Caravaggio
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| Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio | |
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</noinclude>|  Chalk portrait of Caravaggio by Ottavio Leoni, c. 1621. |
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| Birth name | Michelangelo Merisi |
| Born | September 28 1571 Milan |
| Died | July 18 1610 (aged 38) Porto Ercole, near Grosseto in Tuscany |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Field | Painting |
| Movement | Baroque |
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (September 28 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian artist. He was active in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. He is commonly placed in the Baroque school, of which he was the first great representative.
Even during his lifetime, many people talked about Caravaggio. Some were fascinated by his personality. Others could not really make sense of him. Some thought he was dangerous and rebellious. He did not want to fit in, sometimes. He appeared on the art scene in Rome in 1600. He never lacked for commissions or patrons, yet he handled his success atrociously. A notice on him was published in 1604. It tells about his lifestyle, in 1601:
| “ | after a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him | ” |
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—Floris Claes van Dijk,1601[1] |
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In 1606 he killed a young man in a brawl and fled from Rome with a price on his head. In Malta in 1608 he was involved in another brawl, and yet another in Naples in 1609, possibly a deliberate attempt on his life by unidentified enemies. By the next year, after a career of little more than a decade, he was dead.
Huge new churches and palazzi were being built in Rome in the decades of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and paintings were needed to fill them. The Counter-Reformation Church searched for authentic religious art with which to counter the threat of Protestantism, and for this task the artificial conventions of Mannerism, which had ruled art for almost a century, no longer seemed adequate. Caravaggio's novelty was a radical naturalism which combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, approach to chiaroscuro, the use of light and shadow.
Famous and extremely influential while he lived, Caravaggio was almost entirely forgotten in the centuries after his death, and it was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. Yet despite this his influence on the new Baroque style which eventually emerged from the ruins of Mannerism, was profound. Andre Berne-Joffroy, Paul Valéry’s secretary, said of him: "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting."[2]
[change] References
- ↑ Floris Claes van Dijk, a contemporary of Caravaggio in Rome in 1601, quoted in John Gash, "Caravaggio", p.13. The quotation originates in Carl (or Karel) van Mander's Het Schilder-Boek of 1604, translated in full in Howard Hibbard, "Caravaggio". The first reference to Caravaggio in a contemporary document from Rome is the listing of his name, with that of Prospero Orsi as his partner, as an 'assistente' in a procession in October 1594 in honour of St. Luke (see H. Waga "Vita nota e ignota dei virtuosi al Pantheon" Rome 1992, Appendix I, pp.219 and 220ff). The earliest informative account of his life in the city is a court transcript dated 11 July 1597 where Caravaggio and Prospero Orsi were witnesses to a crime near San Luigi de' Francesi. (See "The earliest account of Caravaggio in Rome" Sandro Corradini and Maurizio Marini, The Burlington Magazine, pp.25-28).
- ↑ Quoted in Gilles Lambert, "Caravaggio", p.8.
