Caravaggio

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For other uses, see Caravaggio (disambiguation).
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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Caravaggio, September 29, 1573 - Porto Ercole, Italy, July 18, 1610), named after his hometown near Milan, was an Italian Baroque painter, whose large religious works portrayed pedestrian Romans as starkly lit saints or biblical figures amid darkened backgrounds. Though the representations were often too controversial to hang in churches, they were avidly sought after by aristocratic collectors, including his Cardinal patrons, for their drama, technical accomplishment, startling originality, and some for their minimally disguised erotic often homoerotic qualities. His emotionally dynamic scenes and innovative use of light and shadow became a strong current Baroque painting throuhgout Europe. Though his life nearly coincides with that of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), their two worlds were distinctly different.

Scenes of violent struggle, grotesque decapitations, and naturalistic death are commonly featured in his large canvases, implying a familiarity with the darker side of Roman life. Caravaggio's impulsive and tempestuous nature contrasts with the extreme elegance and control of his work and his ability to ingratiate himself with his aristocratic and clerical supporters, several of whom, most importantly Cardinal Del Monte, lodged him for extended periods in their palaces.

In many ways, Caravaggio represents a revolutionary break away from the classical, elevated, and often sunny Renaissance elegance of painting; and while his stock has fluctuated in value, the repercussions of his style were immense. Today, the renegade talent he showed over his short and troubled life is viewed with the awe reserved for mentally-turbulent towering figures like Van Gogh.

Contents

Biography

Early life

Caravaggio was son of Fermo Merisi (architect of Francesco Sforza) and Lucia Aratori. Information about his youth is scarce: it is not certain that he was born in Caravaggio or in the nearby Milan, and the date of his birth is disputed. It is known that he was well-educated and that at 5 years old he lived in Caravaggio, probably to escape the plague then raging in Milan. His father died of that disease in 1577. Little is known about Caravaggio's artistic origins, or early work. He studied for several years with an obscure Milanese painter, Simone Peterzano, to whom he was apprenticed at age 12 in 1584, but the earliest known work that can be reliably attributed to him dates from almost 10 years later, by which time he had likely been in Rome for several years. His whereabouts in the intervening period are uncertain, and accounts of his life written by near-contemporaries are unreliable on such details. Image:Caravaggio.emmaus.750pix.jpg When Caravaggio finally arrived in Rome around 1592, he suffered the vicissitudes of an unattached young man from the provinces, unknown and unwelcomed, in the center of the Catholic world. He spent a few years working as an understudy in the studios of other painters, mediocre and Lorenzo Siciliano, and the then famed Cavalier d'Arpino. He was asked to paint flowers and fruit, and he is considered the true beginner of the genre which is known as "still life". His genre paintings of young boys also came to the attention of a group of ecclesiastics and businessman who were members of the Roman elite, and passionate collectors of art and artifacts. By day, he moved amongst this community, until his hasty and involuntary departure from Rome a decade later. This small group of patrons bought or paid for nearly all of the images for which Caravaggio is best known.

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Roman works

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His tenebrism of darkened backgrounds and the incisively real, yet plebeian inhabitants of Caravaggio's canvases were a revolutionary departure from the sunlit frescoes of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel roof or the contemporary Carracci fresco cycles. His canvases, while often muscularly large, are not populated by herculean demigods attended by cherubs; instead, as exemplified by the Madonna di Loreto (painted in 1603-1605 and now in Sant'Agostino), the depicted shepherds could have been plucked from the populace. The Madonna in the doorway could be any woman emerging from a dark doorway. The Entombment of Christ (1602-1603) located in the Vatican Pinacoteca is a masterpiece, with subduing emotion as one descends toward the limp Christ.

Starting in 1600, Caravaggio's three influential canvases narrating the story of St. Matthew were unveiled in the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, a church of the French congregation not far from Pantheon and Piazza Navona.

Soon, he also unveiled a pair of canvases about St. Paul in the Cerasi chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo. In The Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus, the saint is an epileptic figure, flattened diagonally on the ground after falling from his horse. His horse dominates the canvas center, oblivious to the divine light that has unseated the rider's gravity.

