Of all the great Italian painters, Caravaggio speaks most clearly and powerfully to our time. Caravaggio's early paintings of cardsharps, musicians, and street vendors convey his familiarity and fascination with the Roman underworld; his stark and brilliant religious paintings represent, for the first time in European art, the world of the poor, the suffering, and the outcast, and they depict the religious experience of the individual with a directness our age can recognize. Caravaggio lived hard and died young, having fled Rome for Sicily, apparently after killing another man in a dispute; his life, involving powerful patrons, sybaritic cardinals, and saints, as well as street boys, prostitutes, and rivalrous painters, is one of the most colorful of any artist's. This biography - the first in English in two generations - shows us Caravaggio's genius with the striking clarity of his own paintings.