.

Those snakes of Rome.

But I was good at playing their game.

The best.

So why have they deserted me?

I know that forgiveness has been promised

and I trust it will be honoured.

But I will, on bended knee and bearing gifts,

return to my rightful place as their master of light.

I hate all this snivelling and grovelling to Papal power,

but I can't be a fugitive forever.

I need redemption. I need sanctuary.

For there are many that seek my head on a platter... literally.

I know what it is to paint mortality.

To tell a story of human drama, of violence and betrayal.

Of life and death.

And yes, I may die tomorrow,

made to disappear, never to be seen again.

My fate is in the hands of others.

So, I ask...

who will remember my name when mortality strikes me down?

Will my art be my saviour?

Who will tell my story?

Caravaggio was born in Milan in 1571.

Now, Milan was a tragic city

through the suffering from plague, famine, warfare,

through the years of Caravaggio's childhood.

The life of Caravaggio and the art of Caravaggio overlap.

It's not possible to understand Caravaggio's art

if you don't understand his life.

You understand Caravaggio's life by looking at his works.

The darkness of Caravaggio's art

and the sort of sense that he is an abandoned man,

proud, satirical, difficult, not easy to get on with,

and it's been suggested this goes back

to Caravaggio's very stormy and tragic childhood.

Making was in my blood.

I remember, as a child in Milan,

hearing the sound of my father's hammer carving stone.

The workshop filled with a fine

dust floating in shafts of light.

His virtuous toil only matched by a deep religious conviction.

But like most of Europe,

Milan was going through a period of tribulation.

The city was riddled with plague.

People everywhere suffering, starving,

breathing in that deadly stench.

A purgatory of souls.

Darkness descended on our little world

while the devil took his revenge.

God knows how I survived.

We fled to my grandfather's house in nearby Caravaggio,

in search of shelter from the horrors.

But darkness haunted the doors of

many a house in Caravaggio too...

including my own.

His father and his grandfather

die in the plague on the same day.

And his mother, Lucia Arattori,

is left with a whole family of small

children to look after and bring up.

In 1584, Caravaggio's mother put a large sum of money

into buying Caravaggio an apprenticeship

in Milan with Simone Peterzano.

Peterzano thought that he was,

signed himself as, a pupil of Titian.

So, he brought to Milan some knowledge of Venetian art

which I think was important to Caravaggio.

My brain was buzzing with theories, pictorial designs,

how to mix colours,

oils, frescos, drawings, observing

nature, and painting life.

After mother died,

I had to wait two years for my meagre inheritance.

Two years!

But when it came through, I was out of there.

Out of Caravaggio, out of Milan,

rushing towards my destiny as a great artist,

in the city I most desired...

Rome.

When Caravaggio arrives in Rome from Lombardy,

it seems that he first painted copies of devotional works.

This is the lowest job you could get as an artist starting out.

And he did that in exchange for room and board.

Then he's said to have painted heads, three heads a day.

I mean, real sort of hack work.

And then he painted what was called half-length figures.

You don't get a sense of permanence.

You don't get a sense of progression either.

You get the impression he's

jumping from workshop to workshop.

Rome was tricky at first.

I remember the cramped conditions and meagre meals

offered at my lodgings with Pucci, the priest.

We used to call him Monsignor Salad

because that's all you got to eat at night!

But every artist needed a patron in Rome.

You worked the streets, selling your efforts for a poor return,

while your stomach ached.

Rome in the 1590s was in a process of transformation.

After the Sack of Rome, its population had dwindled.

The monuments that had made it so glorious

were covered with weeds and grass.

And all travellers going to Rome in the 16th century

comment on the atmosphere of desolation and poverty.

First of all, there was a vast building programme

instigated by the energetic building pope, Sixtus V,

who wanted to turn Rome into a symbol

of the centre of Christianity.

It has the Papal Court, which is at the centre.

And circulating around this court

are the courts of the great nobles,

the courts of the ambassadors, the courts of the cardinals.

And all these are sources of artistic patronage.

But then a stroke of luck.

Old man Cesari offered me a

position in his workshop. Brilliant!

He was a prominent artist who was well connected.

Pope Clement VIII, who loved him, knighted him,

and gave him the name Cavaliere d'Arpino.

His studio was like oxygen,

but Cesari was all baby-blue heavens, pillowy clouds,

airy ascensions accompanied by cherubs

and choirs of attractive angels.

He had me working on decorative

motifs for his church commissions.

When he moved into Cesari's studio,

he was following a well-worn path

that had happened in the Renaissance.

I mean, artists went into artists' studios

and they mixed paints, they created pigments.

And slowly they'd be given more to do.

I think in Caravaggio's case, as you see,

there's still life with fruit, baskets of fruit,

then those still lives with fruit

become still lives with beautiful young men.

Two, three figures, four figures,

five figures, more virtuosity.

Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian.

I so wanted to be like them,

to be revered by popes, commissioned by popes,

revel in my connection with God, directly through my painting.

Remembered and adored.

I was beginning to attract the

attention of some influential folk.

Like Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte,

collector of the new, supporter

of youth and with the Pope's ear.

Cardinal del Monte is a key early supporter of Caravaggio's,

and I think Caravaggio really owes

his turn in his fortunes to Del Monte.

And led to his patronage and also lodgings in his palace.

This was really key,

that Caravaggio finally had a

wealthy patron looking out for him.

The fact that he was painting these unusual subjects

of musicians, fortune tellers, gipsies,

everyday subjects, that he elevated and gave status,

almost like they were history painting.

Caravaggio was truly innovative.

Everything in his painting drags you into that space.

I think personally, that he also knew his market

and they were going to end up

in the private boudoirs of cardinals and princes,

and they're of young, beautiful men.

I think in the Sick Bacchus, we see a self-portrait,

and it's an extraordinary painting

because it's a painting of illness.

It's a painting, probably of him in his early twenties,

probably suffering from malaria,

and at that time malaria was known as the Roman disease.

