The complete Caravaggio part three. Caravaggio's life is in his paintings and seems to have never, physically, strayed far away from them. Tracing his little world in Rome uncovers a morbid geography that connects his church paintings and his crime. His life in Rome was played out in a few streets and piazzas in the heart of the Renaissance city, between Piazza Navona and Piazza del Popolo. He had a house in what is now the Vicolo del Divino Amore (the Alley of Divine Love), a narrow street that still has its 16th-century doorways. He fought Tomassoni just a stone's throw away - and the area where their gangs stalked one another is enclosed by a triangle of churches that, at the time, already contained Caravaggio's compassionate paintings: San Agostino, San Luigi dei Francesi, Santa Maria del Popolo. As he went to kill his man, he must have passed by the church with his image of the devout beggars, and seen the one where Saint Peter stares at his own torture.
In Malta, the beheadings continue. That something is joy. The complete Caravaggio part two. In the room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum that does not have a bust of him above its door, two paintings are attributed to Caravaggio. There is a David and Goliath - but though the museum claims this as a Caravaggio, it's more likely a work by one of his followers, that gang of Caravaggisti. It's just not quite tough enough, mentally, to be a Caravaggio - the pose is easy, the boy holding the head vapid. From being forgotten, Caravaggio is now so famous that museums appear to be happy with the flimsiest attribution. This pseudo-Caravaggio is even pushed as a postcard in the museum shop. With its horrid subject matter, it is closer to our image of the outlaw genius than the genuine Caravaggio that hangs nearby.
The Madonna is enthroned high on the canvas, holding Christ by her side, gesturing with her hand at a selection of black rosary beads a team of clerics dispense to a crowd of the urban poor. Caravaggio was in no sense a conventional Counter-Reformation propagandist. The Complete Caravaggio part one. On the walk from the station, I come through narrow medieval Via dei Tribunali, terrorised by trucks and mopeds, past street stalls laden with the cheapest and best food in Italy.
The buildings in the old heart of Naples are blackened, close, menacing. "Infamia", says a poster on a baroque church. Since last October, 40 people have been killed in a war between the city's Camorra gangs. From this tumultuous street a gateway opens on to a 17th-century courtyard where doctors in white coats are joking. In a waiting room, children sit patiently. The doctors here minister the same charity to the poor of Naples that has been dispensed by this Catholic institution, Pio Monte della Misericordia - Holy Mountain of Mercy - since the 16th century. I find a staircase and follow it upward, turning into a grey corridor. This is a city that has always lived on prayer. Caravaggio loved to paint streets - the real, dusty, dark streets of Rome and Naples at the beginning of the 17th century. How Caravaggio saw in the dark. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (1571–1610) and his Followers. Caravaggio Biography.