Caravaggio

Italian painter

• Born: Autumn, 1571
• Birthplace: Milan or Caravaggio, Spanish Lombardy (now in Italy)
• Died: July 18, 1610
• Place of death: Porto Ercole, Tuscany (now in Italy)

Caravaggio’s bold use of chiaroscuro, provocative reinterpretations of canonical subjects, and revolutionary commitment to realism established a new painting style that made a significant contribution to the definition of Baroque painting. He was a prolific and influential painter whose style became popular quickly, producing an international movement known as Caravaggism.

Early Life

Caravaggio (kahr-ah-VAHD-joh) was born Michelangelo Merisi in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. Little is known about his infancy and early artistic training. In 1584 he became an apprentice to Simone Peterzano, a renowned painter from Bergamo who was active in Milan, where Caravaggio remained through 1588.

Legal documents concerning the sale of his family estate place him in the town of Caravaggio from September, 1589, to April, 1591. It is known that he arrived in Rome on May 11, 1592, but there is no information on his whereabouts or his activities. Later seventeenth century historians who favored Caravaggio’s main rival in Rome, Annibale Carracci, asserted that he spent time in jail, but their bias places these assertions in question. Although there are no known autograph works from this period, the consensus is that Caravaggio was exposed to and mastered the achievements of the three manners of painting styles prevalent in the region: the Lombard, Leonardesque, and Venetian.

Life’s Work

Information about the four years of Caravaggio’s stay in Rome is vague. Presumably he collaborated with several painters, producing cheap portraits and other paintings sold on the general market. More certain is his collaboration with the painter Giuseppe Cesari, also known as Cavaliere d’Arpino, a leading mannerist painter in Rome, for whom Caravaggio probably painted naturalistic details of plants.

Although no signed examples survive, Boy Peeling Fruit and two paintings in the Galleria Borghese (Rome), Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Self-Portrait as Bacchus , are probably representative of this interlude of Caravaggio’s career. These works introduce two essential themes of the artist’s style: a striking realism and an interest in endowing the pictures with multiple meanings and allusions.

After leaving Cavaliere d’Arpino, Caravaggio continued engaging these very issues, producing several provocative paintings such as The Cardsharps and The Penitent Magdalen (generally dated to 1594-1598). The latter presents a young woman dressed in contemporary clothes, identified as the saint only by her jewels and a small flask of perfume on the floor. Isolating the figure, the background was left unqualified save for the shaft of light across the upper right, which quickly became a hallmark of the painter’s style.

In The Cardsharps and similar paintings depicting musicians and fortune-tellers, Caravaggio explores the compositional solutions that inject the scene with drama and immediacy; he crops the figures at half length and places them close to the picture plane, often adding illusionistic details that intentionally break the separation between the space of the painted scene and that of the beholder. These works indicate that Caravaggio formed a mature painting style.

In 1596, Caravaggio entered Cardinal Francesco del Monte’s household as a paid retainer, remaining there through 1600. While working for del Monte, the artist met the marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, who became the artist’s major supporter and an avid collector of his works, as confirmed by the thirteen paintings listed in his possession in a 1637 inventory. Giustiniani helped Caravaggio gain an important commission, showcasing his new style by decorating the Contarelli Chapel in the church of Saint Luigi dei Francesi.

Between July 23, 1599, and July 4, 1600, Caravaggio produced two large canvases, representing The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew . Capitalizing on the darkness of the chapel, Caravaggio created two scenes dominated by a previously unseen contrast of light, leaving most of the painting black and highlighting parts of realistically rendered figures. This extreme chiaroscuro endowed the paintings with an emotional charge while also identifying and freezing the instance of depicted time. The success of these two paintings was immediate and long lasting, procuring to Caravaggio a steady stream of commissions and winning him the election to the Academy of St. Luke, Rome’s prestigious painting academy.

