Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (also Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi da Caravaggio; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610), known mononymously as Caravaggio, was an Italian painter active in Rome for a significant portion of his artistic life. He began his apprenticeship in Milan in 1584, and during the final four years of his life, he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.
Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He made the technique a dominant stylistic element, transfixing subjects in bright shafts of light and darkening shadows. Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes, often featuring violent struggles, torture, and death. He worked rapidly with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and work directly on the canvas. His effect on the new Baroque style that emerged from Mannerism was profound. His influence can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Peter Paul Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Velázquez and Rembrandt, as well as many lesser-known artists. Artists most deeply influenced by him were called the "Caravaggisti" (or "Caravagesques"), as well as tenebrists or tenebrosi ("shadowists").
Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan before moving to Rome when he was in his twenties. He developed a considerable name as an artist and as a violent, touchy and provocative man. He killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a brawl, which led to a death sentence for murder and forced him to flee to Naples. There he again established himself as one of the most prominent Italian painters of his generation. He travelled to Malta and on to Sicily in 1607 and pursued a papal pardon for his sentence. In 1609, he returned to Naples, where he was involved in a violent clash; his face was disfigured, and rumours of his death circulated. Questions about his mental state arose from his erratic and bizarre behavior. He died in 1610 under uncertain circumstances while on his way from Naples to Rome. Reports stated that he died of a fever, possibly due to wounds. Suggestions have been made that he was murdered or that he died of lead poisoning.
Caravaggio's innovations inspired Baroque painting, which often incorporated the drama of his chiaroscuro with a lesser degree of psychological disturbance. As style evolved and fashions changed, Caravaggio fell out of favor. In the 20th century, interest in his work was revived, and his importance to the development of Western art was reassessed. The 20th-century art historian stated: "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting."Quoted in Gilles Lambert, "Caravaggio", p.8.
Biography
Early life (1571–1592)
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi or Amerighi) was born in Milan, where his father, Fermo (Fermo Merixio), was a household administrator and architect-decorator to the marquess of Caravaggio, a town to the east of Milan and south of Bergamo. It was previously assumed that he had been born in Caravaggio.Confirmed by the finding in February 2007 of his baptism certificate from the Milanese parish of Santo Stefano in Brolo. In 1576 the family moved to Caravaggio to escape a plague that ravaged Milan, and Caravaggio's father and grandfather both died there on the same day in 1577. It is assumed that the artist grew up in Caravaggio, but his family kept up connections with the Sforzas and the powerful Colonna family, who were allied by marriage with the Sforzas and destined to play a major role later in Caravaggio's life.
Caravaggio's mother, Lucia Aratori raised her five children in poverty. She died in 1584, the same year he began his four-year apprenticeship to the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, described in the contract of apprenticeship as a pupil of Titian. Caravaggio appears to have stayed in the Milan-Caravaggio area after his apprenticeship ended, but it is possible that he visited Venice and saw the works of Giorgione, whom Federico Zuccari later accused him of imitating, and Titian.Harris, p. 21. He would also have become familiar with the art treasures of Milan, including Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, and with the regional Lombard art, a style that valued simplicity and attention to naturalistic detail and was closer to the naturalism of Germany than to the stylised formality and grandeur of Roman Mannerism.Rosa Giorgi, ": Master of light and dark – his life in paintings", p.12. Graham-Dixon sees the influence of the popular images favored by the Counter-Reformation archbishop Charles Borromeo (who was later sainted).
Beginnings in Rome (1592/95–1600)
Following his initial training under Simone Peterzano, in 1592, Caravaggio left Milan for Rome in flight after "certain quarrels" and the wounding of a police officer. The young artist arrived in Rome "naked and extremely needy... without fixed address and without provision... short of money."Quoted without attribution in Robb, p.35, apparently based on the three primary sources, Mancini, Baglione and Bellori, all of whom depict Caravaggio's early Roman years as a period of extreme poverty (see references below). During this period, he stayed with the miserly Pandolfo Pucci, known as "monsignor Insalata". A few months later he was working for the highly successful Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Clement VIII's favourite artist, "painting flowers and fruit"Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de' pittori, scultori, et architetti moderni, 1672: "Michele was forced by necessity to enter the services of Cavalier Giuseppe d'Arpino, by whom he was employed to paint flowers and fruits so realistically that they began to attain the higher beauty that we love so much today." and other minor elements in his factory-like workshop. It is hard to establish the chronology of Caravaggio's early years due to his changing of addresses frequently around ten times between 1592 and 1595.
