CHASING CARAVAGGIO

He was one of the most impactful painters of the 17th century, and he lived a life as dramatic as his canvases. TRACEY MINKIN pursues the turbulent Baroque artist who fled from Rome under penalty of death, leaving masterpieces along the way.

- By TRACEY MINKIN

Baroque Italy brought to life by Caravaggio (inset, in a posthumous portrait by artist Ottavio Leoni), from left: Portrait of future pope and art patron Maffeo Barberini; a palm reader in The Fortune Teller; and a huckster in The Cardsharps.

I JOIN CARAVAGGIO in a hole in the ground on the island of Malta. It's a guva, a 16th-century prison cell dug out of the Mediterranean island's harsh limestone. It's where the Knights of the Order of Saint John threw the artist in 1608 after he had painted a masterpiece that would make their private cathedral one of the great art destinations of the world.

He had already killed a man in Rome, two years prior. He had fled the city where his star was in bright ascendance, skirting prosecution and capital punishment from port to port, painting to stay in good graces. He had been plucked into the celebrated, safe lap of these Christian warriors, made a knight himself in a stunning maneuver of power and patronage. But the painter had succumbed, during a fracas on the streets of Valletta, to a level of violence forbidden by the order's Draconian moral codes.

Caravaggio—again—was in deep and terrible trouble. I climb down the steep, narrow ladder from the guva's trapdoor, feel the isolation and hopelessness of the hole. More than four centuries later, Caravaggio's depths are mine.