Caravaggio
Caravaggio
Chalk portrait of Caravaggio by Ottavio Leoni, c. 1621.
Birth
name
Michelangelo Merisi
Born
29 September 1571(1571-09-29)
Milan
Died
18 July 1610 (aged 38)
Porto Ercole, near Grosseto in
Tuscany
Nationality
Italian
Field
Painting
Movement Baroque
Works
see works by Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, (29
September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Itali-
an artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta and
Sicily between 1593 and 1610. He was the
first great representative of the Baroque
school of painting, noted for his intensely
emotional canvases and dramatic use of light-
ing.[1] He is widely considered one of the
greatest painters in European history.
Even in his own lifetime Caravaggio was
considered enigmatic, fascinating, rebellious
and dangerous. He burst upon the Rome art
scene in 1600, and thereafter never lacked
for commissions or patrons, yet he handled
his success atrociously. An early published
notice on him, dating from 1604 and describ-
ing his lifestyle three years previously, tells
how "after a fortnight’s work he will swagger
about for a month or two with a sword at his
side and a servant following him, from one
ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage
in a fight or an argument, so that it is most
awkward to get along with him."[2] In 1606
he killed a young man in a brawl and fled
from Rome with a price on his head. In Malta
in 1608 he was involved in another brawl,
and yet another in Naples in 1609, possibly a
deliberate attempt on his life by unidentified
enemies. By the next year, after a relatively
brief career, he was dead.
Huge new churches and palazzi were be-
ing built in Rome in the decades of the late
16th and early 17th Centuries, and paintings
were needed to fill them. The Counter-Re-
formation Church searched for authentic reli-
gious art with which to counter the threat of
Protestantism, and for this task the artificial
conventions of Mannerism, which had ruled
art for almost a century, no longer seemed
adequate. Caravaggio’s novelty was a radical
naturalism