Caravaggio
The rebel of light and shadow.
Caravaggio used ordinary people from the street as models for saints and let them emerge from deep darkness. His life was as violent as his pictures were dramatic.
Caravaggio's real name was Michelangelo Merisi, and he was born in Milan in 1571. The family came from the small town of Caravaggio, which gave him his name. He lost his father to the plague as a child. In 1584 he was apprenticed to the painter Simone Peterzano in Milan. Around 1592 he arrived in Rome, where at first he lived in poverty and worked for other painters.
His early pictures are small and show young men with fruit, musical instruments or in costume, such as the Bacchus in the Uffizi, or everyday scenes such as The Fortune Teller and The Cardsharps. An important patron was Cardinal Francesco Del Monte. His breakthrough came in 1600 with two large paintings for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, where they still hang. In The Calling of Saint Matthew the tax collector sits at a table with his companions, and Christ points at him in a beam of light that cuts through the darkness.
Caravaggio painted directly onto the canvas from live models, often people from the street, and without preparatory drawings. He let sharp light fall against deep darkness. The technique is called chiaroscuro, and in his extreme form sometimes tenebrism. His saints have dirty feet and worn clothes. For some patrons this was too much, and several of his altarpieces were rejected. The Death of the Virgin, now in the Louvre, was turned down partly because Mary looked like an ordinary dead woman.
His life was violent. The police records in Rome contain many entries about fights and brawls. In 1606 he killed a man in a fight and fled. He then worked in Naples, on Malta and on Sicily. On Malta he was admitted to the Order of the Knights of St John and painted The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, his only signed work, but he was soon expelled after another quarrel. He died in 1610 at Porto Ercole on his way to Rome, where he hoped to be pardoned. He was 38 years old.
His influence was enormous. Painters all over Europe, the so-called Caravaggisti, took up his light and realism. Through them he influenced Artemisia Gentileschi, Rubens, Velázquez and Rembrandt, among others.