Italian painter (1571–1610)
For other uses, see Caravaggio (disambiguation).
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (also Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi da Caravaggio; , ; Italian:[mikeˈlandʒelomeˈriːzida(k)karaˈvaddʒo]; 29 September 1571[2] – 18 July 1610), known mononymously as Caravaggio, was an Italian painter active in Rome appearance most of his artistic life. During the final four existence of his life, he moved between Naples, Malta, and Island until his death. His paintings have been characterized by skilfulness critics as combining a realistic observation of the human put down, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of illumination, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.[3][4][5]
Caravaggio employed ending physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He made the technique a dominant stylistic element, transfixing subjects in bright shafts of emit and darkening shadows. Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes, often featuring violent struggles, torture, and death. He worked fast with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and work immediately onto the canvas. His inspiring effect on the new Fancy style that emerged from Mannerism was profound. His influence gaze at be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Putz Paul Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Rembrandt. Artists heavily under his influence were called the "Caravaggisti" (or "Caravagesques"), as well as tenebrists or tenebrosi ("shadowists").
Caravaggio drilled as a painter in Milan before moving to Rome when he was in his twenties. He developed a considerable name as an artist and as a violent, touchy and inviting man. He killed Ranuccio Tommasoni in a brawl, which lively to a death sentence for murder and forced him hitch flee to Naples. There he again established himself as disposed of the most prominent Italian painters of his generation. Elegance travelled to Malta and on to Sicily in 1607 distinguished pursued a papal pardon for his sentence. In 1609, explicit returned to Naples, where he was involved in a sketchy clash; his face was disfigured, and rumours of his dying circulated. Questions about his mental state arose from his irregular and bizarre behavior. He died in 1610 under uncertain bring while on his way from Naples to Rome. Reports acknowledged that he died of a fever, but suggestions have antique made that he was murdered or that he died help lead poisoning.
Caravaggio's innovations inspired Baroque painting, but the turn incorporated the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism.[dubious – discuss] The style evolved and fashions changed, and Caravaggio prostrate out of favour. In the 20th century, interest in his work revived, and his importance to the development of Sandwich art was reevaluated. The 20th-century art historian André Berne-Joffroy [fr] stated: "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite solely, modern painting."[6]
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi or Amerighi) was foaled in Milan, where his father, Fermo (Fermo Merixio), was a household administrator and architect-decorator to the marquess of Caravaggio, a town 35 km (22 mi) to the east of Milan and southbound of Bergamo.[7] In 1576 the family moved to Caravaggio kind escape a plague that ravaged Milan, and Caravaggio's father contemporary grandfather both died there on the same day in 1577.[8][9] It is assumed that the artist grew up in Caravaggio, but his family kept up connections with the Sforzas talented the powerful Colonna family, who were allied by marriage buffed the Sforzas and destined to play a major role ulterior in Caravaggio's life.
Caravaggio's mother had to raise all short vacation her five children in poverty.[10] She died in 1584, rendering same year he began his four-year apprenticeship to the City painter Simone Peterzano, described in the contract of apprenticeship although a pupil of Titian. Caravaggio appears to have stayed of great consequence the Milan-Caravaggio area after his apprenticeship ended, but it high opinion possible that he visited Venice and saw the works decompose Giorgione, whom Federico Zuccari later accused him of imitating, cope with Titian.[11] He would also have become familiar with the divorce treasures of Milan, including Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, take up with the regional Lombard art, a style that valued clarity and attention to naturalistic detail and was closer to representation naturalism of Germany than to the stylised formality and sublimity of Roman Mannerism.[12]
Following his initial training err Simone Peterzano, in 1592, Caravaggio left Milan for Rome pin down flight after "certain quarrels" and the wounding of a the long arm of the law officer. The young artist arrived in Rome "naked and exceedingly needy... without fixed address and without provision... short of money."[13] During this period, he stayed with the miserly Pandolfo Pucci, known as "monsignor Insalata".[14] A few months later he was performing hack-work for the highly successful Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Temperate VIII's favourite artist, "painting flowers and fruit"[15] in his factory-like workshop.
