The Artist Caravaggio

ALL ARTISTS

CARAVAGGIO, Michelangelo Amerighi da (real name MICHELANGELO MERISI), Italian painter born in Caravaggio, Italy, on Sept. 28, 1573 and died in Port'Ercole, July 18, 1610. Known as "I1 Caravaggio" from his birthplace, he was the son of Fermo Merisi, architect of the marquis of Caravaggio. After his father's death he was apprenticed at the age of ten to Simone Petrazano in Milan. He may have studied in other centers in northern Italy after completing his four-year apprenticeship in 1588. No facts are known for this period, however, not even the exact date of his arrival in Rome, though this was probably in 1593. The lack of facts has fed scholarly debates on the sources of his style, some finding them in Venice, others in Lombardy. This disagreement points up the most interesting and important aspect of his style, its boldly new character, which cannot be explained by anything in his sources. Originating in his intense and bluntly honest temperament, the new realistic and dramatic style which he evolved had a power and timeliness which made him a dominant figure in 17th century European painting. In Rome he met with mixed reactions, opposition on both artistic and religious grounds continuing even after he had won many influential patrons and great fame.

In view of the academic taste prevalent in Rome, Caravaggio's insistence on turning to nature for models rather than to the classics, amounted to open rebellion. Even less popular was his insistence on using ordinary, often unprepossessing figure types in his religious pictures. Thus his first public commission, the altarpiece of St. Matthew and the Angel for the Contarelli Chapel in, San Luigi dei Francesi, was refused by the priests on the grounds that the St. Matthew was too plebeian a type. Rejected by the church, the picture was bought by Marquis Giustiniani. This pattern of altarpieces refused by churches, avidly bought by collectors, repeats itself throughout Caravaggio's career: the first versions of the pictures painted for Santa Maria del Popolo bought by Cardinal Sannesio; the Madonna of the Serpent painted for St. Peter's bought by Cardinal Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul IV; the famous Death of the Virgin, of 1606, now in the Louvre, refused by the church of Santa Maria della Scala and bought by the duke of Mantua on the advice of his agent, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens.

These rebuffs undoubtedly contributed to Caravaggio's sense of persecution, and he became more and more frequently involved in tavern and street fights, usually as aggressor. Finally he was forced to flee Rome in 1606, after killing a man. Traveling as if driven, he was active in his last four years in Naples, Malta, Syracuse, Messina, and Palermo; dying of malaria, alone and robbed of all his possessions, on his way back toward Rome, where he expected a pardon. The style which emerged out of this melodramatic life is one of the most powerfully dramatic and moving in the history of art. Fully achieved first in the Calling of St. Matthew painted about 1597 for the Contarelli Chapel, Caravaggio's drama lies not only in his convincingly characterized figures, but also, and more importantly, in the expressive use of light and space, the figures emerging as if spotlighted out of a darkened space.

In later pictures, such as the Martyrdom of St. Matthew in the same chapel, and the Vision of St. Paul, of 1600-1601, in Santa Maria del Popolo, strong recessional movements of the forms in space intensify the sense of the dramatic moment. In his latest style, in pictures painted in Malta and Sicily, the figures are reduced in scale and become enveloped in tremendous, suggestive spaces. Throughout his career he enhances the quality of sensed reality by accenting references to sound and touch, as in Isaac's scream in the Sacrifice of Isaac, the feel of Thomas' finger thrust into Christ's wound in the Doubting of Thomas. In these ways Caravaggio exercised a formative influence on the development of 17th century style, not so much in Rome as in Naples and northern Italy. Outside of Italy his influence was extraordinary; it was strongly felt in all of the important centers of painting, in Spain, France, Flanders, and notably in Holland, where Rembrandt van Rijn forged the final link in the chain which began with Caravaggio.