Probably the most revolutionary artist of his time, the Italian painter Caravaggio abandoned the rules that had guided a century of artists before him. Artists had always idealized the human and religious experience. Scorning the traditional idealized interpretation of religious subjects, Caravaggio took his models from the streets and painted them realistically. Caravaggio's life during the 17th century is certainly among the most adventurous of any of the world's great creators. His life story takes place between shadow and light: a man of a passionate nature, he ran the gamut from provocation to murder. A reward was offered for his capture, sending him into perpetual flight and hiding. Yet none of this transpires in his oeuvre, which is doubtlessly the most profoundly fervent oeuvre in all of Baroque painting. This is the miracle of Caravaggio; the miracle of the sacred portrayed in dimensions he alone mastered.

Caravaggio: Caravaggio: Caravaggio:

Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1571Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1571Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1571---1610 1610 1610

Baroque Art had its roots in the

mid-16th Century. It was used by the Catholic Church

as a visual appeal to attract as large

an audience as possible. Artists of

this style express emotion, movement and variety in their

creations.

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Michelangelo Merisi was born on September 29, 1571, in the little village of Caravaggio in northern Italy. He was named after his birthplace, a procedure not unusual for the times. All too often, 19th-century art historians have portrayed Caravaggio as being of humble origin, when in fact, he came from an excellent family of artists. As was the fashion, Caravaggio began studying painting at an early age. Indeed, Renaissance and Baroque painters were often destined from birth to be artists, so that already during earliest childhood they learned how to grind pigments. Hence, as young adults, they knew their profession inside out. When Caravaggio was 13, the family decided he would devote himself to painting. He was sent to the painter Peterzano's studio, one of the good studios in Milan. "Good" in the sense that, because Peterzano himself was a poor painter, his apprentices had ample occasion to learn. Unlike talented painters, who tend to impose their vision of the art onto their pupils, the poor painter has nothing to impose. This allows his pupils to blossom out on their own, and to achieve a personal vision. Certainly, a poor pupil will become a poor painter, but the geniuses will accomplish their apprenticeship without suffering damage or influence, and having gained a command of the technique involved. He visited Venice would have become familiar with the art of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, and with the regional Lombard art, a style which valued simplicity and attention to naturalistic detail. This is the education Caravaggio received.

Early LifeEarly LifeEarly Life

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio 1571—1610

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In mid-1592 Caravaggio arrived in Rome, “naked and extremely needy ... without fixed address and without provision ... short of money.” A few months later he was performing hack-work for the highly successful Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Clement VIII’s favorite painter, “painting flowers and fruit” in his factory-like workshop.

The subjects of this period are mostly adolescent boys including a small Boy Peeling a Fruit, a Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and the Young Sick Bacchus. All three demonstrate the physical particularity for which Caravaggio was to become renowned. Caravaggio left Cesari, determined to make his own way. His fortunes were at their lowest ebb, yet it was now that he forged some extremely important friendships, with the painter Prospero Orsi, the architect Onorio Longhi, and the sixteen-year-old Sicilian artist Mario Minniti. Orsi, established in the profession, introduced him to influential collectors; Longhi, introduced him to the world of Roman street-brawls; and Minniti served as a model and, would be instrumental in helping Caravaggio to important commissions in Sicily. The Fortune Teller (left), was his first composition with more than one figure. It shows Mario being cheated by a gypsy girl. The scene has been painted over a praying

The Move to RomeThe Move to RomeThe Move to Rome

Boy Pealing Fruit (top) Boy with a Basket of Fruit (bottom)

