His life was sulphurous and his painting scandalous. Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (the name of his native village ner Bergamo), was a downright villian. Other artists had had brushes with justice before him: Duccio was a drunkard and a brawler. The quarrelsome Perugino was involved in street fights, and, as a young man, spent time in prison. And the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, accused of embezzlement, murder and sodomy, was incarcerated in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Caravaggio was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned. He confessed to the murder of an opponent at tennis whom he suspected of cheating, and he was rumoured to have committed other crimes. He was a painter of genius, who worked with extraordinary speed, painting directly onto the canvas without even sketching out the main figures. His powerful patrons found it increasingly difficult to extract him from the prison cells in which he so often languished. Caravaggio risked his life escaping from his last prison, on the island of Malta, as Cellini had done escaping from Castel Sant'Angelo. The evidence suggests that he was we would now term paedophilia. He died, a persecuted outlaw, on a beach south of Rome, perhaps, like 1975 the film-director Pier Paolo Pasolini, a victim of murder.