Caravaggio’s crimes exposed in Rome’s police files
Caravaggio’s crimes exposed in Rome’s police files Michelangelo Merisi, aka Caravaggio, was notoriously bad-tempered and violent, constantly getting into physical altercations, confident that his moneyed patrons would fish him out of scrape after scrape. They mainly did, as it happened, and when they didn’t, he just skipped town for a while until the heat was off him. The stories about him have become part of his legend — the bad boy artist who lived fast, died young and left a sunstroked/syphilitic/stabbed/lead poisoned corpse — and it’s difficult to tell fact from gossip. Rome’s State Archives contain a myriad primary documents detailing Caravaggio’s many brushes with the law (among other information about his life and work) but until recently they were on…