San Giovanni Battista

Caravaggio painted this in Naples in 1610, and it was among the last things he made. He was a fugitive. Four years earlier he had killed a man in Rome and fled with a death sentence hanging over him, and he was now trying to win a pardon. Cardinal Scipione Borghese had the pope's ear, so Caravaggio loaded pictures like this one onto a boat and sailed north to press his case in person. He never arrived. Stopped and briefly held on the coast, then chasing the vessel that carried his belongings, he died that July, most likely of fever, at Porto Ercole. The painting reached the cardinal only after his death. It shows John as a slouching boy in the dark, a ram beside him, the whole scene held in shadow.