Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da

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Italian early baroque painter. He was active in Rome between 1592 and 1606, then in Naples, and finally in Malta. He created a forceful style, using contrasts of light and shade, dramatic foreshortening, and a meticulous attention to detail. His life was as dramatic as his art: he had to leave Rome after killing a man in a brawl.

The son of a mason in the village of Caravaggio near Milan, he had some early training in Milan, but was painting in Rome before he was 20, quickly developing that famous ‘naturalism’ which was in strong contrast to the prevailing Mannerism of Zuccaro and the Cavaliere d'Arpino. Instead of ideal figures, he painted the types he saw and knew, delighting in plebeian traits of character, contemporary dress and carefully delineated still life. Early examples are the Bacchus (Uffizi), the Fortune Teller (Louvre), and the Fruit Basket (Ambrosiana, Milan). The innovation that gave him fame and made him the centre of controversy was not only that he applied this realistic method to religious painting, but also intensified its effect by combining it with a depth and drama of light and shade that he may have adapted from Tintoretto. It appears in his first commission for the Contarelli Chapel of St Luigi dei Francesi, St Matthew and the Angel, the Vocation of St Matthew, and Martyrdom of the Apostle. These and other works in Rome (painted 1600–07), including the Madonna of the Serpent (Borghese Gallery), the Death of the Virgin (Louvre), and the Madonna del Rosario (Vienna), were either refused by his patrons or were the subject of fierce argument.

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