Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi was born on September 29, 1571, in Milan, then capital of the Duchy of Milan under Spanish rule. His father, Fermo Merisi, worked as a household administrator and architect-decorator for Francesco Sforza, Marchese of Caravaggio, a small town east of Milan from which the painter later took his name ^[1]. His mother, Lucia Aratori, came from a propertied family in the same town.

Plague struck Lombardy in 1576, and the family fled Milan for Caravaggio. The disease followed them. Fermo Merisi died in 1577, along with the boy's grandfather and an uncle, all reportedly within a short span ^[2]. Lucia raised the surviving children in reduced circumstances, and she herself died in 1584, leaving the thirteen year old Michelangelo effectively orphaned.

That same year he signed a four year apprenticeship contract with the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, who described himself as a pupil of Titian ^[1]. What Caravaggio absorbed in Peterzano's workshop is debated, since little of the Venetian master's color sense appears in his mature work, but Lombard painting of the period prized direct observation of nature, and that habit stayed with him for life. Some accounts suggest he also saw works by Venetian painters and by Lombard realists such as the Campi family before leaving the region ^[3].

Caravaggio arrived in Rome around 1592, poor and unknown. Early biographers, including his rival Giovanni Baglione and the physician Giulio Mancini, describe years of hardship: he ground pigments, painted heads by the piece for other artists, and passed through the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d'Arpino, where he was assigned flowers and fruit ^[2]. From this period come small secular pictures such as Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the self portrait known as the Sick Bacchus, both now in the Galleria Borghese ^[4].

His fortunes turned when Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a cultivated Tuscan diplomat, noticed his work. Del Monte took the painter into his household at the Palazzo Madama around 1595 and secured him steady patronage among Rome's elite ^[3]. For this circle Caravaggio produced paintings like The Musicians, The Lute Player, and the card cheating scene called The Cardsharps, works that combined sharp observation with novel subject matter drawn from street life.

The decisive commission came in 1599: two large canvases for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, the French national church in Rome. The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, unveiled in 1600, made him famous almost overnight ^[1]. The Calling in particular showed his signature device fully formed: a shaft of light cutting through a dark tavern-like room, picking out the moment a tax collector is summoned to a new life. Commissions followed rapidly, including the Crucifixion of Saint Peter and Conversion of Saint Paul for the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo ^[4].

Any account of Caravaggio achievements begins with his handling of light. He pushed the existing technique of chiaroscuro into something more extreme, later called tenebrism, in which figures emerge from near total darkness under a single raking illumination ^[3]. The effect concentrated attention on gesture and expression while stripping away conventional landscape and architectural settings.

Equally radical was his realism. He painted saints with dirty feet, apostles with weathered faces, and the Virgin modeled, according to contemporary gossip, on women recognizable from Roman streets. Several altarpieces were rejected by their commissioners on grounds of decorum. The first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel was refused by the clergy of San Luigi dei Francesi, and the Death of the Virgin, painted for Santa Maria della Scala, was turned away, only to be bought on Rubens's recommendation for the Duke of Mantua ^[2]. Rejection by churchmen rarely hurt his market: private collectors competed for the discarded canvases.

Between 1600 and 1606 he produced a remarkable run of major works, among them The Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery, London), The Entombment of Christ (Vatican Museums), and the Madonna di Loreto for the church of Sant'Agostino ^[4]. Unusually for his era, he is not known to have made preparatory drawings; technical studies of his canvases show incisions scored into the wet ground, apparently to fix the placement of figures posed directly before him ^[5]. This working method, painting from life onto the canvas, was itself a break with academic practice built on drawing and idealized design.

Caravaggio's police record is one of the best documented aspects of his existence. Roman court archives record repeated arrests between 1600 and 1606: for carrying a sword without a license, for throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter, for insulting verses aimed at Baglione, for stoning the house of his landlady, and for various assaults ^[2]. He moved through the taverns and tennis courts of the artists' quarter with a circle that included the painter Orazio Gentileschi and the architect Onorio Longhi, the latter a frequent companion in street brawls.