It was thought that you got malaria by staying out too late,

and if anybody stayed out too late, it was Caravaggio.

But it's also a painting about

the fact that everything changes.

It decays, fruit decays.

The grape contains bloom.

If you taste it, you'll have that dry, acidic taste

of the sweetness of the grape.

And he's holding the grapes as though he's about to crush them.

He doesn't just do a sick Bacchus,

he does a beautiful Bacchus

with the reflections in the glass and the wine.

But it's almost like he has to do a sick Bacchus

as a counterpoint to the beautiful Bacchus

as a warning for the ills of

drinking wine and eating raw flesh,

which was what you did in the bacchanalia.

It would seem that he always

lived a fairly solitary life, a bohemian life.

He frequented the various taverns.

He went around with a sword.

He liked to party.

As far as family is concerned,

he never married and had no children.

Some documents reveal that he did have lovers though.

These are quite sporadic testimonies

but they certainly suggest

he had lovers both female and male.

Boy Bitten by Lizard is one of Caravaggio's key early works,

painted in Rome in the mid-1590s.

And it shows a boy in half length

with this beautiful still life beside him.

And he is shown in a kind of dramatic moment of pain.

There's a lizard tenaciously clinging to his finger

and he's recoiling in pain, but it's a very enigmatic picture.

A lot has been written about what it means.

Is it an allegory, perhaps an allegory of touch?

Is it a warning of the perils lurking behind beautiful things?

The lizard was clearly hidden amongst the fruit.

The picture is very sensual.

There is a sensuality to a lot of these

early pictures of half-length boys

and there's something sort of

effeminate about the rose behind the ear

and this has often been seen

as an interpretation of Caravaggio's own sexuality

but we have to remember he's not

painting these pictures for himself,

we think he's painting them for the open market.

And he often gives more prominence to the still life.

The still life is often the most

accomplished part of these pictures.

We have to remember Caravaggio's own words, were that, you know,

painting still life required as

much artistry as painting figures.

And this was a really revolutionary thing to say.

In the, kind of, genre hierarchy,

still life is really at the bottom.

"Spogliando modelli e alzando lumi."

So, undressing models, so, painting people from life

and lifting or enhancing the light effects.

These are the two most revolutionary

aspects of Caravaggio's art.

Interesting, the way the world can turn.

The look of horror as you lose your head.

The way a face contorts in a convex mirror.

Here is Medusa,

feared for her ability to turn men into stone with a glance.

The hideous Gorgon with her headdress of living serpents.

I'll tell you what a bit of talent can earn you.

Food, board, steady work

and the occasional introduction to some very rich people.

What's not to like?

Rome has an extremely dark side.

It is a city that is intensely skewed towards the male.

And to satisfy the needs of this male population

there's a huge prostitute population.

And they're confined to a part of Rome called the Ortaccio,

that is "the evil garden".

And beside the prostitutes, there's

a huge population of the poor,

of the dispossessed, of beggars,

of soldiers fighting, rowdiness in the streets.

I got drunk on danger.

Taverns, whores, tricksters, thieves and lots of brawls.

I gave off with my knuckles if needs

be, or with the flash of blade on flesh.

Honour and respect is all you have

in the shadows of the Campo Marzio.

Arrogant youth, cheats, wayward souls and the grifting bravi.

Caravaggio reproduced on the canvas

an image he knew well,

an image of a tavern,

of players playing cards,

of players cheating at cards

The important thing is that this painting represents

the condemnation of the card game

which depicts a young man being cheated by the cardsharps.

And he shows all this with the typical light

of his early artistic years.

In those early years, Caravaggio made very colourful,

very bright paintings.

I'm not stupid.

I knew my choice of models

offended some of our holy brothers in the Church.

But my models were my friends,

available and willing for a bit of coin.

Like Mario Minniti, for example.

He was a pretty boy, I painted him a lot.

And then there was my vivacious little Fillide.

She'd do anything for money.

A queen amongst the whores and villains of the Ortaccio.

Fillide was hardly a virgin and never a saint,

but she made a great Catherine.

Her raw beauty still haunts me.

Now, Saint Catherine was of noble descent,

a virgin martyr,

and she's usually represented as an enchanting looking figure

with her eyes cast heavenwards.

Instead of this, Caravaggio paints this young Roman woman

who looks very directly at the spectator.

A kind of ambiguity that is completely

new in representations of holy figures.

These wonderful draperies in dark violet and midnight blue.

Hovering beside her is this astonishing sword.

And the sword is Caravaggio's duelling rapier.

And the bottom of it seems tinged with blood.

Though I think, in fact,

it's the reflection of the red from the cushion in the sword.

But the sword is sort of hovering there.

And Caravaggio's arranged Saint Catherine's hands.

They're sort of long and elegant,

as though they're not quite holding the sword,

and I think it does give the picture

a strange, sexual, erotic tension,

this deadly rapier in the centre,

Saint Catherine's hands

and this Roman woman looking out so directly.

Now here he is in the city of Raphael,

the city of Michelangelo, and he doesn't draw.

He paints directly from the life model.

But it's the first time that

Caravaggio has used these life studies

to create a dramatic historical story.

So, it is really a big turning point in his art.

Of course, I also gave Fillide

the starring role as Judith beheading Holofernes.

Hm. She loved it!

That look!

Oh, I remember that scowl.

She could cut you with a glance,

though the slice of a sword was much more effective

when it came to beheading Assyrian generals.

Dressed to impress and catching the

eye of any man who might see her,

she played the rich and beautiful heroine so well.

This general, Holofernes, was beguiled

into a drunken stupor by Judith

who then approached his bed.

She took hold of his hair and slashed twice across his neck.

Her maid was on standby to bundle

their gory trophy into a sack.

The act of violence, brought into

focus by the horror on his face,

painted at the exact point of death.

Deliberate on my part.

His last thought in all its bloody reality.

