MARINO AND CARAVAGGIO

According to Giovan Pietro Bellori’s account, Marino and Caravaggio would have been “very close friends.” However, we only have limited, and sometimes unreliable, information about their relationship. Nevertheless, the poet certainly expressed generous praise for the artist in various works, with tributes written and published long after the painter’s death. In fact, there are two texts dedicated to Caravaggio in the Galeria: a sonnet praising his portrait of Marino (Ritratti, XV, 11), and a madrigal for the famous tondo of the head of Medusa, now in the Uffizi(Pitture, 48). Caravaggio is also remembered in the poem Il Tempio from 1614, and again in Adone, where Marino pays tribute to him in four verses, an exceptional case when compared to the fleeting mention he gives to other painters. Therefore, his admiration appears to have been sincere although their acquaintance must have been brief, since it started in Clement VIII Aldobrandini’s Rome – between 1600- 1605 – at the beginning of the poet’s career and the end of the artist’s Roman period. It was perhaps during these years that Marino managed to obtain the Susanna “by Caravaggio’s hand” in his collection, which he recalls in a letter (Letters 1620). To this day, neither the Susanna nor the portrait of Marino have been traced.

---