He never married. His close associations included Fillide Melandroni, a courtesan who modeled for several paintings, and the young painter Cecco del Caravaggio, who appears to have been both his model and his studio assistant ^[5]. Modern scholars continue to debate his private attachments, since the surviving evidence consists mostly of hostile testimony, ambiguous paintings, and legal documents rather than personal letters.

Everything changed on May 28, 1606. During a fight near the Campo Marzio, arising from a dispute connected with a tennis wager or a rivalry over Fillide Melandroni (accounts differ), Caravaggio wounded Ranuccio Tomassoni, who died shortly afterward ^[1]. A capital sentence, a bando capitale, was issued against him, meaning anyone in the papal states could kill him with impunity. He fled Rome, first to the estates of the Colonna family in the Alban hills, and never returned.

The last four years of his life were an itinerary of escape. By late 1606 he was in Naples, then a Spanish possession outside papal jurisdiction, where he immediately received major commissions, including The Seven Works of Mercy for the charitable institution Pio Monte della Misericordia, a painting still in its original location ^[4]. His Neapolitan pictures grew darker in both palette and mood.

In 1607 he sailed to Malta, seat of the Knights of Saint John. He evidently hoped that membership in the order would help secure a papal pardon. He was received as a Knight of Obedience in July 1608 after painting for the order, most notably The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist for the oratory of the Co-Cathedral in Valletta, the largest canvas he ever produced and the only work he is known to have signed, the signature traced in the blood flowing from the Baptist's neck ^[3]. Within months he was imprisoned after a violent altercation involving a senior knight, escaped from the fort of Sant'Angelo, and was expelled from the order as a corrupt and rotten member ^[1].

He passed through Sicily in 1608 and 1609, painting altarpieces in Syracuse, Messina, and Palermo, including The Burial of Saint Lucy and The Raising of Lazarus, works of stark emptiness in which small figures act beneath vast fields of shadow ^[5]. Returning to Naples in late 1609, he was attacked outside a tavern and badly disfigured; reports of his death circulated in Rome. In the summer of 1610, apparently confident that a pardon arranged through Cardinal Scipione Borghese was imminent, he sailed north with paintings intended as gifts. The circumstances of the final days are murky, involving a mistaken arrest and a lost boat, but he died at Porto Ercole on the Tuscan coast on July 18, 1610, most likely of fever, aged thirty eight ^[2]. Researchers who examined remains attributed to him in 2010 suggested lead poisoning from paint may have contributed, though the identification is not universally accepted ^[6].

Caravaggio's influence spread faster than almost any painter's before him. Within a decade of his death, artists across Europe were working in his manner, a movement historians call the Caravaggisti. In Italy his followers included Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi and Bartolomeo Manfredi; in Utrecht, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerrit van Honthorst carried the style north; in Spain and France his example marked Ribera and Georges de La Tour, and echoes of his lighting have been traced in Velazquez and the young Rembrandt ^[3].

His reputation then collapsed. Classical critics of the later seventeenth century, led by Giovan Pietro Bellori, condemned him for copying nature without selection, and for two centuries he was treated as a talented corrupter of art. The modern revival began in earnest with the Italian scholar Roberto Longhi, whose research and a landmark 1951 exhibition in Milan restored him to the front rank of European painting ^[5]. Since then, biographies, exhibitions, and films have made him one of the most widely known old masters, and the 2010 fourth centenary of his death drew record museum attendance in Rome.

For anyone asking who was Caravaggio, the answer his contemporaries gave still holds: a painter who insisted that sacred stories happen to real bodies in real light. Basic Caravaggio facts, roughly ninety surviving autograph paintings, no known drawings, a single signature, only sharpen the sense of a career compressed and combustible. Any serious Caravaggio biography must reckon with both the violence of the life and the tenderness of the work, and the tension between them is a large part of why the paintings still stop people in their tracks ^[6].