The Last Caravaggio

This show brings Caravaggio’s last known painting to London, along with documents telling its story, and revealing a little more about the mysterious last months of its troubled and hugely influential creator

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (detail), 1610. Oil on canvas, 143 x 180 cm. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia – Napoli. © Archivio Patrimonio Artistico Intesa Sanpaolo / Photo: Luciano Pedicini, Napoli.

National Gallery, London
18 April – 21 July 2024

by JULIET RIX

“The Last Caravaggio” has only been “The Last Caravaggio” since 1980 when The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610) was firmly reattributed from his followers to the man himself, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). This was not, as so often, due to the changed (and challengeable) views of connoisseurs and critics, but to the discovery of a letter confirming the painting’s commission – a letter that is also in this exhibition, displayed in the UK for the first time.   

Painted in Naples, St Ursula was dispatched to its buyer just weeks before the artist’s untimely death on his way to Rome, where he hoped to be pardoned for the murder of a man in the city four years earlier (just the most dramatic in a string of crimes) that had taken him on the run to Naples, Sicily, Malta and back again.

The picture is an intense depiction of St Ursula’s moment of martyrdom. A tightly packed closeup, it is made more intense by Caravaggio’s typical chiaroscuro – and here by the appropriately darkened gallery room. This is a painting that needs to be seen “in the flesh”. It is in “a somewhat compromised condition”, as the show’s curator, Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, politely puts it, and is certainly darker than when it was painted. It does not reproduce well. In photographs, important elements may easily be missed, so it is particularly welcome that the picture has been allowed to travel from its home in Naples to London.  

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610. Oil on canvas, 143 x 180 cm. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia – Napoli. © Archivio Patrimonio Artistico Intesa Sanpaolo / Photo: Luciano Pedicini, Napoli.

Caravaggio depicts the group just after the saint’s killer has fired the fatal arrow into St Ursula’s breast. He is the leader of the Huns who have, according to the medieval legend prevalent in Caravaggio’s time, already murdered Ursula’s 11,000 virgin companions. Inspired by her beauty, he has offered to spare her if she marries him, but she has refused. Though physically almost surreally interrelated, the figures are emotionally isolated, each seemingly engrossed in their own thoughts.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610 (detail). Oil on canvas, 143 x 180 cm. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia – Napoli. © Archivio Patrimonio Artistico Intesa Sanpaolo / Photo: Luciano Pedicini, Napoli.

The saint is in a psychological bubble, focused exclusively on her stricken breast, as if taking in what has just happened. Her killer, still holding the offending bow, his wrinkled face surrounding an open mouth, looks the most shocked of anyone in the painting at what he has done. Caravaggio understood both sides of violence.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610 (detail). Oil on canvas, 143 x 180 cm. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia – Napoli. © Archivio Patrimonio Artistico Intesa Sanpaolo / Photo: Luciano Pedicini, Napoli.

Having often been the perpetrator, the tables had recently turned when he was attacked outside a Naples tavern and injured seriously enough to merit months of convalescence before completing St Ursula. It is, believes Professor Keith Sciberras, the leading expert on Caravaggio in Malta, “the most poignant picture he ever painted” and emotionally it seems as much about the killer as about the female saint Caravaggio had been asked to paint.    

As the sepia ink letter (dated 11 May 1610) confirms, the picture was commissioned by Caravaggio’s long-time patron and friend Marcantonio Doria, whose stepdaughter, Livia Grimaldi, had recently entered a nunnery in Naples, taking the religious name Sister Ursula (and letters from 1608 attest to her having a difficult time at the convent). The letter is written by Doria’s agent in Naples to his employer in Genoa, and even non-Italian-speakers can spot the words “Doria”, “Sant’ Orsola” and “Caravaggio”.  

Letter from Lanfranco Massa to Marco Antonio Doria. (ASNa, Archivio Dora D'Angri, II, 290, 9-10 (1)). © Archivio di Stato di Napoli.

This art-historically crucial letter states that the agent was about to send the painting to Genoa but first placed it in the sun to be sure it was dry. This, he admits, “rather than drying out the varnish, made it soften, since Caravaggio applied it quite thickly. I will go round to said Caravaggio‘s again to get his opinion on what to do so I can be sure of not ruining it.” He also assures Doria of the picture’s quality, saying that everyone who has seen it is “amazed”.

It was certainly an unusual St Ursula. She was more often depicted at this time (when depicted at all) in a much more iconographic way with symbols of her martyrdom and one or more (often many more) of her virgin companions. Caravaggio, typically, chooses to tell a more human story. And it is a story. “The narrative is told from left to right,” points out Whitlum-Cooper, from the shooting of the bow to the imminent death of the saint. Sciberras agrees: “You read a Caravaggio rather than look at it.”