Sick Bacchus

Supposedly a self-portrait done during

convalescence from a serious illness

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female saint, perhaps the Virgin Mary. The theme was quite new for Rome, and proved immensely influential over the next century and beyond. This, however, was in the future: at the time, Caravaggio sold it for practically nothing. The Cardsharps (below), showing another unsophisticated boy falling the victim of card cheats is even more psychologically complex, and perhaps Caravaggio’s first true masterpiece. Behind a table that protrudes into the spectator's space, a youthful innocent studies his cards, overlooked by a sinister middle-aged man, whose fingers signal to another, younger scoundrel to his right, who holds a five of hearts behind his back. To the left-hand side of the canvas is the object of their conspiracy, a pile of coins. This low-life scene links Caravaggio's discreet dramas to the genre paintings favoured by his followers. It was to have many imitators - within a few years of the painter's death an early variant had been painted by the Franco-Roman Valentin de Boulogne - but few equals. Caravaggio was less melodramatic than many of the artists known as the Caravaggisti who painted in his style, and he suggests only enough of the interaction between the three actors to imply the sequel. .

The original, lost for almost a century, has been found and is now in Texas, and helps to fill in an important stage in the development of Caravaggio's art. Like the Fortune Teller, it was immensely popular, and over 50 copies survive.

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For Del Monte, Caravaggio executed a number of intimate chamber-pieces — The Musicians , The Lute Player, a tipsy Bacchus, an allegorical but realistic Boy Bitten by a Lizard — featuring Minniti and other boy models. The allegedly homoerotic ambience of these paintings has been the centre of considerable dispute amongst scholars and biographers since it was first raised in the later half of the 20th century.

Bacchus (left) is what we can probably label as the first real "Caravaggio". His earlier works followed a relatively easy traditional format, executed rather dryly. But then he began seeking his models along the river banks, among the dregs of Roman society. With a subject such as Bacchus, the public felt uncomfortable with his choice. They felt even more ill at ease when it came to his use of such models to portray Jesus. An important point here is that Caravaggio repudiated what was considered good form at a time in his life when he could hardly

The Musicians The Lute Player

Bacchus offers wine from a goblet held by pertly cocked fingers with grimy nails.

Boy Bitten by a Lizard

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allow himself to do so. To get his career underway, he should first have provided what was in demand, works in keeping with the taste of his times, and have waited until later before introducing inventions of his own. The realism returned with Caravaggio’s first paintings on religious themes, and the emergence of remarkable spirituality. The first of these was Magdalene, showing Mary Magdalene at the moment when she has turned from her life as a courtesan and sits weeping on the floor, her jewels scattered around her. “It seemed not a religious painting at all ... a girl sitting on a low wooden stool drying her hair ... Where was the repentance ... suffering ... promise of salvation?” Others followed in his same style: Saint Catherine, Martha and Mary Magdalene, Judith Beheading Holofernes, a Sacrifice of Isaac, a Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, and a Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The works, while viewed by a comparatively limited circle, increased Caravaggio's fame with both

connoisseurs and his fellow-artists. But a true reputation would depend on public commissions, and for these it was necessary to look to the Church.

Magdalene

The same girl sat for the Magdalene and the Madonna.

Rest on Flight to Egypt

The artist ingeniously uses the figure of an angel playing the violin with his back to the viewer to divide the composition into two parts. On the right, the sleeping Mary with a dozing infant, on the left, a seated Joseph holding the musical score for the angel.

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It is in the cycle of the life of St Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel that Caravaggio's realistic naturalism first fully appears. The scheme called for three large paintings of scenes from the saint's life: St Matthew and the Angel, The Calling of St Matthew, and The Martyrdom of St Matthew. The execution (1598-1601) of all three, in which Caravaggio substituted a dramatic contemporary realism for the traditional pictorial formulas used in depicting saints, provoked public astonishment. Perhaps Caravaggio was waiting for this test, on public view at last, to reveal the whole range of his diversity. His novelty in these works not only involves the surface appearance of structure and subject but also the sense of light and even of time. The first version of the canvas that was to go over the altar, St Matthew and the Angel, was so offensive to the

canons of San Luigi dei Francesi said, it had to be redone. In this work the evangelist has the physical features of a common laborer. His big feet seem to stick out of the picture, and his posture, legs crossed, is awkward almost to the point of vulgarity. The angel does not s tand grac ious ly , bu t forcefully pushes Matthew's hand over the page of a heavy book, as if he were guiding an illiterate. What the canons did not understand was that Caravaggio, was copying Christ, who had himself raised Matthew from the street. It contained, in the angel who with gentle indulgence guided the saint's uncertain hand as he wrote, one of the most charming figures ever painted by the artist.

