ABSTRACT
Caravaggio's name was Michelangelo Merisi; in Rome, where he first established himself as an artist, he was called "Caravaggio" because the farming community of that name, east of Milan, was the family home. W. Shakespeare's exact contemporary, the revolutionary Tuscan scientist Galileo, was a friend of some of Caravaggio's Roman patrons. The notarial document stipulated four years' service in Peterzano's home and shop together with payment by Caravaggio of 24 gold scudi. Caravaggio should have learned from Peterzano the fundamentals of painting, the grinding of colors, the preparation of walls for fresco, and the basic principles of drawing and applying paint to wall and canvas. There was a rumor that Caravaggio killed someone and had to flee Milan—Giovan Pietro Bellori, a reliable Roman scholar, scratched this in the margin of Giovanni Baglione's Lives of the Painters. The story may have come from Mancini, who heard that Caravaggio had committed a crime and spent a year in a Milanese jail.
