M is the name of an enigma. In his short and violent life, Michelangelo Merisi, from Caravaggio, changed art for ever. He threw out inherited dogma and technique and painted with devastating clarity. In the process he laid bare his own sexual longing and the brutal realities of his life with shocking frankness. Like no painter before him and few since, M the man appears in his art - fierce, vulnerable, humorous, opportunistic, unyielding.Five years of brilliant fame in Rome provoked deep hostility to M - he was imprisoned for criminal libel, saw his work rejected by Roman churches and clashed with the law. A savage street fight left M nearly killed and his enemy bleeding to death. A price on his head, M went south to Naples and beyond: four years of dazzling success as a painter and personal catastrophe. Jailed in Malta for an unnamed crime, M fled pursued by killers through Sicily and Naples and disappeared in the summer of 1610.Peter Robb looks at the crises in politics, religion, art and science dividing Italy and Europe as the seventeenth century began, at M's protectors and enemies. Read Less