Knights, murder, a prison break... we head to Malta to unravel the story of the crucial late period in Italian painter Caravaggio’s wild life

Words Juliet Rix

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610 AD), one of the most influential painters in the history of Western art, signed only a single painting. He hid his name in a splash of blood in a work that hangs in the oratory of St John’s Co-Cathedral, in the heart of Malta’s UNESCO-listed capital, Valletta.

The vast Beheading of St John the Baptist – a striking, violent, revolutionary painting – still dominates the room for which it was created, which now receives nearly half a million visitors a year. It is at the centre of the story of Caravaggio’s time on this island, which was a “pivotal” period in his life and work, explained Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, curator at London’s National Gallery, whose held an exhibition on the artist in early 2024. This is a tale of murder, religion, knights, prison escapes and art theft, all played out across Malta’s most important historic buildings.

I started my quest for Caravaggio where he began his time in Malta, on the sparkling waters of the Grand Harbour, still flanked as they were then by the honeyed limestone fortifications of the Knights of the Order of St John Hospitaller. This harbour has been at the heart of Maltese history since the Phoenicians. Anyone trading or invading in the Mediterranean has at some point coveted this safe haven, and down the years it has caught the eyes of Romans, Arabs, medieval Europeans, Catholic knights, Muslim Turks, Napoleon and the British, to name a few.

When Caravaggio sailed in, it had only been a handful of decades since the harbour had been thick with the blood and cannon smoke of the Great Siege of 1565, in which the outnumbered Knights nearly lost Malta to the Ottoman Turks. The Order of St John’s response was to construct a brand-new impregnable peninsula capital, Valletta, an elegant but austere citadel city that was ‘built by gentlemen for gentlemen’.

Caravaggio, however, was not a gentleman – not by birth or behaviour. In fact, when he arrived here in July 1607, he was on the run after killing a man in a brawl in Rome. But Caravaggio had powerful friends, awed by his art and willing to overlook his dissolute lifestyle, and the Knights’ Grand Master was in search of a top-quality painter to work for the Order in Malta. So Caravaggio boarded one of the galleys bound for Valletta.

A fresh start

I chose to tour the Grand Harbour by dgħajsa water taxi, a colourful, traditional boat rowed standing up, though nowadays assisted by an outboard motor. Like Caravaggio, I passed star-shaped Fort St Elmo, guardian of the harbour mouth on the Valletta side, and on the opposite bank I spied Fort St Angelo, the Knights’ first base in Malta and a key player in Caravaggio’s story. Soon enough, we landed at what is now Customs House Wharf, an area that was known in the 1600s simply as The Marina.

Having disembarked, I was told by Keith Sciberras, professor of art history at the University of Malta and a world expert on Caravaggio’s time here, that the artist would have walked steeply uphill through Salvatore Gate (since renamed Victoria Gate). From there he would have slipped into the narrow streets of Valletta, some of which are still little more than stone stairways. I cheated by taking the Barrakka Lift – not out of laziness (it isn’t far), but to enjoy the glass-sided 58m ride up the exterior of Valletta’s towering fortifications to the bastion-top, where the Upper Barrakka Gardens reveal breathtaking views over the Grand Harbour.

Caravaggio, explained Sciberras, likely crossed town to the home of Ippolito Malaspina, a senior knight and veteran of the Great Siege. He had close connections to the artists’ influential Italian patrons, and he was probably instrumental in bringing Caravaggio to Malta. History shows he gave him one of his first commissions on the island, St Jerome Writing, which is now displayed alongside The Beheading of St John the Baptist in the Co-Cathedral, with Malaspina’s coat of arms clearly visible in the bottom right-hand corner.

Some say that St Jerome is a portrait of Malaspina. Certainly this is a very human-looking saint, which was most unusual at that time. His hands and face are tanned by the sun, his bare torso pale, his mature skin loose and wrinkled. The picture first hung in Malaspina’s home, passing to the Italian wing of the Knights when he died, who then placed it in the Co-Cathedral.

In 1984, in a hard-to-believe heist, two men stole the painting from the Co-Cathedral museum by putting up a fake ‘work in progress’ sign, calmly cutting it from its frame before rolling it up and throwing it out of a window. The picture was only returned, albeit somewhat damaged, after delicate negotiations with the thieves.