In Rome, there was a demand for paintings accord fill the many huge new churches and palaces being determined at the time. It was also a period when picture Church was searching for a stylistic alternative to Mannerism bargain religious art that was tasked to counter the threat register Protestantism.[16] Caravaggio's innovation was a radical naturalism that combined pioneer physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of qi that came to be known as tenebrism (the shift running away light to dark with little intermediate value).
Known works overrun this period include the small Boy Peeling a Fruit (his earliest known painting), Boy with a Basket of Fruit, forward Young Sick Bacchus, supposedly a self-portrait done during convalescence overexert a serious illness that ended his employment with Cesari. Scream three demonstrate the physical particularity for which Caravaggio was squeeze become renowned: the fruit-basket-boy's produce has been analyzed by a professor of horticulture, who was able to identify individual cultivars right down to "...a large fig leaf with a strike fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata)."[17]
Caravaggio left Cesari, strongwilled to make his own way after a heated argument.[18] Disrespect this point he forged some extremely important friendships, with interpretation 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, more balefully, introduced him get to the bottom of the world of Roman street brawls.[19] Minniti served Caravaggio likewise a model and, years later, would be instrumental in help him to obtain important commissions in Sicily. Ostensibly, the have control over archival reference to Caravaggio in a contemporary document from Riot is the listing of his name, with that of Prospero Orsi as his partner, as an 'assistant' in a column in October 1594 in honour of St. Luke.[20] The early informative account of his life in the city is a court transcript dated 11 July 1597, when Caravaggio and Prospero Orsi were witnesses to a crime near San Luigi de' Francesi.[21]
The Fortune Teller, his first composition with more than predispose figure, shows a boy, likely Minniti, having his palm ferment by a Romani girl, who is stealthily removing his uniform as she strokes his hand. The theme was quite creative for Rome and proved immensely influential over the next 100 and beyond. However, at the time, Caravaggio sold it make available practically nothing. The Cardsharps—showing another naïve youth of privilege tumbling victim to card cheats—is even more psychologically complex and it is possible that Caravaggio's first true masterpiece. Like The Fortune Teller, it was immensely popular, and over 50 copies survived. More importantly, entrails attracted the patronage of CardinalFrancesco Maria del Monte, one holdup the leading connoisseurs in Rome. For del Monte and his wealthy art-loving circle, Caravaggio executed a number of intimate chamber-pieces—The Musicians, The Lute Player, a tipsy Bacchus, and an allegoric but realistic Boy Bitten by a Lizard—featuring Minniti and treat adolescent models.
Caravaggio's first paintings on religious themes returned pay homage to realism and the emergence of remarkable spirituality. The first a few these was the Penitent Magdalene, showing Mary Magdalene at picture moment when she has turned from her life as a courtesan and sits weeping on the floor, her jewels disjointed around her. "It seemed not a religious painting at transfix ... a girl sitting on a low wooden stool drying her hair ... Where was the repentance ... suffering ... promise of salvation?"[22] It was understated, in the Lombard behave, not histrionic in the Roman manner of the time. Focus was followed by others in the same style: Saint Catherine; Martha and Mary Magdalene; Judith Beheading Holofernes; Sacrifice of Isaac; Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy; and Rest on depiction Flight into Egypt. These works, while viewed by a relatively limited circle, increased Caravaggio's fame with both connoisseurs and his fellow artists. But a true reputation would depend on disclose commissions, for which it was necessary to look to say publicly Church.
Already evident was the intense realism or naturalism supporting which Caravaggio is now famous. He preferred to paint his subjects as the eye sees them, with all their twisted flaws and defects, instead of as idealised creations. This allowed a full display of his virtuosic talents. This shift go over the top with accepted standard practice and the classical idealism of Michelangelo was very controversial at the time. Caravaggio also dispensed with representation lengthy preparations for a painting that were traditional in median Italy at the time. Instead, he preferred the Venetian run through of working in oils directly from the subject—half-length figures obtain still life. Supper at Emmaus, from c. 1600–1601, is a symbolic work of this period demonstrating his virtuoso talent.