The next major commission, the Cerasi Chapel, was an occasion for a direct comparison with Annibale Carracci, Italy’s leading painter, who was to paint the chapel’s altarpiece. In 1601, Caravaggio painted The Crucifixion of Saint Peter and The Conversion of Saint Paul for the chapel’s side walls. On seeing Annibale’s Assumption of the Virgin , Caravaggio repainted his works, pursuing an even more striking chiaroscuro and theatrical composition. Despite the success of his works at these two chapels, the boldness of his revolutionary solutions were cause for the criticism of important altarpieces he delivered between 1600 and 1605; charged with a lack of decorum and a stagelike quality, three out of five pieces were rejected. His militant realism was both praised and criticized in the many religious paintings privately commissioned, two of which, Supper at Emmaus (London, National Gallery) and The Incredulity of St. Thomas (Potsdam), epitomize Caravaggio’s mature style.

Charged with murder, Caravaggio fled from Rome in May, 1606, first to southern Latium and Naples, where he stayed through the summer of 1607, then to Malta. Despite the troubling circumstances, he continued to receive notable commissions. No longer competing with Annibale’s classicism, Caravaggio altered his style, and his works from the Neapolitan period are more evenly lit and display a certain idealization of forms.

He remained in Malta until October, 1608, when he became a knight of the Order of Saint John. Following a violent dispute, he was imprisoned, but he managed to escape to Sicily. His Sicilian paintings reflect that he had to work quickly because the Order of the Knights of Saint John tried to force him to relocate on a continuous basis. Some of the paintings, like The Adoration of the Shepherds in Messina, also document a change concerning the size and placement of the figures that become smaller and are set farther away from the picture plane; similarly, the emotional directness is replaced by more contrived and calculated gestures and facial expressions.

Having been promised a pardon by the pope, Caravaggio traveled to Rome in the summer of 1610. Unfortunately, he died of a sudden fever in Porto Ercole.

Significance

Caravaggio’s untimely death prevented his style from becoming a viable alternative to the classicism of the Carracci school whose art influenced Italian painting for the next two centuries. Nevertheless, Caravaggio’s lessons and achievements, represented first and foremost by his new realism and bold use of chiaroscuro, were not lost or forgotten. If his Italian followers did not become famous painters, elsewhere in Europe Caravaggism was a major force. The art of Rembrandt (1606-1669) in the Netherlands, Jusepe de Ribera (1588-1652) in Spain, and Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) in France is inconceivable without Caravaggio’s examples. That Annibale Carracci’s classicism came to dominate Baroque painting influenced early modern art critics; they passed a negative judgment on Caravaggio, virtually burying his name for centuries. Early in the twentieth century, however, art historians Roberto Longhi among them recognized the artist’s revolutionary genius. Since the 1950’s, Caravaggio has been the subject of hundreds of scholarly studies, reflecting his significance as an influential and unique painter and his renewed popularity.

Bibliography

Christiansen, Keith, et al., eds. The Age of Caravaggio. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985. The last important comprehensive exhibition of Caravaggio’s works together with comparative material and examples of the works of his followers. The essays and the catalog entries are particularly informative.

Hibbard, Howard. Caravaggio. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. A standard introduction to Caravaggio. Also contains useful translations of pertinent primary sources.

Langdon, Helen. Caravaggio: A Life. Denver, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000. A best-seller, this is an informed, reliable, and very readable biography of the artist that offers many insights on his art.

Longhi, Roberto. “Caravaggio and His Forerunners.” In Three Studies. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1995. This long essay on the Lombard origins of Caravaggio is both thought-provoking and the canonical starting point on the issue.

Puglisi, Catherine. Caravaggio. London: Phaidon, 1998. The most complete monograph on the artist, especially useful to navigate the vast historical scholarship on his work. The author carefully reviews many of the interpretations extant in the literature.

Spike, John T. Caravaggio. New York: Abbeville, 2001. Lavishly illustrated, this large volume contains good reproductions of most of the paintings and many details. It offers interesting insights and interpretations, includes a CD-ROM containing a catalog of the paintings.