The figures are half-length and life-size. The painting is small enough for a private commission but large enough to break down the wall between the painted world and ours. If hung at the right height (which it isn’t quite at the National Gallery), it places the viewer almost within the picture, on the edge of the group – a device Caravaggio employs in other paintings, including his largest and only signed work, The Beheading of St John The Baptist (1608, St John’s Co-Cathedral Oratory, Valletta) painted less than two years earlier in Malta.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The Beheading of St John The Baptist, 1608. Oil on canvas, 370 × 520 cm (150 × 200 in). St John’s Co-Cathedral Oratory, Valletta. Photo: Juliet Rix.

In this site-specific picture taking up the whole end wall of the oratory of the Knights of Malta’s main church, Caravaggio clearly intends to directly involve his audience – then mostly knights and novices, all potential martyrs to the “holy war” between the Christian Knights of St John and the Muslim Turks. He not only places the viewer on one side of the prison yard where the executioner is midway through St John’s decapitation, but the architectural features are typical of the Valletta of his day (and indeed of today).

Arriving in Malta in 1607 to escape the clutches of Roman law and attempt to rehabilitate himself, Caravaggio became a knight in the Order of St John Hospitaller in 1608. The huge Beheading was almost certainly his joining fee and must have been a resonant subject for the artist since in Rome he had a bounty on his head – literally. Even with the carrot of respectability and safety in Malta, however, Caravaggio was unable to control his temper and within weeks he had been involved in another fight in which a senior knight was wounded. Caravaggio was imprisoned pending trial but escaped – no doubt with help – and fled by boat to Sicily, then Naples. Here he found plenty of work. Despite his evident criminality, patrons remained keen for a piece of this remarkable artistic genius.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571-1610. Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist, about 1609-10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. © The National Gallery, London.

Having returned to Italy, he returned also to the subject of the beheading, and the only other painting in this exhibition is the National Gallery’s own Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist, dated here (and by most experts, though without documentary evidence) to 1609-10, placing it shortly after the Malta masterpiece and just before St Ursula. Like St Ursula, it shows a tight group of figures at a tense moment of martyrdom, and it is as if a closeup has been taken a few minutes after the Malta Beheading. The figures of Salome and the older woman are particularly similar.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571-1610 (detail). Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist, about 1609-10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. © The National Gallery, London.

Prefiguring the St Ursula, the protagonists in the National Gallery painting are connected not by how they look at each other (they don’t) but through Caravaggio’s composition. Salome, who has demanded John’s head on a platter in return for dancing for Herod, looks away from her gory prize while the executioner looks at it. The position of their heads, however, align, linking them in the crime. And the cloth wrapped around Salome’s shoulders runs down and around the edge of the platter she holds, visually confirming her responsibility for its burden.

Cloth links the murderous Hun to St Ursula, too, though here (as in the Malta Beheading) it is the colour red – “a violent, powerful colour,” says Whitlum-Cooper – that provides the connection. In both paintings, however, the artist primarily highlights the faces – and the hands.  

In the St Ursula, the killer’s hands that have just fired the arrow are as delicate as St Ursula’s cupping the breast the arrow has struck, though she is white with death and saintly ethereality, while he remains the earthier colour of human flesh. The hand of a bystander is thrust between the protagonists (a part of the painting only rediscovered after the removal of over-painting in 2004) in a vain attempt to prevent the murder, while the hand of a soldier protectively supports the saint’s elbow, his armoured arm echoing her vulnerable unprotected one. Looking up over Ursula’s shoulder, is the enigmatic face of a second bystander, believed to be a self-portrait of Caravaggio (who often inserted himself into the background of his pictures). Together with the soldier, he is very close behind the saint, positioned as if ready to catch her as she falls.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610 (detail). Oil on canvas, 143 x 180 cm. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia – Napoli. © Archivio Patrimonio Artistico Intesa Sanpaolo / Photo: Luciano Pedicini, Napoli.

The darkened bodies are almost unnecessary; if this were a Picasso, we might see just an inter-relating pattern of breast, bow, faces and hands. And Caravaggio was as revolutionary in his time as Picasso was in his – and as artistically revered.

So it was that Caravaggio set out from Naples towards Rome in the summer of 1610 carrying paintings for his Roman patrons and apparently expecting a papal pardon for the 1606 murder, but he never arrived. According to his 17th-century biographers he was arrested en route for reasons unknown and by the time he was freed his boat had sailed, taking his precious paintings with it. “In desperation,” says Giovanni Baglione in his 1642 biography, Caravaggio pursued the vessel, only giving up when he became too ill to continue. At Porto Ercole: “He was put to bed with a raging fever and without the aid of god or man, in a few days he died,” – leaving his Roman patrons waiting in vain and The Martyrdom of St Ursula “The Last Caravaggio”.