Did Caravaggio paint his own murder confession?
Caravaggio was known for his revolutionary way of playing with light in his paintings and, amongst other things, allegedly killing a man over a game of tennis. While that may sound like disparate facts, they entwine bizarrely in The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, the only painting Caravaggio ever deigned to sign, work that held a clue supposedly confessing to murder.
Caravaggio revolutionised the use of chiaroscuro, wherein light dictates the viewers’ focus. Bright shafts of light make figures rise up out of the canvas, and imposing shadows condemn others to the background. This sense of hiding in the shadows echoed his own life, which saw his tempestuous temper overtake all reason on numerous occasions.
In May 1606, the Baroque painter started to fight with Ranuccio Tommasoni over a bet on a tennis game. One of many in a series of violent episodes, it is said that Caravaggio wound up killing him, which led to a death sentence for murder. He was forced to flee the city, constantly dogged by paranoia about execution and arrest. Caravaggio first hid on estates owned by the Colonna, continually making what are now considered masterpieces like the Supper at Emmaus whilst on the run.
But the fear and guilt over the murder didn’t transmute into his paintings until two years later. On the run, he maintained artistic focus, likely as an escape from those thoughts, but it wasn’t until 1608’s oil painting, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, that his subconscious took over.
Caravaggio’s take on human suffering was often bleak and violent, but this painting, despite being the scene of a beheading, lends itself more to tragedy than violence. In as sensitive a way a murder can be painted, it is. Onlookers are horrified, clutching the wounded body of John.
It is strikingly out of place from all other depictions of beheadings in art history, culminating in a moment where the head hasn’t left the body, rather than the more grisly depictions like Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes or Sandro Botticelli’s The Return of Judith to Bethulia.
John is injured, fatally, but still whole in a sense. This leads to some believing that Caravaggio was envisioning a scene where he hadn’t killed Tommasoni, where there was a chance of survival. But the reality is reinforced by the blood that spurts from his neck.
The blood pools on the ground, collecting like evidence the act cannot be undone. It’s this tiny fragment of space, not the foreground or lower corners – that Caravaggio signed his name. It remains the only piece of his 105 known artworks to bear his name. Given it was in a martyr’s blood, the stamp of his signature has led scholars to believe it was his way of confessing to his crime.
