At the height of his fame in Rome, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is known to have owned at least 12 books. We don’t picture Caravaggio as a reader. A streetfighter, a killer, yes – but not an intellectual. Yet his painting The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, which has come to the National Gallery from Naples, proves he could mine a book for its hidden diamonds.
The tale of Ursula, an early Christian princess from Britain who sailed off to marry and hopefully convert a pagan prince accompanied by no less than 11,000 virgins, is one of the religious fairy tales recounted in an incredibly strange medieval compendium called The Golden Legend. Caravaggio obviously studied this 13th-century source carefully because he sees something in it no one else had.