A starry welcome

I followed in Caravaggio’s footsteps along Malaspina’s street, known today as San Bastjan. It is now mostly made up of flats with brightly coloured doors, yet is still scattered with the painted wooden balconies (called gallariji) that became popular here from the late 1600s on. I looked out across the waters of Marsamxett Harbour to Manoel Island and its recently restored fort and lazaretto (plague quarantine centre), and beyond to the glass and steel of modern Sliema – a far cry from the barren, rocky garigue that Malaspina and Caravaggio would have seen.

Valletta is much less changed, despite the 17th-century craze for Baroque embellishment that added fancy porticoes, curlicues and columns to many of the city’s plain facades. Walking towards the centre of town, I paused to visit Casa Rocca Piccola. This is the only private 16th-century palazzo in town that is routinely open to the public, and it is full of historic furniture, lace and paintings. Caravaggio may well have been entertained here, I’d heard, or at least in places like this.

“He was a celebrity,” explained Sciberras. “It was like having Elton John around. Caravaggio was changing the course of art history, and that was recognised at the time. He was probably invited by all.”

Further up the street, I came upon Valletta’s main square, a pleasant gathering place dominated by the Grand Master’s Palace. I wasn’t able to go inside on this occasion because it was closed for refurbishment (though it has since reopened to the public; see p29). Having been home to the rulers of the islands from the 1570s on, throughout the British era (1800–1964) and for fifty years of independence, it was vacated by the nation’s MPs in 2015, when they moved to their new purpose-built parliament (designed by Renzo Piano, architect of the London Shard), allowing the palace to be restored to its historic glory.

I have been inside many times, however, and recalled the statue of Neptune that stands in the courtyard. Many believe its face is that of Alof de Wignacourt, the powerful Grand Master whom Caravaggio came here to visit – and to paint. His striking portrait of Wignacourt in full armour, his page at his side, now hangs in the Louvre. The original armour, along with the Grand Master’s battle suit and stunning dress armour, which is intricately embossed with gold, can still be seen in the Palace Armoury.

The Grand Master was Caravaggio’s meal ticket, and it was he who petitioned the pope for special dispensation to allow a murderer to join the Knights. The pope, perhaps happy to keep this troublesome but talented artist safely away from Rome, agreed, and Caravaggio became an unlikely novice of the Order of St John.

Recruits to the Knights – most of whom were the ‘spare’ sons of Europe’s aristocracy – were expected to pay a substantial fee upon joining. Caravaggio didn’t have any money. Instead, he was commissioned to create a huge painting of the death of the Knights’ patron saint for the newly constructed oratory, which functioned as a combination courthouse, ceremonial centre and novice school.

The exterior of St John’s Co-Cathedral remains more or less the simple, unadorned building it was back when it was built in the 1570s. As I entered, however, I was assailed by an explosion of dazzling Baroque embellishment in bright paint, coloured marble and sparkling 24-carat gold. Gazing up at the barrel-vaulted ceiling depicting the life of St John in colourful oils (by Italian artist Mattia Preti), and across to the golden carvings crowding every arch and buttress, then down at some of the 400 inlaid marble tombstones beneath my feet, I had to remind myself that none of this was here in Caravaggio’s day. These were only added from the 1660s on; before then, the church was almost as spartan inside as out.

As I stood in the oratory, in front of Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St John the Baptist, I mentally stripped everything else away, looking only at the painting (5.2m by 3.7m). For an early 17th-century representation of biblical martyrdom, it is utterly atypical: no angels bear the saint to heaven, no ecstasy soothes the afflicted. John lies with his bloodless face to the ground, head almost severed – but not quite. His executioner leans over him, muscles taut, knife in hand, ready to finish the job, while a gaoler points at the plate held by Salome (or a servant girl; her identity is disputed), awaiting the head promised her by King Herod. Completing the picture’s tight, dramatically lit central group, an elderly woman holds her head in horror, while in the background a couple of prisoners watch through a grilled window. Will they be next? Or, given the viewer is carefully positioned in the space opposite them, will we?

It was a reminder to the novices who sat in contemplation before it what martyrdom (to which they were signing up as ‘holy warriors’) might actually look like, from a man who knew about violence. Caravaggio punches the message home by placing the scene not in some mythical landscape, but amid the contemporary architecture of Valletta, still recognisable in the streets I’d just passed through.

