Caravaggio

I, Caravaggio, painted Salome in 1606 in Naples when I was 33...

My name is Michelangelo Merisi.
Caravaggio's my hometown near
Milan, but it's what everybody calls me.
I was thirty-seven when I died 
in sixteen ten, still fleeing justice after killing my 
opponent in a tennis match in Rome
four years before. The Neapolitans 
protected me and in their city I did 
Salome with John the Baptist's Head.
The story's told in Mark's and Matthew's books:
the girl had danced for Herod, her stepfather,
who rewarded her with what she asked for -
the beheading of the saint who had 
accused her mother, Herod's wide, of breaking
marriage laws Leviticus lays down. 
I show the axeman lifting up the head
from off the charger Salome brings in:
his handiwork. He's done the terarch's bidding 
and is proud. His simian features, jug ears
and squashed nose suggest a man of low
intelligence. His left hand with its grubby 
fingernails is on his sword. Salome
looks away. The Baptist's face is grey-green,
drained of blood, his mouth agape, his eyes
downcast. The wrinkled woman at the back
is old Herodias, the wife and mother, 
hands clasped, satisfied with her revenge. 
I've made her older than I might have done. 
The grisly subject suited me whose life 
was one long rowdy progress between brawls.
I painted real people with uncanny
nat'ralism, lit dramatically
with stark chiaroscuro. Models pose
for me: I pay them and then paint directly
on to canvas without sketches or
preparatory, squared-up drawings. Church
authorities commissioned me but then
complained - they didn't like, they said, the sweaty    
headcloths, rugged faces of the peasants
whom I'd used as the disciples or 
the girl drowned in the Tiber for the dead
Madonna. After Naples, I went on 
to Malta, Sicily then back to Naples 
whence I left for Porto d'Ercole
and died of fever-induced rage brought on
by thinking a falucca had departed
with my personal effects without me. 

Little did I think that I would be
a fav'rite at the National Gallery....