Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (28 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian artist. He worked in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. He was a painter who did a type of art called Baroque style. He was the first person to be really good at painting this way.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Chalk portrait of Caravaggio by Ottavio Leoni, c. 1621.
Born	(1571-09-28)28 September 1571 Milan
Died	18 July 1610(1610-07-18) (aged 38) Porto Ercole, near Grosseto in Tuscany
Nationality	Italian
Field	Painting
Movement	Baroque
Works	see works by Caravaggio

Even while he was alive, many people talked about Caravaggio. Some people liked to see what he did, and how he lived, and thought he was a good person. Other people thought he was very strange. Some people thought he was bad. He did not want to fit in, sometimes. He started being a famous painter in Rome in 1600. Many people gave him money to paint pictures for them, but he used all his money and sometimes got into trouble. In 1604 someone wrote a note about him, and said that he was rude and a bad person. This note tells us how he lived, in 1601:

“	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	”
—Floris Claes van Dijk,1601

In 1606 he killed a young man in a fight and ran away from Rome. He ran away because Rome said it would give money to people who caught Caravaggio. In Malta in 1608 he got into a fight again. He got into another fight in Naples in 1609, but this fight could have been enemies (people who hated him) trying to kill him. In 1610, after making paintings for more than ten years, he died.

Huge new churches and palazzi were being built in Rome the last years of the 1500s and the first years of the 1600s. These big churches needed paintings to hang on the walls. The Counter-Reformation Catholic Church wanted to find painters who would paint beautiful art about God. They wanted people to like the art so much that they would think Protestantism was ugly and boring, and wouldn't want to start being part of a Protestant church. So the Catholic Church needed a new type of art, because Mannerism had been the most famous type of art for 100 years, and now it was boring. Caravaggio's paintings were new, and different from Mannerism. He painted in a way called naturalism, which means that he painted things how they actually looked. He painted pictures of people so that the people looked real, and he made his pictures look exciting by painting a lot of very dark shadows and very bright lights (which is called chiaroscuro).

While he was alive he was very famous, and many artists wanted to paint like he did. But after he died, most people forgot about him, and didn't care about his paintings. Hundreds of years later, in the 1900s, people looked at his art again, and saw that he had been very important. They saw that many other famous artists had tried to paint like he did. Because so many artists had seen his paintings, and liked how he painted, and tried to paint like he did, he made many artists paint in the Baroque style, too. The Baroque style was very famous for hundreds of years.

Andre Berne-Joffroy, Paul Valéry’s secretary, said that: "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting."

Caravaggio Media

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  Basket of Fruit, c. 1595–1596, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

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  The Musicians,*1595–1596, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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  Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (c. 1595), Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford

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  The Lute Player (Hermitage version), c. 1600. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (commissioned by Francesco Maria del Monte)

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  Medusa, c. 1597. Uffizi, Florence

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  Narcissus at the Source, 1597–1599, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome

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  The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600), Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Without recourse to flying angels, parting clouds or other artifice, Caravaggio portrays the instant conversion of St Matthew, the moment on which his destiny will turn, by means of a beam of light and the pointing finger of Jesus.

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  The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Ecclesiastical Version, 1601), Private collection, Florence, Italy

Related pages

• List of Italian painters