Took hours to get the angle of that head right.

The chance to convey truth, rare.

Profound, unblinking visions of painful truth, rare.

The wealthy can buy chapels to pave their way to heaven,

but the artist can wield his brush

to venerate his pathway with truth.

At last!

I got my chance when the French Cardinal Cointerel

bought a side chapel inside San Luigi dei Francesi.

It's a spectacularly beautiful and awe-inspiring church

that I used to visit all the time

when I started living in the Piazza Madama.

Del Monte shoved me forward and I got my first major commission.

My first series of paintings with multiple figures.

My first stab at real dramatic truth. The Contarelli Chapel.

Not one, but three large paintings.

The subject, biblical, of course.

St Matthew, the tax collector one.

Story done to death, but who cares?

Most people can't read the Bible anyway.

They have to witness the story in all its pictorial glory.

And no one had witnessed before what I produced.

With malachite, bone black, red lake,

lead white, vermilion, and yellow ochre,

all mixed with walnut oil,

I created magical alchemy!

The first thing that happens when you enter the church

and you see the Contarelli Chapel,

you have this amazing dynamic explosion of colour.

The scale and the grandeur of

these things outstrips everything.

And then on top of that,

you've got this really, really intelligent way

of constructing the three stories.

He'd painted fortune tellers and card sharps,

but he'd never done anything like this.

So, it was a big gamble, with a lot resting on it,

but the French needed this church painted by the year 1600,

because it was the Jubileo.

The public unveiling of those

pictures in 1600 caused a sensation.

But you have to remember, until this point,

Caravaggio's paintings have not been accessible.

They've been inside people's homes, in palazzi,

only to a very small few they'd been accessible.

So, suddenly, for the wider artistic community

this is their first chance to

see what Caravaggio's capable of.

And we know artists flocked to Rome to see them,

that Caravaggio received the most exaggerated praise.

They were jealous. He was suddenly

the most famous artist in Rome,

going from being relatively unknown

to being a sort of superstar.

In a gloomy chapel lit mostly by candles,

I harnessed the darkness with a single shaft of light.

Sunlight. Our light.

God's blazing orb.

"And Jesus saw a man called Matthew

at his seat in the customs house

and said to him, 'Follow me, '

and Matthew rose and followed him."

It's just an astonishing painting.

There's no perspective like in the Renaissance.

And all the figures on the left seem to be responding.

And there's that lovely moment where Matthew points at himself

saying, "What, I?"

And then Christ's hand comes out in this wonderful gesture,

which is a direct copy of the Sistine Chapel,

this finger pointing towards Matthew.

And the two guys, either side of him, the spadas,

these kind of hired, glamorous thugs,

one's about to leap off, thinking

that Christ threatened his master,

and the other one's pulling back with the light hitting him,

thinking, what's going on?

And the light goes across Christ's head,

and just picks out a slight sliver of a halo.

It's absolute genius.

What Caravaggio introduces there

is a new kind of narrative where the actions, the gestures,

the expressions are ambiguous. You can't always decipher them.

I think his contemporaries would have enjoyed this

in the same way that we do.

Like us, they would have

wondered, which figure is Matthew?

Is Matthew actually about to get

up and follow Christ, or is he not?

Is the figure at the end of the table meant to be the young man

who could not throw his riches aside

and pass through the needle's eye?

Now, he did introduce a new kind of inward turned expression,

a new language of gesture,

that has the, sort of, fleeting ambiguities

that would have interested contemporary observers.

Caravaggio's light is a particular light.

It clearly has various meanings.

It represents precisely the light that illuminates the scene

in a theatrical way,

but it also represents the light of God, who redeems.

And light is Caravaggio's ally.

Caravaggio embraced light like a friend.

Light allowed him to remove the dark,

to eliminate the dark,

to show the things that happen in the dark.

The dark is like a presence that he felt inside him.

He knew he was a great artist, but also a great sinner.

The shadow and the darkness increasingly dominate the light.

In the darkness, recoiling on the floor

and pierced by a shaft of divine illumination,

we see the apostle Matthew,

a former tax collector,

whose calling has redeemed him from the dark abyss of sin

and guided him on a righteous path.

The King of Ethiopia lusted after Matthew's niece

but Matthew rebuked him,

because she was a bride of Christ, a nun.

So, the king sent a soldier to kill Matthew for the offense.

He was slayed and left humiliated,

alone in his martyrdom,

surrounded by a crowd of passive onlookers...

including me.

I made sure I was present, a witness to the act.

No one was rushing to save Matthew,

but I believe my empathy is plain to see.

A discerning observer of morality,

the human condition, and faith.

All delivered with consummate skill.

He includes himself partly to say,

this is the world that I have made,

this is realistic painting, and what an astonishing artist I am.

And I think no painter who didn't

feel the sort of power of sin,

of possible damnation, of guilt, could have painted these works.

And I think also, on a very simple level,

that no artist who didn't have

a genuine religious response to the Bible

could have painted them with such emotion for humankind,

and I think, above all, perhaps, in Caravaggio's paintings,

with such a feeling for the idea

that Christ came for the poor and for the dispossessed.

In the same year I painted the Martyrdom of Matthew,

I watched a heretic friar called Bruno burn at the stake.

What a spectacle!

Like Copernicus, Bruno had declared

that the Earth circled the Sun,

which was bad enough.

What was worse was his denial of the Virgin Mary.

His denial of the divine Christ, his denial of eternal damnation.

What a madman!

Just goes to show, one word from the Pope

can damn a blasphemous friar...

or a wayward artist.

You've got these three paintings.

The one you're first facing is Saint Matthew and the angel,

where the angel recounts the gospel to Saint Matthew.

It has this amazing moment in it,

which I love in the whole cycle.

Just on the edge of the painting,

Matthew's teetering on a stool,

and the stool just edges off the front of the painting,

and it's that gesture you do when somebody says

you've got to get this down.

