The narrative portrait of Caravaggio outlined by his contemporaries, and documented by early biographers such as Bellori, Mancini, and Baglione, is stained with the pejorative impression left by his strange or criminal acts.
The pen-portraits outlined by the biographers of the time were based upon Caravaggio’s sulphurous reputation and upon a primitive science which originated from the time of Catilina or Tigrin della Sassetta, whose principle was that a bad soul was reflected in the face (“faccia ed anima cattiva”). This so-called science claimed that it was possible to find indications as to the character of a person by observing their face and to discover, in the facial appearance of villains, the mark of the wrongdoings they had perpetrated.
The historian Philippe Baldinucci affirmed that Michelangelo de Caravaggio, “since he was a person of chaotic spirit, was therefore a man with a rough and ugly appearance”. Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who wrote around fifty years after the death of the painter (the first edition of Vite di Pittori, Scultori e Architecti moderni dates from 1672), attributed to Caravaggio “a dull complexion, dark eyes, black eyebrows and hair,” and added naively that “he nevertheless succeeded thanks to his natural gift for painting”. The author mentions a medallion representing a “natural” portrait on which Caravaggio is portrayed with a thick and bushy, furrowed brow, and an almost ferocious look in his eyes. His nose is long, three-lobed, and flattened, his eyelids and lips are thick, and his cheeks bony. His right hand holds with vigour a common weapon rather than the refined one of a Knight of Malta. This description perhaps followed the same prejudices that inspired the comments of the portrait placed officially in the Academy of San Luca and considered an authentic self-portrait of Caravaggio. The artist appears as a suspect person with a lean face and a pale complexion almost entirely in shade, with disturbing crossed eyes, a hand resting on the hilt of his sword, the other plunging in his pocket in a rather vulgar way.
Amongst the numerous other portraits influenced by these types of prejudices, one must cite the caricature attributed to Carracci, the Sinister Villain, where Caravaggio is represented devouring vegetables inside a tavern lit by a tiny opening.