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Born Michelangelo Merisi in 1571; Caravaggio is his hometown. Moved to Rome in his teens to be a painter, and after years of abject poverty began to secure lucrative commissions. In an era of idealized representation his subjects were shockingly real, alive in a swirl of color and motion. The way he captured the light. The sheer immediacy of the work, the violence and beauty. In The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, the doubting apostle looks at the resurrected Christ and plunges his fingers into the gaping wound below his chest. Caravaggio frequently got into trouble because his paintings were deemed disrespectful to their religious subjects. For instance, his Death of the Virgin was rejected because the model for the BVM was a known prostitute. Caravaggio was a brawler, a bleeder, a rebel who liked girls and boys, a genius. He was sentenced to death for murder. The sentence could be carried out by anyone, and in his last years he was constantly on the move. Men believed to be relatives of a man he killed caught up with him and sliced his face. In 1610 he was hurrying back to Rome, where his influential admirers had arranged a pardon. En route he caught a mysterious fever and died. He was 39. Almost instantly his reputation went into eclipse. For centuries he was regarded as a minor painter, and his work derided as cheap, vulgar, “base imitations of nature”. In the 1940s he was rescued from obscurity by art critics. The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr (A Civil Action) is a riveting account of how two students and a restorer stumbled upon a Caravaggio that had been lost for three centuries.