Nec Spe Nec Metu

Last night, as the tendrils of sleep crawled over my eyelids coaxing them together, my brain's upper functions attempted to fight back because I was watching an episode of Schama's The Power of Art. This episode was about the “bad boy” of 17th century art: Michelangelo da Caravaggio.

In the series, Schama intelligently and somewhat coyly, it seems, narrates the tale behind a particular representative painting of the artist's. In this episode, we learn about a painting finished in the early 1600s when Caravaggio is supposed to be on the run from a charge of murder: David with the head of Goliath.

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Caravaggio paints himself as the grotesque Goliath's head. It is a dark painting, full of reproach and despair, very powerful.

Alas, sleep won over and I lapsed.

“Nec spe nec metu” ( without hope or fear) was the motto of a bunch of rowdies in Rome of which Michelangeo Caravaggio was one.