Everything about Caravaggio totally explained
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (
September 28 1571 –
18 July 1610) was an
Italian artist active in
Rome,
Naples,
Malta and
Sicily between 1593 and 1610. He is commonly placed in the
Baroque school, of which he was the first great representative.
Even in his own lifetime Caravaggio was considered enigmatic, fascinating, rebellious and dangerous. He burst upon the Rome art scene in 1600, and thereafter never lacked for commissions or patrons, yet handled his success atrociously. An early published notice on him, dating from 1604 and describing his lifestyle some three years previously, tells how "after a fortnight's work he'll 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's most awkward to get along with him." In 1606 he killed a young man in a brawl and fled from Rome with a price on his head. In
Malta in 1608 he was involved in another brawl, and yet another in Naples in 1609, possibly a deliberate attempt on his life by unidentified enemies. By the next year, after a career of little more than a decade, he was dead.
Huge new churches and
palazzi were being built in Rome in the decades of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and paintings were needed to fill them. The
Counter-Reformation Church searched for authentic religious art with which to counter the threat of
Protestantism, and for this task the artificial conventions of
Mannerism, which had ruled art for almost a century, no longer seemed adequate. Caravaggio's novelty was a radical
naturalism which combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, approach to
chiaroscuro, the use of light and shadow.
Famous and extremely influential while he lived, Caravaggio was almost entirely forgotten in the centuries after his death, and it was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. Yet despite this his influence on the new
Baroque style which eventually emerged from the ruins of Mannerism, was profound. Andre Berne-Joffroy,
Paul Valéry’s secretary, said of him: "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting."
Biography
Early life (1571–1592)
Caravaggio was born in
Milan, where his father, Fermo Merisi, was a household administrator and architect-decorator to the Marchese of
Caravaggio. His mother, Lucia Aratori, came from a propertied family of the same district. In 1576 the family moved to Caravaggio to escape a plague which ravaged Milan. Caravaggio’s father died there in 1577. It is assumed that the artist grew up in Caravaggio, but his family kept up connections with the
Sforzas and with the powerful
Colonna family, who were allied by marriage with the Sforzas, and destined to play a major role in Caravaggio's later life.
In 1584 he was apprenticed for four years to the Lombard 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's possible that he visited
Venice
and saw the works of
Giorgione, whom he was later accused of aping, and of Titian. Certainly he'd have become familiar with the art treasures of Milan, including
Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper, and with the regional Lombard art, a style which 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.
Rome (1592–1600)
In mid-1592 Caravaggio arrived in Rome, “naked and extremely needy ... without fixed address and without provision ... short of money.” A few months later he was performing hack-work for the highly successful
Giuseppe Cesari,
Pope Clement VIII’s favourite painter, “painting flowers and fruit” in his factory-like workshop. Known works from this period include a small
Boy Peeling a Fruit (his earliest known painting), a
Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and the
Young Sick Bacchus, supposedly a self-portrait done during convalescence from a serious illness that ended his employment with Cesari. All three demonstrate the physical particularity — one aspect of his realism — for which Caravaggio was to become renowned: the fruit-basket-boy’s produce has been analysed 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 in January 1594, determined to make his own way. His fortunes were at their lowest ebb, yet it was now that 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; and Minniti served as a model and, years later, would be instrumental in helping Caravaggio to important commissions in Sicily.
The Fortune Teller, his first composition with more than one figure, shows Mario being cheated by a gypsy girl. The theme was quite new for Rome, and proved immensely influential over the next century and beyond. This, however, was in the future: at the time, Caravaggio sold it for practically nothing.
The Cardsharps — showing another unsophisticated boy falling the victim of 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 survive. More importantly, it attracted the patronage of
Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, one of the leading connoisseurs in Rome. 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, an allegorical but realistic
Boy Bitten by a Lizard — featuring Minniti and other boy models. The possibly homoerotic ambience of these paintings has been the centre of considerable dispute amongst scholars and biographers since it was first raised in the later half of the 20th century.
The realism returned with Caravaggio’s first paintings on religious themes, and the emergence of remarkable spirituality. The first of these was the
Penitent Magdalene, showing
Mary Magdalene at the moment when she's 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?” It was understated, in the Lombard manner, not histrionic in the Roman manner of the time. It was followed by others in the same style:
Saint Catherine,
Martha and Mary Magdalene,
Judith Beheading Holofernes, a
Sacrifice of Isaac, a
Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, and a
Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The works, while viewed by a comparatively limited circle, increased Caravaggio's fame with both connoisseurs and his fellow-artists. But a true reputation would depend on public commissions, and for these it was necessary to look to the Church.
