Caravaggio

Italian Baroque revolutionary who replaced the idealized bodies of the late Renaissance with hard light, dirty feet and models drawn from the Roman streets. His tenebrist style — heavy darks pierced by a single hard light source — was copied across Europe within a decade. He was also a brawler with a documented arrest record; he killed a man in a duel in 1606, fled Rome, and spent his last years on the run in Naples, Malta and Sicily before dying at thirty-eight under unclear circumstances.