Major Roman CommissionsMajor Roman CommissionsMajor Roman Commissions

The first version of the St .Matthew and the Angel. The second

version of the St. Matthew and

the Angel

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The other two scenes of the St Matthew cycle are no less disconcerting in the realism of their drama. The Calling of St Matthew shows the moment at which two men and two worlds confront each other: Christ, in a burst of light, entering the room of the toll collector, and Matthew, intent on counting coins in the midst of a group of gaily dressed idlers with swords at their sides. In the glance between the two men, Matthew's world is dissolved.

The Calling of St. Mathew (below) with detailed pictures to the right and below .

Above, Matthew brings his hand to his chest, as though to ask if it were he that they wanted.

Left, There has been criticism of how the

handsome head of Christ relates to the outstretched

right arm. As an afterthought, Caravaggio

decide to have St Peter, who is leaning forward clumsily and imitating

Christ's gesture.

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In The Martyrdom of St Matthew (above) the event is captured just at the moment when the executioner is forcing his victim to the ground. The scene is a public street, and, as Matthew's acolyte flees in terror, passersby glance at the act with idle unconcern. The most intriguing aspect of these narratives is that they seem as if they were being performed in thick darkness when a sudden illumination revealed them and fixed them in memory at the instant of their most intense drama. Nothing that Caravaggio had done before was equal in scale or beauty.

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Caravaggio's three paintings for the Contarelli Chapel not only caused a sensation in Rome but also marked a radical change in his artistic preoccupation. Henceforth he would devote himself almost entirely to the painting of traditional religious themes, to which, however, he gave a whole new iconography and interpretation. He often chose subjects that are susceptible to a dramatic, violent, or macabre emphasis, and he proceeded to divest them of their idealized associations, taking his models from the streets. Caravaggio may have used a lantern hung to one side in his shuttered studio while painting from his models. The result in his paintings is a harsh, raking light that strikes across the composition, illuminating parts of it while plunging the rest into deep shadow. But just when everything was going so well for this artist, comfortably installed under the wing of a generous patron, Caravaggio's passionate nature got the better of him and he began acting in most unruly manner. Art historians tend to speak of the greats as impassioned by their art, to which they devoted themselves day and night. But Caravaggio was a drinker, a womanizer, a pugnacious individual who frequently ended up at the police station. The decoration of the Contarelli Chapel was completed by 1602. Caravaggio, though not yet 30, overshadowed all his contemporaries. There was a swarm of orders for his pictures, private and ecclesiastical. The Crucifixion of St Peter (1601) and The Conversion of St Paul, The Deposition of Christ

The Crucifixion of St Peter (top) with details.

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(1602-04), and the Death of the Virgin (1605-06) are among the monumental works he produced at this time. Some of these paintings, done at the high point of Caravaggio's artistic maturity, provoked violent reaction. The Madonna with Pilgrims, or Madonna di Loreto (1603-06), for the Church of San Agostino, was a scandal because of the "dirty feet and torn, filthy cap" of the two old people kneeling in the foreground. the protegé of a cardinal. Some of these paintings, done at the high point of Caravaggio's artistic maturity, provoked violent reaction. he Madonna with Pilgrims, or Madonna di Loreto (1603-06), for the Church of San Agostino, was a scandal because of the "dirty feet and torn, filthy cap" of the two old people kneeling in the foreground.

Death of a Virgin (top) and detail below. Mary lies as though suspended on the coffin. In the foreground Mary Magdalene is lamenting, drained of emotion and without any hope of redemption.

