Death comes to The National Gallery with The Last Caravaggio
The final painting by Caravaggio comes to London for the first time in twenty years...
By
Susan Gray
May 9, 2024
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
Death stalks Room 34 in the National Gallery; reunited for the first time in twenty years, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610), on loan from the Gallerie d’Italia Naples and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10), part of the National Gallery’s collection, reveal the artist’s preoccupation with mortality in the final months and weeks of his life.
Caravaggio’s bad boy of baroque credentials are well known: having stabbed the pimp Rannuccio Tommasoni on a tennis court in Rome in May 1606, he fled the Papal State to Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire. While on the run he painted a second, more despairing and claustrophobic version of The Supper at Emmaus (1606) during a stay in Zagarolo, south-east of Rome, with old friends the Colonna family. In autumn 1606 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606) for Naples’ church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Naples itself is the backdrop to the monumental canvas’ scenes of human degradation and kindness.
Despite being highly in demand in Naples, Caravaggio departed for Malta in June of the following year. The island was a rocky fortress ruled by the Order of St John, a religious order charged with protecting and caring for pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Caravaggio was accepted as a novice by the Grand Master of the Order, Alof de Wigancourt, who commissioned two portraits from the artist. Joining the religious Order would strengthen the artist’s case for a pardon from Rome, yet within six weeks of officially joining the Order as a cavaliere di Obedienza in July 1608, Caravaggio was behind bars for ‘an ill considered quarrel with a noble knight.’ Gaolbreaking from his dungeon cell broke the Order’s rules, and the artist found himself on the run again. By the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples, having spent an itinerant year in Sicily.
Ten weeks after painting The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. While painting the canvas he was recovering from having his face slashed with a knife, in a symbolic revenge attack outside a tavern. In the work, his self-portrait, in three-quarters profile, appears as a witness above the saint’s shoulder. While his face is not depicted as disfigured from the recent attack, its pallor is the oil paint embodiment of ‘the colour of death’.
Caravaggio’s bearded chin hovers above St Ursula’s neck as her head tilts forward to examine the arrow wound just below her breast. Given Ursula’s chastity, connotations of sexual violence through the arrow’s penetration are hard to escape. The martyr’s face, also in profile, is an even more deathly shade of sickly, luminous grey-white than the artist’s. Reminiscent of a mask in Noh theatre, St Ursula’s face, angled at 45 degrees, gives the impression of separating from her body.
Usual depictions of St Ursula, a pious Breton or British princess, tended to focus on the quantity of 11,000 virgins who accompanied her on pilgrimage to Rome, and were massacred by Hun tribes outside Cologne according to the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of 150 saints. But Caravaggio has zoomed in on the martyr herself, whose beauty inspired the Prince of the Huns to propose marriage, thus saving her life. St Ursula’s piety precluded her from entering marriage with anybody who did not share her Christian faith, the strength of her faith making her willing to pay for her beliefs with her life.
Curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper describes The Martyrdom of St Ursula as a ‘drama of hands.’ Reading from left to right, the Hun Prince’s highlighted right hand grasps the cord that has sent the arrow into the saint’s body. His left hand, holding the bow is in shadow. The sheen of the Hun Prince’s armour is achieved by applying two tones of white paint in different directions. St Ursula’s heavily outlined, grey hands disappear up to the knuckles into the arrow wound that drains away her life. An armoured figure on the extreme right of the plane offers a segmented, plated arm, with a metal glove to prevent the saint from falling to the ground. The witness’ white knuckles grip a spear, its shaft directly in front of his mouth agape in horror.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula was commissioned by Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. The commission had a deeply personal connection as Doria’s stepdaughter Livia Grimaldi was professing as a nun in the Trinita delle Monache convent in Naples and had taken the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ For nearly 400 years the painting was lost from the Caravaggio canon as its provenance was undocumented, but, in 1980, a letter written by Doria’s agent Lanfranco Masso on 11 May 1610 was discovered by art historian Vincenzo Pacelli. In the letter, Masso tells his employer that delivery of his St Ursula picture would be delayed, as putting it out in the sun to speedily harden the varnish had had the opposite effect, and Masso needed to visit the artist to rectify the problem. Pacelli’s discovery changed the understanding both of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now confirmed to be by Caravaggio’s own hand, rather than by a follower, and also of Caravaggio’s last period.
Following his painting from Naples to Genoa, Caravaggio died of fever in Porto Ecole in mid-July 1610. Full of darkness and death, the National Gallery’s powerful duo bring to life the painter’s amazingly productive last period.
The Last Caravaggio is showing at The National Gallery until 21st July.
