Giuseppe Cesari

Around 1600 the busiest painter in Rome was Giuseppe Cesari, known as the Cavaliere d'Arpino after Pope Clement the Eighth made him a knight. He ran a large, fashionable workshop, frescoed the vault of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline hill with scenes from Rome's legendary past, and turned out the polished late-Mannerist pictures that popes and cardinals wanted.

One of the boys who passed through that workshop was a newcomer from the north, Michelangelo Merisi, soon famous as Caravaggio. For a short while the young man painted fruit and flowers for Cesari before leaving to work in the raw, shadowed manner that would make his name.

The two men crossed again in a strange way. In 1607 Cesari was arrested on a charge of illegally owning firearms, and Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the art-hungry nephew of the reigning pope, seized his whole collection of more than a hundred pictures. Among them were two early Caravaggios, the Sick Bacchus and the Boy with a Basket of Fruit. Both still hang in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the paintings that outlasted the quarrel that brought them there.