The painting must have had an added poignancy for the artist, too. Caravaggio had fled Rome with a bounty on his head – literally. A reward was payable to anyone in the Papal States delivering his severed head. Perhaps this was why he signed his name in the Baptist’s blood. Either way, it’s telling that he makes a point of writing ‘f’, for fra (brother), before it, perhaps in recognition that he had finally become a Knight of the Order of St John on 14 July 1608 in a ceremony held in front of his own painting. For the artist, it offered hope of a fresh start.

Old demons

“It was incredibly prestigious to be a knight,” explained Whitlum-Cooper, “but he couldn’t hold it together.” The following month, Caravaggio got into a fight at the home of an organist. He smashed a door, and a more senior knight was also wounded. The artist was arrested and imprisoned in Fort St Angelo, the sturdy citadel on the other side of the Grand Harbour that, only four decades earlier, had withstood the might of the besieging Ottoman army.

I took a water taxi over to Birgu (Vittoriosa), which is still a traditional area of narrow medieval streets, filled with glimpses of the Knights’ legacy and waterside relics of Malta’s maritime history. I landed next to the former British naval bakery, where steam machinery once churned out nearly 1.4 tonnes of bread and biscuit daily to feed the Mediterranean fleet. It’s now the National Maritime Museum, which is due to reopen in April following a long renovation. Walking along the waterfront, on my way to Fort St Angelo, I passed the Knights’ old treasury (now restaurants) and the fancy yachts of the modern marina.

As the nation’s oldest fort, St Angelo was already established by the 13th century as the base of the medieval Castellan, who ruled Malta for his overlords in Sicily. When the Knights arrived in 1530 (invited by the Holy Roman Emperor following their expulsion from Rhodes by the Ottoman Turks), they had little interest in the islands’ then-capital, Mdina, which still stands as a remarkable citadel of ancient palazzi, convents and churches atop a high plateau in the middle of the main island. The Knights needed to be near their galleys, so they settled in Birgu, making Fort St Angelo their HQ until the post-siege move to Valletta.

Revitalised under British rule, the fort was a frequent target for air raids during the Second World War. Nazi propaganda even once claimed to have sunk ‘HMS St Angelo’. The idea of this made me laugh as I climbed the long, zig-zagging stone ramps between its thick defensive walls, making my way up towards the Fort’s expansive cannon-fringed parade ground, which afforded fabulous views back across the water to Valletta. I stepped over the little grill in the ground that tour guides will frequently tell you marks the site of Caravaggio’s cell.

“It doesn’t,” remarked Sciberras categorically. “He was still a knight and awaiting trial. He would have been treated better than that.”

He would, however, have been firmly detained. So, on gazing down the long vertical drop to the tiny figures fishing from the harbourside rocks below, it was clear to me that Caravaggio must have had help when, a few weeks after his incarceration, he escaped by boat to Sicily, then on to Naples.

In Italy, the artist resumed his career and found no lack of patrons eager for a slice of his talent, whatever his crimes. Among the surviving paintings from this period is the London National Gallery’s Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist. A tight close-up, it has the echoes of a sequel to his Maltese work. The executioner places the Baptist’s head on a platter held by Salome, whose pose echoes that of the man who had wielded the knife, while a distressed older woman looks down at the same angle as the severed head of the saint.

There is a suggestion that Caravaggio sent a similar scene from Italy to the Grand Master in Malta, but it was probably not this version. If such a gift was delivered, we don’t know how it was received. We know only that the Knights did not pursue the artist any further. Instead, in Valletta, another ceremony was held in front of Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St John the Baptist divesting the artist of his knighthood and, in the words of a document that recorded the events at the time, severing him from the order ‘like a fetid limb’.

Violence and Caravaggio were never long apart, and in 1609 he was attacked outside a Naples tavern and severely injured. After months out of action, he painted The Martyrdom of St Ursula in the spring of 1610, another deathly close-up. Having delivered it to his aristocratic commissioner, Caravaggio set out for Rome, apparently expecting a papal pardon. He never arrived, dying en route in murky circumstances, thus turning St Ursula into ‘The Last Caravaggio’ and making the Maltese paintings some of his final masterpieces.

I couldn’t leave Valletta without one more visit to the Co-Cathedral. With a nod to the graves of Wignacourt and Malaspina, I headed back into the oratory. I stood before The Beheading, in the presence not only of one of the most powerful paintings in European art but on the spot where once the artist himself – the disturbed and disturbing genius, Caravaggio – stood and signed his name in blood.