The Deposition of Christ (left)

Madonna with

Pilgrims (right)

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Artists, men of learning, and enlightened prelates were fascinated by the robust and bewildering art of Caravaggio, but the negative reaction of church officials reflected the self-protective irritation of academic painters and the instinctive resistance of the more conservative clergy and much of the populace.

The more brutal aspects of Caravaggio's paintings were condemned partly because Caravaggio's common people bear no relation to the graceful suppliants popular in much of Counter-Reformation art. They are plain working men, muscular, stubborn, and tenacious. Criticism did not cloud Caravaggio's success, however. His reputation and income increased, and he began to be envied. Although he moved in the society of cardinals and princes, the spirit was the same, still given to wrath and riot. After the time of the Contarelli project, Caravaggio had many encounters with the law. In 1600 he was accused of blows by a fellow painter, and the following year he wounded a soldier. In 1603 he was imprisoned on the complaint of another painter and released only through the intercession of the French ambassador. In April 1604 he was accused of throwing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter, and in October he was arrested for throwing stones at the Roman Guards. In May 1605 he was seized for misuse of arms, and on July 29 he had to flee Rome for a time because he had wounded a man in defense of his mistress. Within a year, on May 29, 1606, again in Rome, during a furious brawl over a disputed score in a game of tennis, Caravaggio killed one Ranuccio Tomassoni.

Culmination of Mature StyleCulmination of Mature StyleCulmination of Mature Style

Madonna of the Rosary

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In terror of the consequences of his act, Caravaggio, himself wounded and feverish, fled the city and moved on to several places of hiding and eventually reached Naples, probably in early 1607. He remained at Naples for a time, painting a Madonna of the Rosary for the Flemish painter Louis Finson and one of his late masterpieces, The Seven Works of Mercy, for the Chapel of Monte della Misericordia. It is impossible to ignore the connection between the dark and urgent nature of this painting and what must have been his desperate state of mind. It is also the first indication of a shift in his painting style.

At the end of 1607 or the beginning of 1608, Caravaggio traveled to Malta, where he was received as a celebrated artist. He worked hard, completing several works, the most important of which was The Beheading of St John the Baptist for the cathedral in Valletta. In this scene of martyrdom, shadow, which in earlier paintings stood thick about the figures, is here drawn back, and the infinite space that had been evoked by the huge empty areas of the earlier

Flight from RomeFlight from RomeFlight from Rome The Seven Works of Mercy

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compositions is replaced by a high, overhanging wall. This high wallcan be linked to a consciousness in Caravaggio's mind of condemnation to a limited space, the space between the narrow boundaries of flight and prison.

On July 14, 1608, Caravaggio was received into the Order of Malta as a "Knight of Justice"; soon afterward, however, either because word of his crime had reached Malta or because of new misdeeds, he was expelled from the order and imprisoned. He escaped, however. Caravaggio took refuge in Sicily, landing at Syracuse in October 1608, restless and fearful of pursuit. Yet his fame accompanied him; at Syracuse he painted his late, tragic masterpiece, The Burial of St Lucy, for the Church of Santa Lucia. In early 1609 he fled to Messina, where he painted The Resurrection of Lazarus and The Adoration of the Shepherds, then moved on to Palermo, where he did In Adoration with St Francis and St Lawrence for the Oratorio di San Lorenzo. Painted under the most adverse of circumstances, these show a subdued tone and a delicacy of emotion that is even more intense than the overt dramatics of his earlier paintings. His desperate flight could be ended only with the pope's pardon, and Caravaggio may have known that there were intercessions on his

The Burial of St. Lucy The Resurrection of Lazarus The Adoration of the Shepherds

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behalf in Rome when he again moved north to Naples in October 1609. Bad luck pursued him, however; at the door of an inn he was attacked and wounded so badly that rumors reached Rome that the "celebrated painter" was dead. After a long convalescence, he sailed in July 1610 from Naples to Rome, but he was arrested in route when his boat made a stop at Palo. On his release, he discovered that the boat had already sailed, taking his belongings. Setting out to overtake the vessel, he arrived at Port'Ercole, a Spanish possession within the Papal States, and he died there a few days later, probably of pneumonia. A document granting him clemency arrived from Rome three days after his death.