You've got to write this down, quick. Write this down.

And the angel's up top recounting

all the things he needs to put in.

He picks up the first thing, a stool and it's tottering,

like an urgency.

Saint Matthew's got to get this gospel

down while the angels are recounting it.

That's the first amazing thing you see.

The other formal aspect which has a great impact on the work

is that the stool is falling towards the spectator.

It is as if the Church and the message of the Church

was literally falling into the laps of the faithful

thus strengthening the religion of the Catholic Church.

The congregation participates

more directly in this story of Saint Matthew.

In my opinion, that's what Caravaggio wanted to convey.

The saint, and therefore the Church,

engaging and involving the viewer.

When it comes to his religious paintings,

you do have to know a little bit about the Catholic Reformation,

what it wanted from a religious artist,

what a religious painter was actually allowed to do.

The desire to transform the Church

and to free the Church of what people saw as corruption

and as false practises,

was initiated by the Catholics.

And this is why I tend to use the term Catholic Reformation

rather than Counter-Reformation,

because the desire to reform the Church

begins, really, before the Protestants.

This was a very prudish time,

nudity in churches is entirely forbidden.

And the Catholic Church wanted an art that is dramatic,

that is emotional, that appeals to the spectator.

One of the great Catholic Reformation

theorists, Cardinal Pagliotti,

says how much more moving it is to see a virgin die

than to read about it in a book.

So, they are looking for an art that'll be really in your face.

And, of course, Caravaggio gives them that,

although they don't always like it when they get it.

After the success at the Contarelli chapel,

I got asked to do a similar

commission for Santa Maria del Popolo,

to paint the Apostles of Rome, Saints Peter and Paul,

whose martyrdoms symbolised the rebirth of Roman Catholicism,

so rooted in their blood.

Another wealthy patron, Tiberio Cerasi, paid for the commission

and wanted the most advanced artists in Rome,

so, naturally, he chose me.

And the more established Annibale Carracci.

The paintings in Santa Maria del Popolo in the chapel

are two of the first paintings I saw of Caravaggio in situ.

And they flank a painting by Carracci of the Madonna,

which when you look at it,

immediately, it looks chocolatey boxy, it looks sweet.

These were contemporaries.

And then you cast your eyes left and right,

and on the left you have Saint Peter being martyred.

He's being pushed up on this cross

by these brutish figures who are straining to push him up.

And as he looks down,

this old man's face looking at these nails going through,

it's kind of controversial

because he's not meant to be looking at pain or suffering.

He's meant to be entering heaven.

He knows this is the moment of his martyrdom.

He's chosen to be martyred upside down.

But there's this reality in his face.

How do you do that in a painting?

My workmen, with blackened feet, twisted in the darkness,

their faces hidden, their bodies taut,

veins swollen as they strained to complete the task.

Peter looks old,

but I thought he needed to appear strong, muscular,

able to resist gravity and raise

his head to those who will listen.

I was in awe of his sacrifice.

A religious moment, brutally performed by brutal men.

One of Caravaggio's trademarks is the chiaroscuro lighting,

this very kind of forceful,

contrasted, light and dark effect

that he brings to his pictures.

And light plays such a key role in

carrying you around these paintings.

In the Crucifixion of Saint Peter,

it's the thing that picks out each brutish execution.

I mean, this whole picture is about martyrdom,

but it's actually about the, kind of, physical effort.

They're pulling and heaving and pushing

and the light picks up on Peter's own face,

which is ridden with fear. He looks terrified.

But he doesn't just use light for dramatic effect.

The lighting always has a underlying meaning,

whether it's a kind of divine light, the light of revelation,

the light of conversion.

And what you realise Caravaggio has

done, he's pared the whole thing back.

These figures sort of emerge from darkness.

For my Paul, time had stopped.

Although he had been violently flung from his horse,

a delicate light illuminated his face

as his open arms betrayed an ecstasy.

The light is not blinding but enters

Paul's soul like a powerful epiphany.

I wanted his stillness to become our

witness to a moment of conversion.

A sudden and complete transformation.

No longer an old man,

I decided to cast him as a young, common soldier.

His confused groom holds the reigns of a magnificent horse,

a working horse, bare back,

in reverse and delicately hovering,

as if from another reality.

He came along at a time

when the Catholic Church, certainly, was fighting.

They were fighting back against the new Protestantism.

One of things they talk about is,

how can we make these stories

more viable to the ordinary people

and one of things they talked about was spectacle and theatre

and I think Caravaggio gives them that in spades

with these new images, these new ideas, these new orders.

And he was right at the centre of all that.

My competitors called me

quarrelsome, volatile and paranoid.

Look, you will die on the streets

of Rome if you don't have steel.

I wasn't just bending the rules,

I was burning the rule book.

I will always defend my honour, with blunt force, if necessary,

that's just me.

The sword is only one of my weapons.

My brush is the other.

And with that I have status and loyalty beyond the streets,

with the lofty indulgence of patrons.

The commissions flowed with a series of smaller works

that attracted great attention.

The first was Christ at Emmaus.

Two disciples journeyed to Emmaus from Jerusalem,

depressed and disheartened after

witnessing the crucifixion of Christ.

As they travelled, Jesus drew near and joined them,

but was not recognised by them.

The inn keeper serves them supper

while Jesus discusses scripture.

According to Luke, "Jesus took bread, blessed it and broke it,

and gave it to them.

Their eyes were instantly opened, and they recognised him.

But then he vanished out of sight.

The disciples returned to Jerusalem to tell the others

that they had witnessed the resurrection of Christ."

The Supper at Emmaus is painted in 1601

for the Mattei brothers, a wealthy banking family in Rome,

and Caravaggio's still living in Del Monte's palace,

under Del Monte's protection,

but he is able to work for other wealthy patrons.

And there's a space at this table for us.

There's a way to draw you in.

