11-26-2025, 09:37 PM
Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio; 28 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian painter active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily from the early 1590s to 1610. His paintings combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, and they 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, darkening shadows and transfixing subjects in bright shafts of light. Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes, often featuring violent struggles, torture and death. He worked rapidly, with live models, preferring to forego drawings and work directly onto the canvas. His influence on the new Baroque style that emerged from Mannerism was profound. It can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Peter Paul Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Rembrandt, and artists in the following generation heavily under his influence were called the "Caravaggisti" or "Caravagesques", as well as tenebrists or tenebrosi ("shadowists").
Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan before moving in his twenties to Rome. He developed a considerable name as an artist, and as a violent, touchy and provocative man. A brawl 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 traveled in 1607 to Malta and on to Sicily, 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, but suggestions have been made that he was murdered or that he died of lead poisoning.
Caravaggio's innovations inspired Baroque painting, but the Baroque incorporated the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism. The style evolved and fashions changed, and Caravaggio fell out of favor. In the 20th century interest in his work revived, and his importance to the development of Western art was reevaluated. The 20th-century art historian André Berne-Joffroy stated, "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting."
Quote: "It was the way incipient sexuality came across as toughness in Love that gave it the sexy edge, made people catch their breath. Cecco as Love joined, as it were, the divided values of Matthew and the angel. He was the hard peasant man and the voluptuous child in one. His wings weren’t a stately white swan’s like the angel’s, but a dark carrion seeking bird of prey’s. Cecco was well on the way from being the golden haired fullfaced child in the first Saul to being the yelling young lout about to be knifed in the next year’s Isaac. M’s painting was getting harder, more energetic and assertive, and so were his boy models. The new angel, when M redid the Matthew altarpiece within months of the first, was so thuggish and menacing as he spelt out the gospel on his dirty fingers that the second Matthew turned into a scared pensioner fearing a subway mugging from the air. Cecco survived the early putative ravages of child sex abuse and grew up to become a vigorous and assured painter with a strong feeling of his own for the energy of lowlife types. As an artist he was very much his own man, one of the most distinctive and subversively original and one of the most brutally realistic painters in early seventeenth century Italy. He was still in Rome in 1620, and soon after that he registered the oddest long delayed aftershock of his first encounter with the long gone M, and those early days when he modelled nude as M’s Love. The memory returned in an immensely strange painting of himself twenty years after Love the winner, a painting that was hyperrealist, illusionistic and at the same time – insistently – merely an image.
All that came a long time later. In 1602 Cecco was on the cusp of adolescence, and if Love the winner played on his immaturity for the sake of the theme and – yes – sexual decorum, the other painting M did of him that year, the other full length nude, showed his body more male, his limbs longer and muscles harder. M did this new painting in a way that upped the ante of his visual provocation to an almost insane level. 1602 was the year M thought he could get away with anything. Either that or he simply didn’t care. Amazingly, he came through unharmed. Eros had given M and his client Giustiniani a certain limited room for manoeuvre. The boy Love was traditionally playful. He’d lost his really dangerous charge of sexual anarchy long, long ago, before the end of preChristian times. Greek Eros had been tamed to Roman Cupid, made a child, and now lived on as a plump and sexless putto."
[attachment=326][attachment=327][attachment=328][attachment=329]