It was always going to end badly.
He ran with a rough crowd, did Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio. Roaming the cobbles under moonlight, a captive to his vices, the father of modern art was an incident waiting to happen. He promised rivals he would 'fry their balls in oil' and fought duels for the honour of prostitutes. He drew steel on a waiter over a disputed plate of artichokes. He wounded policemen. He killed a man in the street and had to go on the run.
And finally, 400 years ago this week, he died penniless, desperate, feverish and alone.
Yet somehow, during it all, he produced what may be the most arresting, influential and remarkable art in the history of the Christian West.
Caravaggio was the Jim Morrison of his time — Rimbaud with a paintbrush. There was little that was pious or holy about the man with a gift for holy and sacred art. Caravaggio's world was the world of drunken singing, back-alley brawls, prostitutes, thieves and ne'er-do-wells. Not for him the abstinence of the monk. Caravaggio desired the physical, the earthly.
But perhaps if he hadn't been such a drunken, violent, criminal, he may never have been human enough, disturbed enough or repentant of enough sin to produce the terrible realism for which he is justly famous.
Much has been written about Caravaggio's technical genius, his ability to use light and contrast to throw his subjects into stark relief. Artists owe much to his work, not just his arresting colours but also his skill at painting from life without repeated sketches. The direct-to-canvas approach gives his work an immediacy and an intimacy that drags us into the scene, grabs us, forces us to engage with what the artist makes us see.
It is in this drama of the sudden, the explosive, that Caravaggio breaks down the wall between the viewer and the viewed. One cannot be disengaged from his work. Look, he says, look at the great and terrible acts happening, right here, right now! Look on and be amazed. Look on with awe and wonder.
But the genius and the impact of Caravaggio goes far beyond the technical. In his Young Sick Bacchus, we begin to see the early stirrings of his revolution. Bacchus is not a beautiful cherub, as we expect, but a green-tinged, unhealthy adolescent. A closer look shows the filthy fingernails, the rottenness of the grapes, the pallor of