4. Rome
Details are again sketchy, but we know that at the age of 21 Caravaggio left Milan to travel to Rome. In so doing, he joined legions of other aspiring artists, who were attracted by the vast amount of artistic commissions from Pope Clement VIII, who wanted to revitalise the city’s existing churches and build new ones. Caravaggio lived with around 2, 000 other artists in the small area between Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Spagna. Competition was rife between the artists, and often broke out into feuds. Penniless, Caravaggio was forced to take on various small jobs.
At first he lodged with the Sicilian painter Lorenzo Siciliano, who was in a similar position, and ‘painted heads for a groat apiece and produced three a day’, according to his early biographer, Giovanni Pietro Bellori. The economics of living hand to mouth meant that Caravaggio was forced to work faster than he probably would have liked, often completing paintings in less than two weeks. After a few months, however, his talent was evident enough for him to find relative stability in the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Clement’s favourite painter, and undertook small commissions such as flowers and fruit.
Although he was understandably frustrated by these restrictions on his work, in this period Caravaggio did produce his two earliest-known paintings, A Boy Peeling Fruit and The Young Sick Bacchus. Both works are deservedly-lauded, which is all the more remarkable since he was also enjoying a raucous life in the artists’ district. According his 17th-century biographer, Joachim von Sandrart, he liked to go about with ‘his young friends, mostly brash, swaggering fellows – painters and swordsmen – who lived by the motto nec spe, nec metu, “without hope, without fear”‘. Despite his later fame, Caravaggio never tired of brawling.