'Most famous painter in Rome' (1600–1606)
In 1599, presumably through the influence of Del Monte, Caravaggio contracted to decorate the
Contarelli Chapel in the church of
San Luigi dei Francesi. The two works making up the commission, the
Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and
Calling of Saint Matthew, delivered in 1600, were an immediate sensation. Caravaggio’s
tenebrism (a heightened
chiaroscuro) brought high drama to his subjects, while his acutely observed realism brought a new level of emotional intensity. Opinion among Caravaggio’s artist peers was polarized. Some denounced him for various perceived failings, notably his insistence on painting from life, without drawings, but for the most part he was hailed as the saviour of art: "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."
Caravaggio went on to secure a string of prestigious commissions for religious works featuring violent struggles, grotesque decapitations, torture and death. For the most part each new painting increased his fame, but a few were rejected by the various bodies for whom they were intended, at least in their original forms, and had to be re-painted or find new buyers. The essence of the problem was that while Caravaggio’s dramatic intensity was appreciated, his realism was seen by some as unacceptably vulgar. His first version of
Saint Matthew and the Angel, featured the saint as a bald peasant with dirty legs attended by a lightly-clad over-familiar boy-angel, was rejected and had to be repainted as
The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. Similarly,
The Conversion of Saint Paul was rejected, and while another version of the same subject, the
Conversion on the Way to Damascus, was accepted, it featured the saint’s horse’s haunches far more prominently than the saint himself, prompting this exchange between the artist and an exasperated official of
Santa Maria del Popolo: “Why have you put a horse in the middle, and
Saint Paul on the ground?” “Because!” “Is the horse God?” “No, but he stands in God’s light!”
Other works included
Entombment, the
Madonna di Loreto (
Madonna of the Pilgrims), the
Grooms' Madonna, and the
Death of the Virgin. The history of these last two paintings illustrate the reception given to some of Caravaggio's art, and the times in which he lived. The
Grooms' Madonna, also known as
Madonna dei palafrenieri, painted for a small altar in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, remained there for just two days, and was then taken off. A cardinal's secretary wrote: "In this painting there are but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust...One would say it's a work made by a painter that can paint well, but of a dark spirit, and who has been for a lot of time far from God, from His adoration, and from any good thought..."
The
Death of the Virgin, then, commissioned in 1601 by a wealthy jurist for his private chapel in the new Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala, was rejected by the Carmelites in 1606. Caravaggio's contemporary
Giulio Mancini records that it was rejected because Caravaggio had used a well-known prostitute as his model for the Virgin;
Giovanni Baglione, another contemporary, tells us it was due to Mary's bare legs —a matter of decorum in either case. Caravaggio scholar John Gash suggests that the problem for the Carmelites may have been theological rather than aesthetic, in that Caravaggio's version fails to assert the doctrine of the
Assumption of Mary, the idea that the Mother of God didn't die in any ordinary sense but was assumed into Heaven. The replacement altarpiece commissioned (from one of Caravaggio's most able followers,
Carlo Saraceni), showed the Virgin not dead, as Caravaggio had painted her, but seated and dying; and even this was rejected, and replaced with a work which showed the Virgin not dying, but ascending into Heaven with choirs of angels. In any case, the rejection didn't mean that Caravaggio or his paintings were out of favour. The
Death of the Virgin was no sooner taken out of the church than it was purchased by the Duke of Mantua, on the advice of
Rubens, and later acquired by
Charles I of England before entering the French royal collection in 1671.
One secular piece from these years is
Amor Victorious, painted in 1602 for
Vincenzo Giustiniani, a member of Del Monte’s circle. The model was named in a memoir of the early 17th century as "Cecco", the diminutive for Francesco. He is possibly Francesco Boneri, identified with an artist active in the period 1610-1625 and known as
Cecco del Caravaggio ('Caravaggio's Cecco'), carrying a bow and arrows and trampling symbols of the warlike and peaceful arts and sciences underfoot. He is unclothed, and it's difficult to accept this grinning urchin as the Roman god
Cupid – as difficult as it was to accept Caravaggio’s other semi-clad adolescents as the various angels he painted in his canvases, wearing much the same stage-prop wings. The point, however, is the intense yet ambiguous reality of the work: it's simultaneously Cupid and Cecco, as Caravaggio’s Virgins were simultaneously the Mother of Christ and the Roman courtesans who modeled for them.
Exile and death (1606–1610)
Caravaggio led a tumultuous life. He was notorious for brawling, even in a time and place when such behavior was commonplace, and the transcripts of his police records and trial proceedings fill several pages. On
29 May 1606, he killed, possibly unintentionally, a young man named Ranuccio Tomassoni. Previously his high-placed patrons had protected him from the consequences of his escapades, but this time they could do nothing. Caravaggio, outlawed, fled to
Naples. There, outside the jurisdiction of the Roman authorities and protected by the Colonna family, the most famous painter in Rome became the most famous in Naples. His connections with the Colonnas led to a stream of important church commissions, including the
Madonna of the Rosary, and
The Seven Works of Mercy.
