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talentless maestro whose name lives on only because it is associated with Caravaggio’s youth. The few that it has been possible to identify show no sign of Merisi’s master hand, whether because he didn’t work on them—he wasn’t Grammatica’s only assistant—or because he turned them out mechanically, with no thought of proving anything to anyone. By then he was trying to make a place for himself as a painter with his own workshop, in the city that was the very navel of the art of his day, and he must have believed that investing effort in work that didn’t even make him a good living was a waste of time.
    What we are left with instead are several heads—not all of them gigantic—of Caravaggio himself. He appears in the grips of fever in
Sick Bacchus
, and stricken with anguish in the face of death in
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
. On May 29, 1606, he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni on a tennis court and was sentenced to death by beheading. Over the following years he painted hisown severed head in two works:
David with the Head of Goliath
—which he sent to Scipione Borghese in return for pleading his cause before Pope Paul V—and
Salome with the Head of John the Baptist
—which he sent as a gift to the grand master of the Knights of Malta to request the protection of the order when the pope’s executioners were closing in on him.
    He had also painted himself as an adolescent in
The
Musicians
, which he completed under the protection of Cardinal del Monte after he came to live on the lower floor—the servants’ floor—of the Palazzo Madama in 1595. The lasciviousness of his half-open mouth, the succulence of his naked shoulders, the supplicatory look he gives the sole spectator of the painting—it was the first work that he painted for the cardinal’s exclusive enjoyment—makes one imagine that he feels a gratitude that is at the very least voluptuous. In
The Musicians
, he portrays himself as a boy of fourteen or fifteen, though he was already a full-fledged and well-seasoned twenty-four when he painted it. This is unsettling, because during the talks of the conclave of 1621, the argument with which the representatives of Philip IV put an end to Cardinal del Monte’s previously unstoppable campaign for the papal seat was that he ran a charitable mission recruiting boys of twelve or thirteen to be educated under his personal supervision in the palace. According to the cardinals’ accusations, which are known because they were posted anonymously on the statue of Pasquino in Rome, del Monte recruited boys “not on the merits of their intelligence or neediness, but for their beauty.”
    There is a sixth head of Caravaggio, sketched ten or fifteen years after his death, in chalk on paper. It was done by OttavioLeoni, who knew him well. The brown of the eyes, the boldly drawn eyebrows that almost meet at the bridge of the nose, the untidiness of the rather thin beard, the unkempt and chaotic hair, the skin of the face shiny with grease, and the straight nose unblemished by age are the same as in his self-portraits, but in Leoni’s drawing Caravaggio’s expression isn’t theatrical. He looks like what he probably was: difficult, peevish, ready for a fight. His right eyebrow, arched higher than the left, conveys irony and impatience, skepticism. The turned-down mouth signals that he was easily irritated; his slovenliness suggests that he was more arrogant than vain. Most of all, it is the saddest head ever drawn: that of someone already done for, caught in his own trap. The head of someone who no longer has a name of his own.
    In March 1595, del Monte bought two paintings from the butcher and art dealer Constantino Spata, paintings by the young artist he had met in Antiveduto Grammatica’s workshop of giant heads. It was so early in his career that they were still signed with the name of his Lombardy boyhood—M.