Overshadowing all the rest

We don’t know what Caravaggio himself would have made of Beyond Caravaggio, the new exhibition at the National Gallery which is devoted to his own work and that of his numerous followers. But, by chance, we do have a very good idea what he would have said at least of one exhibit: ‘The Ecstasy of St Francis’ (1601) by Giovanni Baglione. Two years after this was painted, in 1603, Caravaggio stated in a disposition to a Roman court that he didn’t know of any other artist ‘who thinks Giovanni Baglione is a good painter’.

Very few of Caravaggio’s own words survive, and those that do are mainly in the records of legal cases in which he was involved. But these are enough to give an idea of his demeanour. As Baglione himself wrote later — when the great man was safely dead — Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) was ‘a satirical and proud man’.