Despite his success in Naples, after only a few months in the city Caravaggio left for
Malta, the headquarters of the
Knights of Malta, presumably hoping that the patronage of
Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights, could help him secure a pardon for Tomassoni's death. De Wignacourt proved so impressed at having the famous artist as official painter to the Order that he inducted him as a knight, and the early biographer Bellori records that the artist was well pleased with his success. Major works from his Malta period include a huge
Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (the only painting to which he put his signature) and a
Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page, as well as portraits of other leading knights. Yet by late August of 1608 he was arrested and imprisoned. The circumstances surrounding this abrupt change of fortune have long been a matter of speculation, but recent investigation has revealed it to have been the result of yet another brawl, during which the door of a house was battered down and a knight seriously wounded. By December he'd been expelled from the Order "as a foul and rotten member."
Before the expulsion Caravaggio had escaped to
Sicily and the company of his old friend Mario Minniti, who was now married and living in
Syracuse. Together they set off on what amounted to a triumphal tour from Syracuse to
Messina and on to the island capital,
Palermo. In each city Caravaggio continued to win prestigious and well-paid commissions. Among other works from this period are a
Burial of St. Lucy, a
The Raising of Lazarus, and an
Adoration of the Shepherds. His style continued to evolve, showing now friezes of figures isolated against vast empty backgrounds. "His great Sicilian altarpieces isolate their shadowy, pitifully poor figures in vast areas of darkness; they suggest the desperate fears and frailty of man, and at the same time convey, with a new yet desolate tenderness, the beauty of humility and of the meek, who shall inherit the earth." Contemporary reports depict a man whose behaviour was becoming increasingly bizarre, sleeping fully armed and in his clothes, ripping up a painting at a slight word of criticism, mocking the local painters.
After only nine months in Sicily Caravaggio returned to Naples. According to his earliest biographer he was being pursued by enemies while in Sicily and felt it safest to place himself under the protection of the Colonnas until he could secure his pardon from the pope (now
Paul V) and return to Rome. In Naples he painted
The Denial of Saint Peter, a final
John the Baptist (Borghese), and, his last picture,
The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. His style continued to evolve —
Saint Ursula is caught in a moment of highest action and drama, as the arrow fired by the king of the
Huns strikes her in the breast, unlike earlier paintings which had all the immobility of the posed models. The brushwork was much freer and more impressionistic. Had Caravaggio lived, something new would have come.
In Naples an attempt was made on his life, by persons unknown. At first it was reported in Rome that the "famous artist" Caravaggio was dead, but then it was learned that he was alive, but seriously disfigured in the face. He painted a
Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (Madrid), showing his own head on a platter, and sent it to de Wignacourt as a plea for forgiveness. Perhaps at this time he painted also a
David with the Head of Goliath, showing the young David with a strangely sorrowful expression gazing on the wounded head of the giant, which is again Caravaggio's. This painting he may have sent to the unscrupulous art-loving cardinal-nephew
Scipione Borghese, who had the power to grant or withhold pardons.
In the summer of 1610 he took a boat northwards to receive the pardon, which seemed imminent thanks to his powerful Roman friends. With him were three last paintings, gifts for Cardinal Scipione. What happened next is the subject of much confusion and conjecture. The bare facts are that on
28 July an anonymous
avviso (private newsletter) from Rome to the ducal court of Urbino reported that Caravaggio was dead. Three days later another
avviso said that he'd died of fever. These were the earliest, brief accounts of his death, which later underwent much elaboration. No body was found. A poet friend of the artist later gave
18 July as the date of death, and a recent researcher claims to have discovered a death notice showing that the artist died on that day of a fever in Porto Ercole, near
Grosseto in
Tuscany.
Caravaggio the artist
The birth of Baroque
Caravaggio “put the oscuro (shadows) into chiaroscuro.”
Chiaroscuro was practiced long before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique definitive, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light. With this came the acute observation of physical and psychological reality which formed the ground both for his immense popularity and for his frequent problems with his religious commissions. He worked at great speed, from live models, scoring basic guides directly onto the canvas with the end of the brush handle. The approach was anathema to the skilled artists of his day, who decried his refusal to work from drawings and to idealise his figures. Yet the models were basic to his realism. Some have been identified, including
Mario Minniti and
Francesco Boneri, both fellow-artists, Mario appearing as various figures in the early secular works, the young Francesco as a succession of angels, Baptists and Davids in the later canvasses. His female models include
Fillide Melandroni,
Anna Bianchini, and Maddalena Antognetti (the "Lena" mentioned in court documents of the "artichoke" case as Caravaggio's concubine), all well-known prostitutes, who appear as female religious figures including the Virgin and various saints. Caravaggio himself appears in several paintings, his final self-portrait being as the witness on the far right to the
Martyrdom of Saint Ursula.
