Equating Caravaggio with Raoul Moat has left us all the poorer

Visitors to the National Gallery in search of Caravaggio are in danger of being disappointed. The Baroque genius may have been largely ignored by the artistic establishment for the first three centuries after his passing, but in the Year of Our Lord 2010 there was no avoiding him.

As a result of the 400th anniversary of his mysterious death falling in mid-July, more column inches were devoted to Caravaggio last year than in any year since the National’s 2005 hit show Caravaggio: The Final Years. Even my father, whose interest in art has lain dormant since the gallery-hopping travels of his youth, seemed to know who ‘the violent painter’ was over tea the other day.

And yet, despite all the hair-raising reviews of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s biography and reports of the artist’s bones being discovered in Porto Ercole, we managed to spend the anniversary period learning almost nothing about Caravaggio’s work. “A murderer whose appetite for destruction knew no bounds” screamed the Sunday Express (he killed one man, possibly accidentally), “Infamous lover, killer and pimp” shrieked a news piece in The Sunday Telegraph; “Homocidal, psychotic and perverse” chimed in the The Observer, and so the fevered coverage went on.

By portraying Caravaggio as some kind of seventeenth-century Raoul Moat, the outlets concerned probably did their public a real disservice. When I stepped into Room 32 at the National Gallery in the autumn to reacquaint myself with its three works by the old master, I felt as deflated as Reggie Yates presumably does on listening back to any of his radio shows.

Because, as the collection’s beautiful possessions demonstrate, Caravaggio is not in fact all about atmospherically lit blood-lust. In fact I would estimate that of the 80 or so works strongly attributed to him, less than 20 feature any kind of physical violence. The blood curdling Judith Beheading Holofernes (above right) may have been the work I saw most often reproduced in the press last month, but it tells only a fragment of the master’s story.

Through all the violence and the sensationalism, we have missed the opportunity to probe Graham Dixon’s characteristically grandiose claim that “Caravaggio was a painter who changed the way we view the world”. We have also squandered the chance to consider Caravaggio as a homosexual revolutionary; to re-open the file on the great man’s relationship with the Bacchic and narcissistic youths who pout suggestively out of his early Roman portraits. Or even to join David Hockney in asking whether the tiny hole and the use of optical equipment in the painter’s dark studio really do explain the extraordinary absence of any surviving preparatory drawings.

Instead the media’s chiaroscuro spotlight has dwelt almost exclusively on the enticing trail of Caravaggio’s indiscretions and demise. As Graham-Dixon saunters along the fatal beach at Porto Ercole in the television program Who killed Caravaggio, he tells the viewer that, while the subject of his 400-year-old murder investigation had created “some of the most moving, spiritual paintings in the history of western art”, all he wanted to know was “where’s the body?”

Well now it seems we probably know a little more about the location of the great master’s bones, and the turbulent life which left them lying in the crypt of a small church, hours from the Eternal City where the painter had made his name. Maybe that is enough. Or maybe we should consider marking the deaths of serial killers and their anniversaries with features and news reports about violence. And celebrate those of artists chiefly by thinking and writing about art.