This basket of fruit on the edge of the table,

that's sort of falling into our space,

as is also the jutting elbow of the disciple on the left

who's leaping out of his chair.

These are invading our space.

And this is one of the key things with Caravaggio.

We're not just passive viewers.

We become active participants in his pictures.

So, the innkeeper is standing passively beside them.

He's the only one who seems

completely unmoved by what's going on.

And if you see, he's the only one with his face in shadow.

He hasn't seen the light. He's completely in the dark.

He doesn't recognise Christ for who he is.

And then Caravaggio plays with his shadow.

Behind the head of Christ,

you have a sort of counter halo

created by the shadow of the innkeeper.

It's an incredibly sophisticated picture,

as well as being technically really masterful.

So, we have to kind of control the urge

to push that basket back on to the table.

We almost feel like pulling up a chair.

It's something he does again and again.

He also does it in his Doubting Thomas,

where you have these three apostles gathered around Christ,

entirely focused on this gesture of Thomas

with his groping finger going into the wound.

And there's a space in this sort of arc, this human arc, for us,

and we feel that we're sort of in the picture,

that we're one of the apostles witnessing this event.

Unless you feel something, painting is meaningless.

We are flesh and blood, after all,

and should experience art with a shiver through the spine.

Search for humanity and authenticity,

even in those cursed to damnation.

People like Judas, for example.

A conflicted and complex villain.

I show Judas mortified by his clumsy embrace,

with a furrowed brow, conflicted.

The consequences of his actions

reflected in the look of disappointment

on Christ's passive face.

It's hard to paint humiliation.

To get all that details right and still make it relatable,

to patrons, to ordinary people...

to myself.

The thing most people misunderstand about Caravaggio

is the fact that most of the documents

we've got are police records.

He's seen as a kind of blunt instrument.

Two weeks painting, two months

drinking, two months of violence.

And I think we have to look much

further than that, beyond the myth,

that myth, that violent myth of Caravaggio,

to find the beauty within the work.

Most people see him as this kind of thuggish brute

who painted like an animal, lived like an animal,

but I think there must have been so much more to him.

He must have had a great

intellect. He must have read well.

I think his paintings speak of his intellect

and he must have had something going for him

if he can be invited into the papal court

and the aristocracy of Rome at the time.

I don't think they would invite somebody

in who didn't have some level of charm.

In my opinion, the Victorious Cupid

is the most intellectual painting that he did.

Painted for Vincenzo Giustiniani,

and he had other paintings by Caravaggio.

Now, what the painting shows is

Cupid, who is the Roman god of love.

And he's holding two arrows, one black, one red,

to suggest the pains and the pleasures of love.

And I think a spectator would have

been really stunned by this apparition

of this very beautiful, very erotic young boy.

So, I think that the painting is really about the triumph of sex.

Love conquers all things.

And it's quite a common theme in early 17th century painting.

Musical instruments are archaic, the strings are broken,

they cannot be played, the

writing of the poet is illegible.

They have a kind of abandoned air.

But Caravaggio is the only artist

to show it in this real triumph of human sexuality.

And I think that this painting is full of comparisons with art,

with literature,

as well as being a shocking painting of a 12-year-old boy.

He was an odd personality. I

mean, he was a lone wolf, as well.

He didn't train students in how to paint.

He very much worked alone

and he was a revolutionary in the way that he painted.

And painting figures directly from life and onto the canvas

was the single most revolutionary

aspect of Caravaggio's art.

God, this journey is relentless.

My body aches, my arse throbs, and my stomach churns.

"Not long now," they say...

and then what?

A prodigal return or a broken promise?

All these thoughts of betrayal are driving me mad.

And yet, the spectre of my death haunts my broken sleep.

Am I to be sacrificed by the fathers of Rome?

Around 1604,

Caravaggio paints for a church in Rome the Deposition.

You can see how Caravaggio is clearly inspired by classicism.

This work, at first glance, almost looks like a sculpture.

We see a Christ that is truly dead,

that is heavy, and not just in spirit.

The person who supports him is struggling

and needs help from another.

They struggle to support this weight

that is lowered into the grave

like a kind of freight elevator

because there is that slab of stone

on which they are standing

which seems to be descending into the grave.

It's both very realistic and very significant.

Caravaggio is representing here

the important fact,

the human fact of death.

He is making death tangible.

Like others, the heirs of Ermete Cavalleti

had purchased a side chapel in the church of Sant'Agostino.

He wanted a picture of the Virgin of Loreto,

and they needed a great artist to paint it.

In a Roman doorway, I painted a young local girl, Lena,

as a beautiful Madonna standing with her child, a vision,

blessing two pilgrims stripped of wealth and worldly goods,

their bare and filthy feet, kneeling in servitude.

The honest labourer and devoted poor.

The poor will always be with you, says the Bible.

They're not only abundant, they're familiar.

Grace, poverty and piety, walking right

up to the door of the Holy Virgin.

We have the rich, dark velvet of Mary coming to the door

to greet these pilgrims who are in jute and hessian,

with the soles of their feet thrust out facing us,

with the dirt and the humus, this

earthiness, thrust out towards us,

these two pilgrims fixated by the Madonna

coming to the door holding the infant Jesus.

And what I love about the Jesus, the baby Jesus in this painting,

is that he's wriggling and she's holding him

like you do when babies wriggle.

And he just holds out his hand in a little gesture

to bless the pilgrims.

I think it's an extraordinary painting.

Just to the right of the doorway is a real Caravaggio moment

where the plaster is unrendered

and the brick shows through this beautiful doorway.

But just to the right, there's a hint of reality.

But I think it's a lovely indication

of the fact that nothing's perfect

in this world of humus and knees and dirt.

We have to realise that he's one of the first artists

to bring real people into paintings.

I mean, he turns bakers into the aristocracy.

He turns prostitutes into angels.

He's the first artist to really put real people

at the heart of his paintings and the heart of the story.

Everyone has parity. There isn't a hierarchy.

