The Seven Crimes of Caravaggio: The Violent Life of a Baroque Master

Rome in the early 1600s was a city in flux: a teeming, uneven capital of papal power, where lavish artistic commissions and casual acts of violence lived side by side. While cardinals and noble families competed to fill chapels and palaces with superb images to assert their prestige, the streets of the city’s seedy underbelly were a simmering stew of resentment and criminality. Violence was common currency; swordfights broke out easily over gambling debts, careless insults, or a woman's affection, and few walked after dark unarmed.

Rome’s artists had a foot in both camps: while they hobnobbed with the city’s elite, feted for their skill and often lodged in their households, they themselves were of low status, forced to navigate a precarious world of patronage, rivalry and lawless intrigue. For painters, success depended not only on talent but on the protection of their patrons and the ability to survive the city’s shifting tempers. It was in this volatile climate that Caravaggio rose to fame - with a brush in one hand and a blade in the other.

The dramatic paintings Caravaggio produced in this fevered atmosphere captured the sacred with the immediacy of the street, and ensured his fame. But beyond the canvas, Caravaggio’s life was a steady unraveling of fights, threats and lawsuits. The records survive in Rome’s State Archives: yellowing police logs and court proceedings that preserve his outbursts in vivid detail: stone-throwing at a landlady’s window, an assault over a plate of artichokes, even a murder.

What follows are seven fascinating episodes that trace the reckless path of a man whose life was as combustible as the extraordinary art that he left behind.

Carrying a Sword in Piazza Navona (1598)

In the small hours of May 4, 1598, Caravaggio was stopped by the birri - Rome’s restless night watch - during a patrol in Piazza Navona. On him they found a sword and a pair of compasses. He declared, with some pride, that he was fully entitled to carry the weapon. He was “pittore del Cardinal del Monte,” a valued member of the cardinal’s private retinue and therefore under elite protection. But Bartolomeo, the somewhat officious lieutenant of the bargello, wasn’t having any of it. The painter had no license on him, and that was enough. He was arrested and taken straight to the Tor di Nona prison. It would be the first of many spells in the slammer for the young tearaway.

Caravaggio’s ties to del Monte and Palazzo Madama would soon see him released. But the encounter tells us plenty about Caravaggio and the Rome of his day. Heavy-drinking artists strutted its streets with blades on their hips and paint-stained hands, swaggering from studio to tavern and back again. Fueled by wine, rivalry, and the pursuit of patronage, bravado was practically part of the job description. A contemporary of the painter reprovingly described how "after a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him."

Caravaggio wasn’t yet notorious, but the friction between his temperament and the city’s volatile legal code was already sparking. Although he was on the cusp of success - just months from unveiling the Calling of Saint Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi - with increasing fame came increasing chances for trouble. For Caravaggio and his thuggish pals Onorio Longhi and Prospero Orsi, the line between papal palace and prison cell was a very thin one indeed.

The Libel Trial (1603)

At its heart, early modern Rome was a city obsessed with fama - one’s reputation was everything, especially in the cutthroat world of art. In 1603, Caravaggio’s casual contempt for his peers exploded into a courtroom spectacle. The target: Giovanni Baglione, an ambitious but middling painter who had just landed a prestigious commission to paint an altarpiece of the Resurrection at the Jesuit mother church of the Gesù.

Caravaggio and his circle circulated mocking satirical verses attacking Baglione’s style and status. Baglione, famously thin-skinned and fond of litigation, took him to court. At his libel trial, Caravaggio doubled down: “I don’t know any painter who thinks Giovanni Baglione is a good painter. His Resurrection is clumsy - the worst he’s done.” The court records reveal a man disdainful of consensus, scorning those he deemed unworthy of the title valentuomo. Baglione won his suit, and Caravaggio spent several weeks back in Tor di Nona prison. His defenders, including the French ambassador, helped secure lenient treatment, but the damage was done.

Baglione never forgave the slight, accusing Caravaggio of sodomy and of attempting to murder him to anyone who would listen. In his later biography of his illustrious rival, written after the painter’s death, he couldn’t resist sticking the boot in further: Baglione’s Caravaggio is a violent brute, a heretic, and a devil in human form (Baglione even painted a devil with the face of Caravaggio in one of his works). The feud outlived them both.

The Artichoke Incident (1604)

Of all Caravaggio’s crimes, the most ridiculous may also be the most revealing of his character. On April 24th, 1604, at one of his regular haunts - the Osteria del Moro, near Piazza Navona - Caravaggio sat down for lunch with his cronies and ordered eight artichokes: four cooked in oil, four in butter. That should have been the end of it. Instead, when the waiter arrived, the painter asked which artichokes were which. The surly reply: “Smell them and see.”

One of Caravaggio’s posse would later claim that the insolent garcon even thrust one of the offending roots under Caravaggio’s nose to make his point. To a man as volatile and grandiose as Caravaggio, this was an unforgivable slight. In a flash, he hurled the platter of artichokes at the waiter’s face, spitting out a stream of foul-mouthed insults as he did so. The earthenware dish hit the waiter on the cheek, and Caravaggio apparently snatched up his friend’s sword, ready for further action. The waiter escaped and went straight to the police, but our man escaped the rap thanks to the testimony of his dining companions, who claimed that he had been provoked.

As stories go, it's quintessentially Caravaggio: high drama, violence, a dash of comedy and the unvarnished life of the Roman street. Even when dining, Rome’s most brilliant painter made life a violent spectacle.