Exile and death

Caravaggio led a ruthless life. Notorious for his violence and brawling in his private life, even in a time and place when such behavior was commonplace, transcripts of his police records and trial proceedings fill several pages.

Several violent incidents nearly ended in the death of Caravaggio or his adversaries and he certainly owed his continuing freedom, at least in part, to the protection of his powerful patrons. But even his well-placed friends did not save Caravaggio from the police after a nightime battle between rival gangs led to the death of one of the participants, Ranuccio Tomassoni, on May 29, 1606: he left Rome for good, taking shelter in Naples and then, at the end of 1607 or the beginning of 1608, in Malta.

After his exile from Rome, his works became darker in mood and hastier in execution. Given the tumultous circumstances of his existence, that he continued to do remarkable works is in itself an achievement.

In this period he completed several works, the most important of which is Salome with the Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist for the island's cathedral (the painting is now in London). It is a scene of martyrdom where the shadow of the earlier works gives space to a wall representing probably the painter's consciusness of condemnation to jail. On July 14, 1608 Caravaggio entered the order of Knights of Malta, but again he had to move from the Mediterranean island after a quarrel with another knight or because of news of his misdeeds had reached the Order. Imprisoned, he managed to escape to Sicily in October 1608. In this period he painted some of his finest works: the famed Burial of St. Lucy in Syracuse, The Adoration of the Shepherds in Messina (where he fled in 1609) and the notable Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence for the Oratorio of San Lorenzo in Palermo. The Maltese however had not ceased to seek for him, and he again fled to Naples in October 1609: here he barely survived to an attack at the door of a inn, which left his face badly scarred, so much that in Rome people started to rumour that the "celebrated painter" was dead. In 1610 he embarked for Porto Ercole, a Spanish possession in Toscana, to wait for the pardon from the pope, but he was mistaken for another fugitive and jailed. When he was freed, he desperately tried to reach the ship that had to sail him again to Rome but the strain provoked a high fever which killed him at the age of 38, on July 18, 1610. Tirtheen days after he received a useless mercy from the pope.

Artistic legacy

The Caravaggisti

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Caravaggio's innovations had great impact on painters of his generation and the generations that followed — his gritty realism, his choice of models, his theatrical lighting, his "night paintings"; the rich passages of still life; in short, he brought a revolution in art to fruition at a time when art was ripe for renewal.

"The painters then in Rome were greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles. They outdid each other in imitating his works, undressing their models and raising their lights."
   —Giovanni Pietro Bellori, 1672.

A short list of artists who owe much to his stylistic breakthroughs includes his companion Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, the Frenchman Georges de La Tour, and the Spaniard Giuseppe Ribera.

The scope of Caravaggio's influence was also spurned by some of his contemporaries. His most vocal detractor was Giovanni Baglione, who in 1603 brought charges of libel against Caravaggio and Gentileschi, alleging that they had accused him of plagiarism. At the trial Tommaso Salini also testified against Caravaggio, and was later scornfully accused by him of being Baglione's "guardian angel". Despite the unequivocal disdain leveled against him by these two artists, Caravaggio undoubtedly affected their works, inspiring in them a more creative appropriation of his style.

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A group of Catholic artists from Utrecht, the "Utrecht Caravaggisti", travelled to Rome as students in the first years of the 17th century and were profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, as Bellori describes. On their return to the north this trend had a short-lived but intense development in the 1620s among painters like Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, Andries Both, and Dirck van Baburen. In the following generation less intense affects of Caravaggio are seen in the work of Rubens (whose time in Rome overlapped that of Caravaggio, and who purchased one of his paintings for the Gonzaga), Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Velazquez, who likely saw his work during his various sojourns in Italy.

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Modern tradition

Many large museums of art, for example those in Detroit, and New York, contain rooms where dozens of paintings by as many artists display the characteristic look of the work of Caravaggio — nightime setting, dramatic lighting, ordinary people used as models, honest description from nature.

In modern times, contemporary painters like the Norwegian Odd Nerdrum and the Romanian Tibor Csernus make no secret of their attempts to emulate and update his work.

Chronology of major works

Roman Works

Paintings after exile from Rome

See also

Wikimedia Commons has more media related to:

Further reading

External links

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