Throughout the Renaissance, there's a hierarchy of subjects,

of people, where people are positioned in a painting.

He places everyone in the same claustrophobic space.

And the idea that he takes people

who everybody knew, the baker,

the candlestick maker,

and turns them into a pope or a disciple or Pontius Pilate,

I think that's the thing that he does most.

I think it's the fact that everybody knew

who these characters were,

in a very small milieu of the Campo Marzio,

everybody knew who the baker was,

the prostitute, the barber, the surgeon,

everybody knew who these people were,

they were their own kind of locale

and to be inserted in paintings was

just quite an extraordinary thing.

To show human grief using a minimal action,

to create a compelling drama, is what occupies my mind.

I aim to build up a complex

pattern of gesture and expression,

of revelation both melancholic and enlightened,

in an effort to trigger a deep contemplation.

A revelation. Always bathed in a dramatic light.

Caravaggio certainly provoked people.

He certainly challenged people. His

paintings are very often outrageous.

And occasionally, not as often as people make out,

but occasionally, his paintings do get rejected.

But I don't think they were ever rejected on doctrinal grounds.

It's usually because they're indecorous,

because they are shocking, because they're lascivious.

They never seem to have had blasphemous intentions.

For instance, The Death of the Virgin,

which Caravaggio does for a church

in a working class area of Rome,

it is astonishing that he thought

they would want that painting,

because he paints this very, very dead Virgin.

He paints no heavens, no clouds of angels, nothing,

just a scene of terrible death.

He was shocked and horrified when

it was rejected by the Church.

So, he is pushing boundaries, artistically, all the time.

The Death of the Virgin is an extraordinary work.

It has been called the most religious

painting of the seventeenth century.

Caravaggio made this painting in Rome

just before he had to flee for his life.

She is clearly a dead woman.

Some have suggested he modelled her

on a drowned woman pulled from a river.

The work is extraordinary because of the set he constructs

and the complex way he positions all the characters.

One is Mary Magdalene

who is in the foreground crying desperately.

She is distraught in the face of death.

She is not shown as happy that the Virgin Mary has died

and is on her way to heaven.

I believe Caravaggio has put his mother in that image

as he saw her on her deathbed.

He paints this with love.

So, when the painting was

rejected, it was a very heavy blow.

This may have contributed to his agitation that then led him

a few months later to murder.

May, 1606, is a month I won't forget.

That's when the arrogance of

Ranuccio Tomassoni blighted my life.

A local enforcer and arrogant thug,

whose beef with me was...

who knows what!

But we often clashed and his rage was inconsolable,

mouthing off to anyone who would listen.

Well, I had had enough.

So me and some friends, Longhi and Toppa,

organised a fight

to teach him a lesson.

Violence is the language of the streets

and I was never one to shy away from a scrap.

So, we marched right past Tomassoni's house

where he and his lackeys saw us.

We all squared up,

but it was between me and him, really,

so we went at it, with swords, one-on-one.

There was lots of screaming and yelling.

Bit of a shambles, really.

I got cut,

but then Tomassoni fell to the ground,

bleeding out like a pig.

I was surprised. I must have nicked him.

Then it all kicked off, with blades flying about.

Toppa was severely wounded, as was I.

But what was worse, Tomassoni died that night.

It wasn't supposed to happen.

The Tomassoni family are powerful,

so I had to flee to the Alban hills to hide,

with my old friends, the Colonnas.

I've been cursed by that day ever since.

And with a death sentence hanging

over me like the sword of Damocles,

I headed for Naples,

ruled by the Spanish, so out of reach from Papal law.

This place was so full of people, jostling, hustling.

And the smell!

On the salty air, there was the sound of markets

thriving with Spanish trade,

whilst Vesuvius rumbled and percolated in the distance.

This was a city of culture in a golden age.

The wealthy indulged in luxury goods, fine horses, and music.

And there were so many churches. So many opportunities.

Naples is the city of the New Orders.

It's new found wealth from the gold

that was plundered from the New World.

Naples is hell inhabited by angels.

Or it's heaven inhabited by devils.

And the term "carpe diem" was

written for Naples, "seize the day."

And they're building churches at a rapid rate.

The rich and the wealthy want in.

It's a port city, it's a city of banking.

Historically, it had always had

connections with other areas of Italy.

And was there ever a more chiaroscuro city than Naples?

A city of contrasts, black and white, of wealth and poverty.

Caravaggio was made for Naples and

Naples was made for Caravaggio.

It's like this meeting of the city and this great artist

had come together by misadventure, really.

My reputation preceded me.

Celebrated with commissions immediately.

And the irony was not lost on me, though.

In Rome, I am considered a murderous criminal,

condemned to exile.

But in Naples, I am embraced as a Spanish subject,

protected by my noble friends, admired by other artists,

and welcomed with open arms.

Caravaggio spent seven months in Naples

of quite astonishing productivity.

And his works include three great altarpieces.

One of them, The Seven Works of Mercy,

that he painted for a confraternity,

shows these works,

which are described in the Gospel of Saint Matthew,

in a frenzied Neapolitan street.

Caravaggio responds so quickly to Naples itself.

It's the most remarkable work.

The Neapolitans knew all about the seven acts of mercy

but had never before seen it as I did it.

One swirling maelstrom of black showing all the mercies at once.

Feed the hungry,

give drink to the thirsty,

clothe the naked,

shelter the homeless,

visit the sick and the imprisoned,

bury the dead.

Do all this and you receive salvation.

The characters were pure Neapolitan.

People stopped me in the streets to express their awe and wonder.

I loved that.

The Misericordia were a fraternity,

and I think with the Counter-Reformation

came this new kind of responsibility.

If you had great wealth or you earned great wealth,

you were meant to do great good with it.

But this Misericordia was set up by seven noblemen

in order to provide hospital care for the poor,

food, and work within the tenets of Saint Matthew's Gospel,

to be fed, to be clothed, to be buried,

to be redeemed, to be rescued.