Caravaggio had a noteworthy ability to express in one scene of unsurpassed vividness the passing of a crucial moment.
The Supper at Emmaus depicts the recognition of Christ by his disciples: a moment before he's a fellow traveler, mourning the passing of the Messiah, as he never ceases to be to the inn-keeper’s eyes, the second after, he's the Saviour. In
The Calling of St Matthew, the hand of the Saint points to himself as if he were saying “who, me?”, while his eyes, fixed upon the figure of Christ, have already said, “Yes, I'll follow you”. With
The Resurrection of Lazarus, he goes a step further, giving us a glimpse of the actual physical process of resurrection. The body of Lazarus is still in the throes of rigor mortis, but his hand, facing and recognizing that of Christ, is alive. Other major Baroque artists would travel the same path, for example
Bernini, fascinated with themes from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
The Caravaggisti
The installation of the St. Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had an immediate impact among the younger artists in Rome, and Caravaggism became the cutting edge for every ambitious young painter. The first Caravaggisti included
Giovanni Baglione (although his Caravaggio phase was short-lived) and
Orazio Gentileschi. In the next generation there were
Carlo Saraceni,
Bartolomeo Manfredi and
Orazio Borgianni. Gentileschi, despite being considerably older, was the only one of these artists to live much beyond 1620, and ended up as court painter to Charles I in England. His daughter
Artemisia Gentileschi was also close to Caravaggio, and one of the most gifted of the movement. Yet in Rome and in Italy it wasn't Caravaggio, but the influence of
Annibale Carracci, blending elements from the
High Renaissance and Lombard realism, which ultimately triumphed.
Caravaggio’s brief stay in Naples produced a notable school of Neapolitan Caravaggisti, including
Battistello Caracciolo and
Carlo Sellitto. The Caravaggisti movement there ended with a terrible outbreak of plague in 1656, but the Spanish connection – Naples was a possession of Spain – was instrumental in forming the important Spanish branch of his influence.
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 influential flowering in the 1620s among painters like
Hendrick ter Brugghen,
Gerrit van Honthorst,
Andries Both and
Dirck van Baburen. In the following generation the effects of Caravaggio, although attenuated, are to be seen in the work of
Rubens (who purchased one of his paintings for the Gonzaga of Mantua and painted a copy of the
Entombment of Christ),
Vermeer,
Rembrandt, and
Velazquez, the last of whom presumably saw his work during his various sojourns in Italy.
Death and rebirth of a reputation
Caravaggio’s fame scarcely survived his death. His innovations inspired the Baroque, but the Baroque took the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism. He directly influenced the style of his companion
Orazio Gentileschi, and his daughter
Artemisia Gentileschi, and, at a distance, the Frenchmen
Georges de La Tour and
Simon Vouet, and the Spaniard
Giuseppe Ribera. Yet within a few decades his works were being ascribed to less scandalous artists, or simply overlooked. The Baroque, to which he contributed so much, had moved on, and fashions had changed, but perhaps more pertinently Caravaggio never established a workshop as the Carracci's did, and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical approach to art, the psychological realism which can only be deduced from his surviving work. Thus his reputation was doubly vulnerable to the critical demolition-jobs done by two of his earliest biographers, Giovanni
Baglione, a rival painter with a personal vendetta, and the influential 17th century critic
Giovan Bellori, who hadn't known him but was under the influence of the French
Classicist Poussin, who hadn't known him either but hated his work.
In the 1920s art critic Roberto Longhi brought Caravaggio's name once more to public attention, and placed him in the European tradition: “Ribera,
Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of
Delacroix,
Courbet and
Manet would have been utterly different.” The influential
Bernard Berenson agreed: “With the exception of
Michelangelo, no other Italian painter exercised so great an influence.”
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 — nighttime setting, dramatic lighting, ordinary people used as models, honest description from nature. In modern times, painters like the Norwegian
Odd Nerdrum and the Hungarian
Tibor Csernus make no secret of their attempts to emulate and update him, and the contemporary American artist
Doug Ohlson pays homage to Caravaggio's influence on his own work. Filmmaker
Derek Jarman turned to the Caravaggio legend when creating his movie
Caravaggio; and Dutch art forger
Han van Meegeren used genuine Caravaggios when creating his ersatz Old Masters.
Only about 50 works by Caravaggio survive. One,
The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, was recently authenticated and restored. It had been in storage in
Hampton Court, mislabeled as a copy. At least a couple of his paintings have been or may have been lost in recent times.
Richard Francis Burton writes of a "picture of St. Rosario (in the museum of the Grand Duke of Tuscany), showing a circle of thirty men
turpiter ligati" which isn't known to have survived. Furthermore, a painting of an Angel was destroyed during the
bombing of Dresden, though there are black and white photographs of the work.
Chronology of major works
Further Information
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