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TELL ME ABOUT THE FUCKED UP SHIT CARAVAGGIO GOT UP TO ;O

So, Caravaggio was a messed up violent guy, even by the standards of his time. It’s genuinely amazing he produced as many paintings as he did, with all the time he spent, fucking, fighting, and fleeing the law.

He constantly got in trouble with the law for dumb shit like writing bitchy (and absolutely fucking filthy) libelous poems about people, threatening to beat up painters who imitated his style, throwing rocks at the cops, and in one incident, throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter (don't be dicks to the waitstaff, folks).

But he was really notorious for just constantly getting into brawls. "The transcripts of his police records and trial proceedings fill many pages" apparently. Dude just wanted to throw down ALL. THE. TIME.

So in one of these brawls he straight up kills a guy by trying to cut his dick off (and instead stabbing him in the femoral artery) and has to flee Milan to evade murder charges. He ends up in Rome, where he gets the brilliant idea to BEAT A NOBLEMAN WITH A CLUB, and eventually gets his ass thrown in jail. His patrons intervene, get him out of jail and into house arrest so at least he can paint and stay out of trouble.

HAHA NOPE! So much for staying out of trouble -- a couple years later he stabs another dude in a fight over a model he’s banging, and has to flee to Genoa for a few weeks before coming back to Rome. At which point he gets in trouble because he doesn't pay rent, and decides the reasonable response to this is to chuck old veggies and rocks at his landlady. Several dozen people had sued this dude for various reasons, mostly involving stabbing or throwing shit (we only know as much about him as we do because of the paper trail from this dude’s insane legal troubles). Hell, he managed to stab himself when he tripped and fell on his own sword. He was a menace.

Caravaggio also had a LOT of sex, with men and women, and was pretty flagrant about it during a time when uhhhhh the church would still set you on fire for being gay. Whatever, Caravaggio gave zero fucks. He slept with a large number of prostitutes, some of whom modeled for him, and even painted “Madonna of Loreto” for the church of Sant’Agostino in Rome, with Mary modeled off a prostitute friend of his. WHO WORKED THE STREET IN FRONT OF THAT CHURCH. 

So people would walk by her soliciting clients on their way to church then go INTO church and see her as the Virgin Mary, which didn’t go over that well for reasons. (And it’s suspected he pulled a lot of this kinda shit to troll his own clients, on purpose.)

But his most sexual paintings and his nudes were always of young men. Young, nubile, cow-eyed men. Who he was also, historians speculate, banging -- court records indicate at least one young male prostitute he was close with was responsible for helping distribute the earlier mentioned dirty poetry, and a young man appears repeatedly in many of Caravaggio’s paintings and is suspected to have been a lover of his. 

That said, despite numerous grumblings of sodomy, Caravaggio’s legal troubles were mostly based around his constant violence rather than his sex life. Though the latter was also probably also pretty fraught and questionable, not so much because of the queerness as because of the general instability and poor life choices of the man in question.

Back to the violence -- Caravaggio gets in the biggest amount of trouble when he kills a wealthy dude from a powerful family with criminal ties in a duel (over a debt or a prostitute or... tennis? Seriously, one account says it’s over tennis.) Again, there is dick stabbing. His patrons are like “DUDE, WTF. WE HAVE TRIED, WE CAN’T HELP YOU WITH THIS” and an order goes out for his head (literally - he’s sentenced to beheading) and he is now officially exiled from Rome, adding another city to the list of cities that he can’t go back to because he murdered a guy by stabbing him in the junk.

He goes to Naples, paints a lot, then goes to Malta and manages to get himself inducted with the Knights of Malta. Does some of his most famous paintings, and things seem to be doing okay, until he reverts back to his usual bullshit and gets in a brawl with another Knight and is kicked out of the order for being an asshole. After that he bounces around a bit between Sicily and Naples, acting even more nucking futs than usual according to his friends (exhibiting paranoia and sleeping fully dressed and armed) before hearing that some powerful friends in Rome have gotten him a pardon. 

On his way back to Rome to claim said pardon, however, he mysteriously dies. No one’s entirely sure whether he was simply sick, murdered by his enemies, or developed sepsis from an injury he got in-- you guessed it -- another fucking brawl.

On some level, Caravaggio probably knew he was an asshole. He included himself in several of his paintings, often as a severed head (he painted his own head as Goliath’s head being held aloft by David, and as John the Baptist’s head being held by Salome) -- though whether this was a sort of morbid act of contrition, where he punished himself in his art, or just a fuck you to the people who sentenced him to beheading back in Rome, is hard to say. 

But he also was clearly not well. Mental illness likely played a role, but it’s also highly likely that he had syphilis from all the unprotected sex he was having, which was endemic at the time and had neurological effects as it progressed. Also highly probable as a reason behind a lot of Caravaggio’s behavior is an affliction that many painters at the time had -- lead and other heavy metal poisoning. Lead was the main ingredient in white paint, and a lot of red paint contained mercury sulfide. Caravaggio’s own prodigious body of work would have been slowly poisoning him, leading to his violent and increasingly erratic behavior, and probably contributing to his early death at 38. 

That said, his paintings fucking SLAPPED. His treatment of light and shadow helped define the art of the period and influenced a ton of artists after him. Dude was a genius.

Just, also, you know. A violent unhinged asshole lunatic who threw artichokes at people and stabbed them in the dick.

@clubpemguin i want to be the caterpillar :)

(.' '.))))))))) <- caterpillar

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Credit: artsydoe