I mean, Caravaggio's genius was to try to get

the seven acts of mercy into one painting.

Compositionally, it's extraordinary.

And all over the painting are, like, separate light sources.

One of the angels' calves lit like a spotlight.

The back of the figure at the front.

And the breasts, on Pero, who's feeding her father.

It has this wonderful detail.

There must have been conversations about

but who's the figure in the back?

Who's that at the front? What's that there?

But one thing we must remember about that painting is

that when it was first shown and when it was painted,

it would have been by candlelight.

I think, on one level, it's the greatest painting he ever did.

For me, it's the most problematic, the most difficult,

the most challenging, the most intelligent,

and I think he knew it.

My altarpieces were a hit in Naples.

I never stopped working and landed

some pretty prestigious commissions.

The Spanish Viceroy himself commissioned a picture

of the apostle Andrew who angered

a Roman proconsul, Aegeus,

by converting his wife to Christianity.

The punishment?

Crucifixion, what else?

The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew,

which is a strange painting,

a haunting image

and Caravaggio paints his face and his emaciated body

with an unparalleled and moving expressiveness.

He puts a little group of figures

who represent the

poverty-stricken world of Naples.

And there's a woman at the left with a goitre

who is one of his most touching descriptions of poverty,

and it's particularly southern Italian poverty.

So, in a really remarkable way, he works very, very fast

and produces a completely new vision

in his great Neapolitan altarpieces.

I had to get out of Naples.

Despite so much success,

there were too many figures lurking

in the shadows for my liking.

I was drawing too much attention.

Time to leave, further south.

Further into sanctuary.

I pinned my hopes on the Knights of Malta,

the Order of Saint John,

to save me from Rome's retribution.

There is something stoic about Valletta.

This new capital of Malta, this bastion of Christianity.

An impenetrable fortress,

battle-ready to protect Europe from infidel aggressors

like Ottoman Turks and Barbary pirates.

Besides, I knew a few people there.

Sons of some noble families who had supported me in Rome,

Giustiniani, and Sforza Colonna.

The Knights' Grand Master, a

Frenchman called Alof de Wignacourt,

seemed to be a fan.

Wisdom told me to start with his portrait.

This painting was worth every

bit of the knighthood I received,

much to the bewilderment of others.

Wignacourt had petitioned the pope,

asking to receive two men as

brothers of the Magistral Knights,

stating, "Even if one of them had

committed murder during a brawl."

Hm. I wonder who that could be?

My name was never mentioned, so

Wignacourt's petition was genius!

I guess he was keen for me to stay.

I reckon that's why I got to do my biggest painting yet,

for the Oratory of the Co-Cathedral

of Saint John in Valletta.

On Herod's birthday, Salome, the daughter of Herodias,

danced for guests and pleased Herod so much

that he promised to give her whatever she asked.

Prompted by her mother, Salome said,

"Give me, on a platter, the head of John the Baptist."

The king was conflicted,

but because of the promise he had

made in front of so many guests,

he ordered the beheading of John the Baptist,

who he had imprisoned.

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist,

he makes some incredible compositional

choices with that picture.

To me, the thing that strikes me the

most is just the starkness of it.

I mean, more than half of the picture

is given over to nothing, to a void,

and all the action is happening in the lower left corner

with John the Baptist reclining at

the very lower edge of the canvas.

And when you go and see this painting

in situ it entirely dominates the space.

And the space isn't a side chapel.

It's quite key.

It's where the knights met.

It's a council chamber.

It's where Caravaggio himself was knighted.

He signs this picture in the blood "Fra",

showing that he's been knighted.

And it is vast.

I mean, it measures more than five metres wide.

And you realise why he made those compositional choices

because your head is closest to the Saint John.

When you see it in reproduction, you don't realise,

the picture doesn't hang off the floor. It hangs at head height.

And so, the figure, the action,

is very close to you when you stand in the space.

And they're, sort of, spot-lit.

So there's something incredibly theatrical about this picture.

It's one of the rare occasions,

in fact, if not the only occasion,

in which Caravaggio signs,

and he signs with the blood of Saint John the Baptist.

And again, you would have been able to see that in the space.

It's a very, very powerful picture.

In fact, he's wearing a sort of goat fur

and the little feet are placed very prominently by his head

so it's emphasising that idea of the sacrificial lamb.

And then the Knights of Malta turned.

Why do I always find myself staring down the blade

of some priggish upstart who offends me?

And, in this case,

why did I pick a fight with a

Knight of the bloody Justice? Idiot!

Just when things were going so well.

A knighthood, prospects of a pardon, brilliant commissions.

Again, I found myself in a prison cell.

This time behind the walls of Fort St. Angelo.

For what? The offense of offending, it seems.

I was not in a good place, I can tell you.

But I escaped, on a boat, headed for Sicily.

Syracuse was much like Naples.

Another Spanish viceroy and land of interesting contrasts.

A new start, I thought, or, another start, at least.

Essentially I was a criminal in two states

but artists and men of letters

seem to welcome me with open arms, wherever I go.

"The best painter alive," they say, "and he's here!"

Lucky for me,

the church dedicated to the city's patron Saint Lucy,

was being renovated

and the government wanted to commission

a major work of art for the altar.

In Sicily, Caravaggio began to paint in a different way.

He sets his scenes with vast areas

of darkness above the figures.

And I think this is the most

striking stylistic characteristic

of his Sicilian works.

And they have a kind of haunting gravity.

He paints, sort of, fragile, piteous-looking figures

in the foreground.

And they have a strange new quality of sympathy

for the poor and the meek and the humble

that differentiates these works from his earlier periods.

I think that Caravaggio's biography

is apparent throughout his works,

and what's very interesting is

that he manages to combine his own personal situation

with a response to the needs of his patrons,

and with, I think, a very dramatic response to place.