The Assault of Mariano Pasqualone (1605)

In the summer of 1605, Caravaggio’s violent temperament flared once again, this time over a woman. The courtesan Maddalena Antognetti, known as Lena, was not only Caravaggio’s model for the sensational but controversial Madonna di Loreto altarpiece he had just completed in the church of Sant’Agostino, but also, it seems, his lover.

When the notary Mariano Pasqualone - perhaps a spurned suitor, or perhaps acting on behalf of a friend - apparently made disparaging remarks about her during a heated discussion with Caravaggio on the Via del Corso, the painter’s response was swift and brutal. On the night of July 29th, in the shadows of Piazza Navona, Caravaggio attacked Pasqualone from behind, striking his head with a sword. Though the notary never saw his assailant, he named Caravaggio without hesitation.

Pasqualone wasn’t just anybody - he worked in the offices of the Cardinal Vicar of Rome - and the fallout was serious. With another criminal charge looming, Caravaggio fled Rome for Genoa. Only months later did he return, under the protection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Peace was formally brokered in the cardinal’s presence, with Caravaggio pledging to let the matter rest. Some believe he painted the introspective Saint Jerome Writing as a gesture of thanks for the art-obsessed cardinal’s intervention.

Once again, the episode reveals the deep entanglement between Caravaggio’s art and life: passion, scandal, and violence bleeding from the streets of Rome onto the canvas.

Disputes with his Landlady (1605)

Caravaggio never stayed out of trouble for long, and after his return from Genoa it was his landlady who bore the brunt of his chaos. Prudenzia Bruni, the unfortunate woman who rented him rooms on what is now the Vicolo del Divino Amore, had finally had enough. Caravaggio was behind on rent once again, and she took advantage of his absence by locking him out of the house and confiscating his belongings in lieu of payment. Unsurprisingly, the painter didn’t take kindly to being evicted. That night, he returned to the building and hurled stones through her window shutters, splintering the wood and waking the neighbourhood.

What followed was pure theatre. Caravaggio came back with some of his ne'er-do-well mates, stationed himself under Bruni’s window, and launched into a bawdy musical performance, singing vulgar songs and playing the guitar in an unholy serenade. Bruni took him to court, testifying not just about unpaid rent and harassment but also about structural damage: Caravaggio had, apparently, knocked a hole through the ceiling to let more light into his studio. A visionary’s skylight in his own eyes, an act of vandalism in hers.

It was one of many times Caravaggio’s volatile genius quite literally blew the roof off.

The Killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni (1606)

By 1606, Caravaggio’s death spiral was well underway - but no one could have predicted how far he would plunge, or how fast. On a sweltering May afternoon, in the dust and heat of a Roman tennis court, a petty dispute escalated into bloodshed. The opponent was Ranuccio Tomassoni, a swaggering young nobleman with powerful connections who was by all accounts a nasty piece of work. The cause? A soured wager, an old grudge, or perhaps the tangled affections of Fillide Melandroni - courtesan, model, and long entwined with both men. The truth remains murky. But what’s clear is this: swords were drawn, and Caravaggio struck with lethal precision.

He slashed Tomassoni high on the thigh, slicing through his femoral artery. Some historians believe that Caravaggio’s blow wasn’t intended to be fatal, and that he merely wished to injure, or even castrate, Ranuccio - a wound freighted with symbolism in the violent honour code of 17th-century Rome. But his blow went too far. Tomassoni bled out in the street, and Caravaggio’s fate was sealed.

By nightfall, Rome’s star artist had become a fugitive. A bando capitale (death sentence by beheading) - was issued, forcing Caravaggio into exile. From celebrated artist to hunted criminal, Caravaggio vanished into the underworld of southern Italy - his canvases growing darker, more desperate, as he painted with one eye on the road and one hand always near the hilt of his sword.

The Malta Scandal (1608)

Caravaggio had clawed his way back. After years on the run, hounded by unknown would-be assassins, he landed in Malta in 1607 and was suddenly respectable again. The Grand Master of the Knights of St John welcomed him with open arms, and Caravaggio was soon painting dramatic saints, martyrdoms and portraits, before long even receiving the rare honor of knighthood. He was a fratello now, cloaked in Maltese prestige. But it didn’t last.

In August 1608, something happened. Something big. The records are maddeningly vague, but we know Caravaggio was arrested and imprisoned in the grim dungeons of Fort Sant’Angelo. Some said he insulted a powerful knight. Others whispered of a fight or a brawl, where the artist was once again too free in the use of his sword. Maltese sources suggest the victim was high-ranking, and that Caravaggio had “committed a serious and detestable crime.”

Whatever the truth, Caravaggio somehow pulled off the impossible: he escaped. No one quite knows how. One night he was behind bars, the next he was gone, slipping away to Sicily under cover of darkness in an audacious solo boat ride. The Knights were furious, and the high walls of Valletta echoed with scandal. By December, Caravaggio had been formally expelled from the Order, branded “putridum et foetidum membrum” - a rotten and stinking limb. His brief moment of redemption was over, and the long road to his death had begun.

Fascinating as the records of his brushes with the law are, Caravaggio’s paintings remain the most vivid document of the world he inhabited - raw, immediate, and still astonishing in their power. Discover the masterpieces that he painted all across Rome with us on our fascinating Caravaggio tour!