He was the most famous artist of his era. But he was also a murderer. He was on the run from a sentence of death. And so it was that, in the late summer of 1609, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, revolutionary painter and ruffian brawler, fetched up in Naples. He was presumably hoping that, until a papal pardon had been secured, he would better be able to dodge his pursuers amid the anarchic chaos of a city that had grown into the largest in Europe.
It was there, in Naples, that in 1610 he executed his last painting: a claustrophobic drama that zooms in, like a film-maker’s camera, on the moment in which a Christian princess, the determinedly virginal St Ursula, is shot through the