In Sicily, there are hints that he was afraid,

that he felt hunted, that he slept

with his dagger beside him in his bed,

and that his spirits, one writer writes,

were as restless as the seas of Messina.

His Adoration of the Shepherds,

when you're standing back from it,

you realise it's a stable scene.

There's the donkey, there's a loaf of bread,

there's the shepherds crowded around, the holy child.

And then, as you get closer,

you can see the straw on the stable

floor, loose straw on the stable floor.

And as you get closer to the canvas,

you realise he's just taken a dry brush

and just dragged it across the surface of the canvas.

I think he just became more economical.

As he got older, as he was on the

run, his palette becomes much darker,

whether that's reflecting his mood, his fear.

We know that he started to feel paranoid.

He was sleeping with a knife under his bed.

He starts using more burnt umber, siennas, earth colours.

They say I rant and rave like a madman, paranoid, deranged!

But I have reason to be.

This dark life is suffocating.

Traitors and tricksters everywhere!

Licking their sour lips over my demise.

I was hardly hiding. Hm!

There were knights everywhere.

I was attracting the attention of some important people,

connected people.

But I never felt I could stand still for long.

Have to keep moving, out of the unseen, the unknown.

No, not that way.

That way.

Towards the pale light that guides me.

Sicily was a safe haven no more.

I could sense the vultures circling.

Time to head back north

into the arms of Naples to await my pardon.

But I had only been there a few days when trouble found me.

Or did I find trouble?

Doesn't matter. It was nasty.

A nasty attack, with blades.

Set upon by some bravi at the Osteria del Cerriglio.

No reason given.

And I couldn't tell if they were acting in the name of

the knights or the Pope or just because

they took offense to my natural charm.

Some reported that I was either dead or badly disfigured,

which set tongues wagging in Rome.

Like a dog licking his wounds, I laid low.

I must admit that I became a little obsessed with beheadings.

It was on my mind all the time

and in the narratives that consumed me, like Salome.

Unable to bear the sight of what she had ordered,

she looks away from the lifeless head,

while an old woman and the executioner

contemplate the scene with such pity

that they seem to be looking on with some emotional distance...

the distance between life and death.

The severed head, a tragic mask.

The picture of Salome with the head of John the Baptist

dates from the end of Caravaggio's career.

And you can see just how different the way it's painted.

Gone is that sort of very

descriptive, hyper-realistic quality.

The colours are very subdued. It's almost monochromatic.

Some of the late pictures have a sort of flash of red

but, generally, they use quite muted tones.

It's a moment of great emotional,

physical and psychological tension in his life.

And I think you really feel that in his pictures, as well.

Painting the frail cast of characters, you know,

the old woman grieving is juxtaposed

with Salome's youthful face,

which has this very enigmatic expression.

She can't bear to look at the beheaded John the Baptist.

And what looks like quite a simple, straightforward picture

is actually very complex in terms of

the interplay between the characters.

In these last four years of his life,

he has a death sentence hanging over his head.

I personally don't see Caravaggio's own head

in the head of John the Baptist,

but we know that he did insert himself in his pictures,

famously in the David and Goliath,

today at the Villa Borghese.

Read into it what you want, but that's how I pictured it.

My severed head, dangling in the dark.

There is no relief in death.

Only torment.

The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula

is a truly exceptional painting and probably his last.

It is a painting that,

fortunately, we rediscovered only a few years ago.

The framing is cinematic or photographic

because what do you see?

You see the archer killing Saint Ursula

from very close range.

They are almost touching one another.

He shoots the arrow, she receives it.

The killer and the one killed.

Caravaggio also puts himself in the picture,

even if it's unrealistic, watching this murder,

perhaps as a witness, perhaps as the victim.

Caravaggio's final journey definitely started from

the house of Costanza Colonna in Naples.

He then went to Palo on the felucca

with several works of art by him,

which he's intending to take to Scipioni Borghese.

New evidence has just shown

that the aim of his journey was to go to Palo,

to meet with Giovanni Francesco Tomassoni,

to come to peace with him,

and was absolutely essential

before he went to Rome and received a papal pardon.

It was bitterly ironic that,

as the papal pardon has been granted

and Caravaggio's making his way back to Rome,

it's actually the journey that leads to his death.

And there's some discrepancy in the early sources

about what exactly happened.

We know that he gets into trouble, he's in prison,

and when he's released,

the felucca with his paintings has

disappeared and he's desperate.

These are the pictures that are going

to get him back into favour in Rome

and, without them, he feels really helpless.

It seems he probably died of

fever, heat stroke, heart attack.

We don't really know.

But what we do know is he died alone.

Certainly Caravaggio is a modern painter.

The essence of Caravaggio's art,

the central thing is truth.

Caravaggio was a great painter when he was alive.

He was then imitated, praised by young painters

who saw his new way of painting

that broke with the painting style of the time,

and therefore had many followers.

Caravaggio has an iconic status,

and I would say on the same rank as someone like Leonardo.

And I think it is the universal appeal of his paintings,

the fact that you don't need to know anything.

You can appreciate them for their beauty, for their power.

I think he's just such a brilliant storyteller

and his pictures are so captivating

that you can come to them completely

fresh and get something from them.

I think it's because he speaks very powerfully and directly

across the centuries about humankind.

He strips religious art of its traditional iconography,

goes back to its very meanings.

And I think he introduces an

extraordinary poetry of light and dark

that still speaks to us very directly today.

At last!

My pardon from Rome is promised,

so I buy my passage on this godforsaken boat to take me back

to my rightful place,

lorded and fêted by my noble friends.

I have had to move quickly, bringing

canvases to sweeten the deal.

I can't help but feel nervous...

suspicious that all is not as it seems.

But let's throw caution to the wind, live off instinct and wit.

Not long now until we land

and, God permit, I can make my long-anticipated return.

Back to the streets of Rome and those who love me.

They will rejoice

and shall celebrate the return

of the great Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio!