About 60 of his paintings survive—some of them enormous. He once chopped a hole in the ceiling of his rental apartment to accommodate the size of his canvases. When his landlady objected, he threw rocks at her window.

He also threw rocks at the police, brandished sword and pistol in the streets of Rome without a license, was tossed in jail for assaulting a fellow painter, was arraigned for beating a man with a stick, and instigated countless battles, brawls, and post-pub fist fights. In the worst of these—the result of, according to various sources, a quarrel over a woman, a foul ball in tennis, or an unpaid gambling debt—he killed his opponent and was forced to flee the country.

He also