A Popular Rogue’s Gallery : Italian Exhibit of Rebel Master Caravaggio Gets Hero’s Welcome

Michelangelo Merisi, killer artist, stalked cardinals’ palaces and low bars in 17th-Century Italy with ferocious intensity: His knife was as slick as his brush, his rap sheet peninsula-long.

Historians wonder whether the rebel Merisi was a genius tormented by mental affliction, the fall guy of ne’er-do-well companions--or simply a punk who could paint. They debate, but the popular verdict is already plainly writ.

Caravaggio’s in.

“He’s getting to be like Van Gogh,” said Mina Gregori, president of the Roberto Longhi Foundation here. “I’d say he’s so popular because he was a modern man. He had psychological problems, and he went against tradition.”

Fans of the baroque master whose short, choleric life was punctuated by violence and disaster--and who has passed into history with the name of the Lombard town where he was born about 1573--have been lining up at the rate of more than 1,000 a day for a major Caravaggio exhibition here sponsored by the foundation. The show moves to Rome in March.

In addition to gathering 21 of Caravaggio’s works, the exhibition, “Caravaggio: The Making of a Masterpiece,” has a strong technical foundation, with illuminated panels serving as preface to the paintings themselves.

Named for the first Italian critic to study Caravaggio’s work seriously earlier this century, the Longhi Foundation has brought science to the work of a rebel despised by many contemporaries but a national hero to modern Italians: Caravaggio glowers pugnaciously from the face of the 100,000-lira bank note (worth about $85).

All the canvases on display at the Pitti Palace here, including the delightful “The Cardsharps” from Ft. Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum that is the star of the show, have been systematically X-rayed and minutely studied under raking light.

“Such examination positively identifies whether a work is by Caravaggio because of the painter’s singular technique,” said Gregori.

Caravaggio signed only one of about 70 works--in the blood of a slain St. John the Baptist--but his stylistic signature is stamped on every work.

In the first place, he never sketched but drew with his paint. He made incisions on the paint to place his figures or to make corrections. They are easily found by scientists and, to art experts, unmistakable.

The tousle-haired artist also worked only with live models. Perforce, he painted very quickly, Gregori says.

In some canvases there is a fine line between different colors of paint, places where he stopped short to avoid smudging neighboring areas that were still wet.

Caravaggio painted to shock. Even his religious works such as the “Sacrifice of Isaac” and “Judith and Holofernes” on display here reek of the violence and horror that dogged the artist’s life. His street scene “The Toothpuller,” with its writhing, bloody patient and morbidly fascinated onlookers, is a jarring taste of life before anesthesia.

The painter chafed at more than artistic convention. He went to jail for the first time as a teen-ager in Milan, having squandered his inheritance and become tangled in a murder that historians are still trying to sort out.

Caravaggio went to Rome, where his great talent drew high patronage, and his street rampages brought many police. In fact, more is known about him from police blotters in half a dozen cities than from any other source.

One night he threw a plate of artichokes at a waiter in the Piazza Navona. On another occasion, he was apparently knifed but told police he had fallen on his sword.

Caravaggio was a man of earthy and unabashed appetites. In 1604, he went to jail for insulting the police. The next year he was arrested at least three times: for carrying a dangerous weapon, for insulting two women and for wounding a man in a fight. In 1607, after a brief stay in Genoa, he returned to Rome, did two paintings rejected as insufficiently reverent by clerical patrons, and apparently murdered one Ranuccio Tomassoni.

Caravaggio fled, leaving a trail of great art and criminal excess through Naples, Palermo, Messina and Malta before dying en route back to Rome and a promised papal pardon. He was 39.

Scientists working behind the scenes of the first major Caravaggio exhibition since one in New York and Naples in 1985 have peeled away new layers of Caravaggio’s art--if not his anguish.

Gregori says that “Narcissus,” from the National Gallery in Rome and long attributed to Caravaggio, is in fact the work of a contemporary, Giovanni Antonio Galli, called Lo Spadarino.

Ft. Worth’s cheating card players, by contrast, bought in Switzerland in 1987 and being shown publicly in Europe for the first time, are manifestly Caravaggio, by the scientists’ reckoning.

Indeed, who else could have done it? An earnest young man peers at his cards while one villain leans over his shoulder signaling to his friend, the second cheater, who is reaching behind his back for winning cards stuffed between his tunic and the belt that holds his dirk. Maybe Caravaggio, who was known to turn a card or two, used models for the scene. But he might also have painted from memory.

Examination in Florence also finds that two look-alike versions of one of his most famous works, “Boy Bitten by a Lizard,” are both originals painted by Caravaggio. One is owned by the Longhi and is usually at the Uffizi Gallery here, and the other is customarily at the National Gallery in London. Both are in the show.

As the crowds marvel at the talent of a 17th-Century rebel without a cause, serious research continues into the life and works of a Janus whose personal joust ‘tween beauty and beast may make him an artistic icon of the ‘90s.

“There is still so much to learn. We are just beginning,” said Gregori.

* “Caravaggio: The Making of a Masterpiece,” at the Pitti Palace in Florence until March 15, when it will move to the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome until the middle of May. Open daily, 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission, about $10.