Status Updates From Caravaggio (Basic Art Serie...

He was forced to flee Rome […]. Now he was back in the underworld, as he had been when he arrived in Rome, twelve years before.

As a lodger at the Palazzo Madama, he became a prominent artist: controversial, admired and hated in equal measure, but above all, famous.

[…] Caravaggio was struck down by an illness - Roman fever or the plague - that was raging throughout the peninsula. […] Death seemed certain. […] He survived, but the experience marked him forever […].

At eighteen, full of impatience, ambition and the desire to paint, he set off for Rome.

There was no escape, however, for Caravaggio’s father and uncle, who both fell victim to the epidemic. His mother brought up her five children in grinding poverty.