Are you in love with the beautiful works of Caravaggio too? Would you like to know more about his life and the innovations he brought to painting?
You’re in the right place!
As often happens, the fame of artists is due in part to their adventurous and sometimes dissolute lives. Caravaggio’s life was studded with countless twists and turns, and the artist had no shortage of problems with his patrons.
But it is in the paintings of Caravaggio that we find expressed all that realism which not only made him unique, but also generated many imitators and followers (among them Artemisia Gentileschi).
In this post I’ll tell you about Caravaggio’s life and explain, in simple terms, his revolution in the art of painting.
Ready to find out?
Let’s go!
The life of Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, was born in Milan in 1571. His nickname, Caravaggio, comes from the fact that he was believed to be a native of that town: in reality his family had close ties with that place, but the artist was born in Milan.
As a boy he trained in Milan in the workshop of Simone Peterzano, himself a pupil of Titian: it was here that he absorbed the lesson of Venetian colour. In 1592, while still very young, he left Lombardy and arrived in Rome, apparently after some brawls and the wounding of a policeman.
In the Eternal City, thanks to the protection of Cardinal Del Monte, it didn’t take him long to become famous. But his eccentric, quarrelsome character brought him constant trouble: in 1606, at the height of a brawl (perhaps a duel over a bet on a ball game), he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni. With a death sentence over his head, he was forced to flee Rome and spent his final years between Naples, Malta and Sicily, painting without pause.
Caravaggio died in 1610, aged just 38, at Porto Ercole: the sources speak of a fatal fever, though there has never been a shortage of more novelistic theories (some have even suggested an ambush by emissaries of the Knights of Malta, out to avenge the offence done to a powerful knight).
Caravaggio’s style
One of the key points of his works lies in the fact that Caravaggio wanted to portray common people. In his canvases he very often used prostitutes, beggars and ordinary men as models for the Virgins and the Saints. This obviously caused fierce arguments with the Church and his patrons, but it is precisely from this that his extraordinary humanity springs.
The paintings of Caravaggio are special above all for their incredible effects of light and for the expressiveness of the figures. Shadows, colours and lights are reinvented and used almost as in a photograph: from a very dark background, figures emerge lit by a single beam of light, in what scholars call tenebrism.
For example, in the Rest on the Flight into Egypt at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, the angel is turned away and Saint Joseph really does look like a poor carpenter, enchanted by the celestial music. And you’ll find the same effects of light in the cycle at San Luigi dei Francesi, dedicated to Saint Matthew.
The differences between Mannerism, inspired by the painting of Raphael and Michelangelo Buonarroti, and the paintings of Caravaggio are striking: simple, sober and full of life and feeling.
Thanks to his insights, he was a total innovator in the history of painting.
Caravaggio’s technique
Michelangelo Merisi was an experimenter from a technical point of view too.
Unlike his contemporaries, he almost never started from preparatory drawings: he painted directly from life, arranging his models in a dark studio lit by a single source of light from above. On the canvas he spread a dark ground and, instead of drawing, he traced thin incisions in the priming to fix the position of the figures (they can still be seen today in X-rays of his works).
The result is that sense of almost physical presence of his figures, who seem to come towards us out of the darkness.
Why is he a “cursed” painter?
Caravaggio’s life and art have been the subject of a great deal of discussion.
This character, so eccentric, almost anticipates the artists of bohemian Paris and the ideal of the cursed, quarrelsome genius. Michelangelo Buonarroti too had a personality with little respect for authority, but Merisi was known precisely as a troublemaker.
The realism you notice in Caravaggio’s works is so intense that it exasperates the emotions, pushing them to the limit. On top of this, his habit of using common people and prostitutes as models did much to shape his reputation.
Very interesting is the episode linked to the Death of the Virgin (now in the Louvre). This work was in fact rejected by the patron because the Madonna depicted was devoid of any mystical attribute. It is even said that for the painting Caravaggio used as his model a prostitute found drowned in the Tiber: this would explain the woman’s swollen belly and the colour of her face. The feet, portrayed bare up to the ankle, also caused great scandal for the time.
Despite everything, Caravaggio’s paintings remain among the most beautiful in the history of art.
How Caravaggio was seen by his contemporaries
Karel van Mander was a Flemish painter and writer. In his Schilder-boeck (Book of Painters, 1604), written on the model of Vasari’s Lives, he devoted a section to the Italian painters. It is very interesting to read his opinion of Caravaggio and what people said about him at the time:
“There is also a Michelangelo da Caravaggio who is doing wonderful things in Rome. [But] next to the good grain there is the weed: for he does not devote himself continuously to study, but after he has worked for a couple of weeks he goes off for a month or two, with his sword at his side and a servant behind him, moving from one ball game to another, always ready to pick a fight or brawl, so that it is rare to be able to keep company with him. […] Nevertheless, his painting is beyond question.”
“He does not make a single stroke without doing it directly from the living model. And this is not a bad way to reach a good result, because painting with the help of drawings, even if drawn from life, is not as reliable as keeping the real thing in front of you and following nature in all the variety of its colours.”
Where to admire Caravaggio’s works
Today you can admire very many of his works in Rome. And the good news is that several of them can be seen for free, because they are in churches: the Saint Matthew cycle at San Luigi dei Francesi, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter at Santa Maria del Popolo, the Madonna of the Pilgrims in Sant’Agostino.
Other masterpieces are in the city’s museums: at the Galleria Borghese (which holds no fewer than six), at Palazzo Barberini, at the Vatican Museums, at the Capitoline Museums and at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj.
A tip: if you want to connect the various sites and have Merisi’s life and works told to you by someone who knows them well, there is a guided tour in Caravaggio’s footsteps through the churches of Rome.
But the works of Caravaggio today are scattered across many other museums of the world, because his fame, yesterday as today, is universal. I’ve even found some at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, at the Louvre in Paris, at the Prado in Madrid and in Malta, where he worked for a few years.