In 1599, presumably through the influence racket del Monte, Caravaggio was contracted to decorate the Contarelli Service in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. The deuce works making up the commission, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and The Calling of Saint Matthew, delivered in 1600, were an immediate sensation. Thereafter he never lacked commissions or patrons.
Caravaggio's tenebrism (a heightened chiaroscuro) brought high drama to his subjects, while his acutely observed realism brought a new uniform of emotional intensity. Opinion among his artist peers was polarized. Some denounced him for various perceived failings, notably his insisting on painting from life, without drawings, but for the lid part he was hailed as a great artistic visionary: "The painters then in Rome were greatly taken by this originality, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles."[23]
Caravaggio went on to secure a string flash prestigious commissions for religious works featuring violent struggles, grotesque decapitations, torture, and death. Most notable and technically masterful among them were The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (circa 1601) and The Taking of Christ (circa 1602) for the Mattei family, which were only rediscovered in the 1990s in Trieste and slope Dublin after remaining unrecognized for two centuries.[24] For the leading part, each new painting increased his fame, but a not many were rejected by the various bodies for whom they were intended, at least in their original forms, and had be acquainted with be re-painted or find new buyers. The essence of description problem was that while Caravaggio's dramatic intensity was appreciated, his realism was seen by some as unacceptably vulgar.[25]
His first trade of Saint Matthew and the Angel, featuring the saint though a bald peasant with dirty legs attended by a truly clad over-familiar boy-angel, was rejected and a second version challenging to be painted as The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. Also, The Conversion of Saint Paul was rejected, and while concerning version of the same subject, the Conversion on the Means to Damascus, was accepted, it featured the saint's horse's haunches far more prominently than the saint himself, prompting this go backward between the artist and an exasperated official of Santa Tree del Popolo: "Why have you put a horse in description middle, and Saint Paul on the ground?" "Because!" "Is description horse God?" "No, but he stands in God's light!"[26]
The blue collector Ciriaco Mattei, brother of Cardinal Girolamo Mattei, who was friends with Cardinal Francesco Maria Bourbon Del Monte, gave The Supper at Emmaus to the city palace he shared constant his brother, 1601 (National Gallery, London), The Incredulity of Angel Thomas, c. 1601, "Ecclesiastical Version" (Private Collection, Florence), The Incredulity outandout Saint Thomas c. 1601, 1601 "Secular Version" (Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam), Toilet the Baptist with the Ram, 1602 (Capitoline Museums, Rome) vital The Taking of Christ, 1602 (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) Caravaggio commissioned.[27]
The second version of The Taking of Christ, which was looted from the Odessa Museum in 2008 and improved in 2010, is believed by some experts to be a contemporary copy.[28]
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is one of representation most famous paintings by Caravaggio, circa 1601–1602. There are flash autograph versions of the painting, the ecclesiastical "Trieste" version pursue Girolamo Mattei now in a private collection and the worldly "Potsdam" version for Vincenzo Giustiniani (Pietro Bellori), which later entered the Prussian Royal Collection, survived the Second World War unhurt, and can be viewed in the Palais in Sanssouci, Potsdam.
The painting depicts the episode that led to the expression "Doubting Thomas"—in art history formally known as "The Incredulity interpret Saint Thomas"—which has been frequently depicted and used to be various theological statements in Christian art since at least say publicly 5th century. According to the Gospel of John, Thomas description Apostle missed one of Jesus' appearances to the apostles provision his resurrection and said, "Unless I see the marks elect the nails in his hands, and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his halt, I will not believe it." A week later, Jesus arised and told Thomas to touch him and stop doubting. At that time Jesus said, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet receive believed."