In Rome, there was a demand for paintings to fill the many huge new churches and palaces being built at the time. It was also a period when the Church was searching for a stylistic alternative to Mannerism in religious art that was tasked to counter the threat of Protestantism.Harris, Ann Sutherland, Seventeenth-century Art & Architecture (Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008). Caravaggio's innovation was a radical naturalism that combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of chiaroscuro known as tenebrism (the shift from light to dark with little intermediate value).
Caravaggio began working in Rome for Lorenzo Siciliano, a minor painter for whom he painted three heads a day, for very nominal pay, according Giovanni Bellori, a painter and an early biographer of Caravaggio.
Known works include the small Boy Peeling a Fruit (his earliest known painting). The next two works are from his time with Cesari: Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and Young Sick Bacchus, supposedly a self-portrait done during convalescence from a serious illness that ended his employment with Cesari. The title Sick Bacchus comes from Italian art historian Roberto Longhi. Whether the artwork references Caravaggio’s real life illness is up for question, though many scholars are convinced it is a self portrait. All three demonstrate the physical particularity for which Caravaggio was to become renowned: the fruit-basket-boy's produce has been analyzed by a professor of horticulture, who was able to identify individual cultivars right down to "...a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata)."
Caravaggio left Cesari, determined to make his own way after a heated argument. At this point he forged some extremely important friendships, with the painter Prospero Orsi, the architect Onorio Longhi, and the sixteen-year-old Sicilian artist Mario Minniti. Orsi, established in the profession, introduced him to influential collectors; Longhi, more balefully, introduced him to the world of Roman street brawls.Catherine Puglisi, "Caravaggio", p. 79. Longhi was with Caravaggio on the night of the fatal brawl with Tomassoni; Robb, "M", p.341, believes that Minniti was as well. Minniti served Caravaggio as a model and, years later, would be instrumental in helping him to obtain important commissions in Sicily. Minniti had fled Syracuse years prior, and he and Caravaggio allegedly dreamed together of rising to greater things. Minniti had a “moon-shaped” face and appeared in a number of Caravaggio’s early works. Ostensibly, the first archival reference to Caravaggio in a contemporary document from Rome is the listing of his name, with that of Prospero Orsi as his partner, as an 'assistant' in a procession in October 1594 in honour of St. Luke.H. Waga "Vita nota e ignota dei virtuosi al Pantheon" Rome 1992, Appendix I, pp. 219 and 220ff The earliest informative account of his life in the city is a court transcript dated 11 July 1597, when Caravaggio and Prospero Orsi were witnesses to a crime near San Luigi de' Francesi."The earliest account of Caravaggio in Rome" Sandro Corradini and Maurizio Marini, The Burlington Magazine, pp. 25–28
The Fortune Teller, his first composition with more than one figure, shows a boy, likely Minniti, having his palm read by a Romani girl, who is stealthily removing his ring as she strokes his hand. The theme was novel in Rome, and proved immensely influential over the next century and beyond. However, at the time, Caravaggio sold it for practically nothing. The Cardsharps—showing another naïve youth of privilege falling victim to card cheats—is even more psychologically complex and perhaps Caravaggio's first true masterpiece. Like The Fortune Teller, it was immensely popular, and over 50 copies survived.
The two paintings, which were displayed in Costantino Spata's shop, attracted the patronage of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, one of the leading connoisseurs in Rome. He purchased them both. According to Graham-Dixon, "the pictures allegorically enact Caravaggio’s own stratagem in painting them, namely that of ensnaring a wealthy man." For del Monte and his wealthy art-loving circle, Caravaggio executed a number of intimate chamber-pieces—The Musicians, The Lute Player, a tipsy Bacchus, and an allegorical but realistic Boy Bitten by a Lizard—featuring Minniti and other adolescent models.
Caravaggio's first paintings on religious themes returned to realism, from which emerged a remarkable spirituality. The first of these religious paintings was the Penitent Magdalene, showing Mary Magdalene at the moment when she has turned from her life as a courtesan and sits weeping on the floor, her jewels scattered around her. "It seemed not a religious painting at all ... a girl sitting on a low wooden stool drying her hair ... Where was the repentance ... suffering ... promise of salvation?"Robb, p. 79. Robb is drawing on Bellori, who praises Caravaggio's "true" colours but finds the naturalism offensive: "He (Caravaggio) was satisfied with [the] invention of nature without further exercising his brain." According to Catherine Puglisi, the figure of Mary Magdalene "shares with the genre pictures a close observation of the models." It is a "portrait-like image," because Caravaggio is "interested in neither the idealized female nude, the imagined wilderness, nor standard Christian symbols of death and salvation."Catheine Puglisi, "Caravaggio" Phaidon 1998, pp. 69-71.