Baroque Age
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610)
Italian Baroque painter.
Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio after the Lombard town near which his family lived, transformed European painting in barely fifteen years of feverish activity. Arriving in Rome around 1592, poor and combative, he built his early reputation on sharply lit still lifes and half-length figures painted directly from the model, then won public commissions that scandalized and electrified the city. His method was revolutionary: he worked without preparatory drawings, straight onto the canvas from live sitters — including street people cast as saints — and set his figures against a devouring darkness pierced by a single raking light.
That technique, tenebrism, made sacred events feel like things happening now, in a tavern or a doorway, to bodies with dirty feet and creased brows. The Calling of Saint Matthew, Judith Beheading Holofernes, and the Supper at Emmaus fixed the climactic instant with theatrical force. Some patrons rejected his altarpieces as indecorous; others could not get enough.
His life matched the violence of his art. Quick to the sword, he killed a man in Rome in 1606 and fled with a capital sentence over his head, working in Naples, Malta, and Sicily as a fugitive of extraordinary productivity. He died in 1610 at Porto Ercole, aged thirty-eight, apparently while trying to reach a papal pardon. He left almost no writings; his art speaks, and a divided posterity — Bellori disapproving, a generation of 'Caravaggisti' devoted — argued over it for centuries.
The words the record keeps using: violent, immediate, theatrical, carnal, unsparing, dramatic, raw, arresting.
At a glance
- Lived 1571–1610
- Origin Italian (Lombard)
- Worked in Rome, Naples
- Era Baroque Age
- Movements Baroque
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Chiaroscuro, Tenebrism, Alla prima (wet-in-wet)
Works in the archive
- Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598 (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica (Palazzo Barberini), Rome)
Caravaggio stages the Old Testament assassination at its most graphic climax: the young widow Judith, brow furrowed in distaste, saws through the neck of the Assyrian general as blood jets across the sheet and an aged… - The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599 (Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome)
One of Caravaggio's first great public commissions shows Christ entering a dim counting-house and calling the tax collector Levi (Matthew) to follow him. The seated men, in contemporary dress at a table strewn with… - The Supper at Emmaus, 1601 (National Gallery, London)
The risen Christ, beardless and youthful, breaks bread before two disciples who suddenly recognize him — one flinging his arms wide, the other gripping his chair to rise. A basket of fruit teeters at the table's edge… - David with the Head of Goliath, 1609 (Galleria Borghese, Rome)
A late, intensely personal work: the young David holds out the severed head of Goliath with a look less of triumph than of sorrow. The giant's face is widely believed to be Caravaggio's own self-portrait, making the…
What was said
Bellori, admiring yet disapproving, wrote that Caravaggio recognized no master but the model before him, copying nature so slavishly that when the best antique statues were shown to him he answered that nature had given him models enough — a naturalism Bellori blamed for corrupting the art.
Van Mander, writing while Caravaggio was still alive, reported his rising fame in Rome and his conviction that all painting is a trifle unless made after life, done directly from nature.
Questioned in a Roman libel suit, Caravaggio defined a good painter (a 'valent'huomo') as one who knows how to paint well and to imitate natural things well — a rare direct statement of his standard.
Lineage
Learned from Michelangelo Buonarroti
Passed on to Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt van Rijn
What would Michelangelo make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Michelangelo · Keep a life moment the way Michelangelo would · Pictures made after Michelangelo