Caravaggio
1571–1610 — Roman Renaissance painter
The dark theatre of the late Renaissance.
The painter of the The Calling of Saint Matthew and one of the defining figures of the Late Renaissance.
Life
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan in September 1571, the son of a mason and majordomo to the Marchese of Caravaggio. He came to Rome in the late 1580s or early 1590s, worked initially as a journeyman painter producing small devotional panels and genre scenes, and around 1599 received the commission — for a pair of large paintings in the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi — that made his reputation in a single decisive moment.
The Contarelli Chapel paintings, The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, introduced to Roman painting a technique and a sensibility that had no real precedent in the Italian tradition: extreme tenebrism, the use of a single, unmodelled shaft of light falling on figures drawn from the lowest social registers — street people, labourers, the poor — in scenes of religious significance. The result was immediately controversial and immediately influential.
Caravaggio's working method was radically direct. He painted without preparatory drawings, working from live models — often drawn from his immediate social circle, which included soldiers, prostitutes, and tavern keepers — directly onto the canvas. His religious figures are not idealised; they are specific bodies with specific faces, caught in specific moments of physical and emotional extremity.
He died in July 1610 at Porto Ercole, in disputed circumstances, at the age of thirty-eight. The influence of his chiaroscuro on the subsequent European tradition — on Rubens, on Rembrandt, on Velázquez — is incalculable.
Major paintings
The major paintings of Caravaggio span the full range of Late Renaissance art — from early works in the Roman tradition to the mature style that defined his period.