Caravaggio “put the oscuro (shadows) into chiaroscuro.” Chiaroscuro was practiced long before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique definitive, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light. With this went the acute observation of physical and psychological reality which formed the ground both for his immense popularity and for his frequent problems with his religious commissions. He worked at great speed, from live models, scoring basic guides directly onto the canvas with the end of the brush handle. The approach was anathema to the skilled artists of his day, who decried his refusal to work from drawings and to idealize his figures. Yet the models were basic to his realism. Some have been identified, including Mario Minniti and Francesco Boneri, both fellow-artists, Mario appearing as various figures in the early secular works, the young Francesco as a succession of angels, Baptists and Davids in the later canvasses. His female models include Fillide Melandroni, Anna Bianchini, and Maddalena Antognetti, all well-known prostitutes, who appear as female religious figures including the Virgin and various saints. Caravaggio himself appears in several paintings, his final self-portrait being as the witness on the far right to the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula.

Caravaggio, the artistCaravaggio, the artistCaravaggio, the artist

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In the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, the dimly lit scene of the saint gazes at the arrow with an air of quiet concern, while the Hun stares at her, his eyes shaded in darkness, one attendant looking at his hand and another, who must be modeled on Caravaggio himself, peering from the back, anxious to watch the proceedings. It is the last time that Caravaggio sees himself as an anguished spectator, but in pictorial terms the painting seems to presage what might have been a fresh stage in his career, for the Hun is painted with a new boldness in the brushwork. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, is another of the newly rediscovered paintings by Caravaggio, dates to his final weeks in Naples, before the ill-fated sea-trip back towards Rome and the pardon which was awaiting him. The varnish was still wet in May. In early July, Caravaggio was dead.

Martyrdom of Saint Ursula

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Caravaggio’s fame scarcely survived his death. His innovations inspired the Baroque, but the Baroque took the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism. Yet within a few decades, his works were being ascribed to less scandalous artists, or simply overlooked. The fashions had changed, but perhaps more pertinently, Caravaggio never established a workshop as the Carraci's did, and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical approach to art, the psychological realism that can only be deduced from his surviving work. In the 1920s art critic, Roberto Longhi brought Caravaggio's name once more to public attention, and placed him in the European tradition.

Only about 50 works by Caravaggio survive. One, The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, was recently authenticated and restored. It had been in storage in Hampton Court, mislabeled as a copy. At least a couple of his paintings has been or may have been lost in recent times. Richard Francis Burton writes of a "picture of St. Rosario, showing a circle of thirty men turpiter ligati" which is not known to have survived. One recent find was made famous by Jonathan Harr’s best selling book, The Lost Painting. The painting is The Taking of Christ (picture on cover page). The Taking of the Christ is the object of desire by both Sir Denis and Roberto Longhi. It vanished over two centuries before Longhi first discovered a clue to its existence but Longhi did not live long enough to solve the mystery.

The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew

The SurvivorsThe SurvivorsThe Survivors

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Cover Picture: The Taking of Christ

There are seven figures in the painting, from left to right: St John, Jesus, Judas, two soldiers, a man and a soldier. The main light source is not evident in the painting but comes from the upper left. Some art historians believe that the man holding the lantern is a self-portrait..

By the late 18th century, the painting was thought to have disappeared, and its whereabouts remained unknown for about 200 years. In 1990, Caravaggio’s lost masterpiece was recognized in the residence of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in Dublin, Ireland. The exciting rediscovery was published in 1993. The painting is now on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Ireland having previously been on display in the van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The painting was the central theme and mystery of The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr.