Portrait of Fra Antonio Martelli

Caravaggio painted this old knight around 1607 on Malta, where he had fled as a wanted man. The year before, in Rome, he had killed someone in a fight and been sentenced to death, and he went to the island hoping the Knights of Malta would take him in and protect him. For a while it worked, and he was made a knight himself. The sitter is Fra Antonio Martelli, a Florentine in his seventies, prior of the order in Messina, shown in the black habit with the white eight-pointed cross, one hand on his sword, the light catching every line of an aging, wary face. Within months Caravaggio wrecked it all in another brawl, was thrown in a Maltese cell and escaped by sea. For a long time this man was mistaken for the order's grand master.