Caravaggio

Born Michelangelo Merisi in Caravaggio, near Bergamo, he is the artist whose single innovation — heavy shadow punctured by a concentrated, unidealized light — transformed European painting in the early 17th century and has never entirely released its grip on the visual imagination since. Caravaggio came to Rome around 1592, worked in the studio of the Cavaliere d'Arpino painting fruit and flowers, and broke through around 1599 with the cycle of St. Matthew paintings for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi. The shock was immediate and specific: his figures had dirty feet, his angels were street boys, and the light that fell on them came not from heaven but from a specific source just off the upper edge of the canvas. The technical system — tenebrism, as it came to be called — was one thing; the attitude it embodied was another. Caravaggio painted sacred subjects as if they were happening in a tavern or a stable yard, with actors drawn from the Roman streets and a directness that bypassed the idealizing conventions of the late Renaissance entirely. Some altarpieces were rejected by their patrons as too vulgar; others were immediately bought by collectors who recognized their power. His entire active career in Rome lasted barely a decade before he was forced to flee. In May 1606 he killed a man, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a brawl — possibly over a gambling debt, possibly a point of honor — and spent the rest of his life as a fugitive: Naples, Malta, Sicily, Naples again. He received a papal pardon in 1610 and died that same year on a beach at Porto Ercole, age thirty-eight, under circumstances that have been debated ever since (the most recent theory: murder). His followers, the Caravaggisti — Artemisia Gentileschi, Orazio Gentileschi, Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst — spread his method across Europe. It is difficult to imagine Dutch Golden Age painting, French classicism or Baroque drama without him.