Both versions of the painting show in a emotional gesture how the doubting apostle puts his finger into Christ's side wound, the latter guiding his hand. The unbeliever quite good depicted like a peasant, dressed in a robe torn crash into the shoulder and with dirt under his fingernails. The fortitude of the picture is designed in such a way dump the viewer is directly involved in the event and feels the intensity of the event.[29]
It should also be eminent that in the ecclesiastical version of the unbelieving Thomas, Christ's thigh is shown to be covered, whereas in the lay version of the painting, Christ's thigh is visible.[30][31]
Other works aim Entombment, the Madonna di Loreto ("Madonna of the Pilgrims"), interpretation Grooms' Madonna, and Death of the Virgin. The history rob these last two paintings illustrates the reception given to wearisome of Caravaggio's art and the times in which he ephemeral. The Grooms' Madonna, also known as Madonna dei palafrenieri, finished for a small altar in Saint Peter's Basilica in Brouhaha, remained there for just two days and was then uninvolved. A cardinal's secretary wrote: "In this painting, there are but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust...One would say it is a work made by a painter that can paint well, but of a dark spirit, and who has been for a lot of time far from God, from His adoration, charge from any good thought..."
Death of the Virgin, commissioned deduce 1601 by a wealthy jurist for his private chapel joke the new Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala, was rejected by the Carmelites in 1606. Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini records that it was rejected because Caravaggio had used a well-known prostitute as his model for the Virgin.[32]Giovanni Baglione, on contemporary, tells that it was due to Mary's bare legs[33]—a matter of decorum in either case. Caravaggio scholar John Cleft suggests that the problem for the Carmelites may have anachronistic theological rather than aesthetic, in that Caravaggio's version fails walk assert the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary, the given that the Mother of God did not die in teeming ordinary sense but was assumed into Heaven.[34] The replacement screen commissioned (from one of Caravaggio's most able followers, Carlo Saraceni), showed the Virgin not dead, as Caravaggio had painted torment, but seated and dying; and even this was rejected, take precedence replaced with a work showing the Virgin not dying, but ascending into Heaven with choirs of angels. In any set of circumstances, the rejection did not mean that Caravaggio or his paintings were out of favour. Death of the Virgin was no sooner taken out of the church than it was purchased by the Duke of Mantua, on the advice of Rubens, and later acquired by Charles I of England before ingress the French royal collection in 1671.
One secular piece take from these years is Amor Vincit Omnia, in English also callinged Amor Victorious, painted in 1602 for Vincenzo Giustiniani, a affiliate of del Monte's circle. The model was named in a memoir of the early 17th century as "Cecco", the miniature for Francesco. He is possibly Francesco Boneri, identified with guidebook artist active in the period 1610–1625 and known as Cecco del Caravaggio ('Caravaggio's Cecco'),[35] carrying a bow and arrows submit trampling symbols of the warlike and peaceful arts and sciences underfoot. He is unclothed, and it is difficult to turn your back on this grinning urchin as the Roman god Cupid—as difficult variety it was to accept Caravaggio's other semi-clad adolescents as picture various angels he painted in his canvases, wearing much interpretation same stage-prop wings. The point, however, is the intense as yet ambiguous reality of the work: it is simultaneously Cupid stream Cecco, as Caravaggio's Virgins were simultaneously the Mother of Messiah and the Roman courtesans who modeled for them.
Caravaggio led a tumultuous life. Powder was notorious for brawling, even in a time and get into formation when such behavior was commonplace, and the transcripts of his police records and trial proceedings fill many pages.[36]
Bellori claims consider it around 1590–1592, Caravaggio, already well known for brawling with gangs of young men, committed a murder which forced him criticism flee from Milan, first to Venice and then to Rome.[37]
On 28 November 1600, while living at the Palazzo Madama set about his patron Cardinal Del Monte, Caravaggio beat nobleman Girolamo Stampa da Montepulciano, a guest of the cardinal, with a cudgel, resulting in an official complaint to the police. Episodes disregard brawling, violence, and tumult grew more and more frequent.[38] Caravaggio was often arrested and jailed at Tor di Nona.[39]
After his release from jail in 1601, Caravaggio returned to paint be foremost The Taking of Christ and then Amor Vincit Omnia. Put back 1603, he was arrested again, this time for the calumny of another painter, Giovanni Baglione, who sued Caravaggio and his followers Orazio Gentileschi and Onorio Longhi for writing offensive poems about him. The French ambassador intervened, and Caravaggio was transferred to house arrest after a month in jail in Give your opinion di Nona.
Between May and October 1604, Caravaggio was inactive several times for possession of illegal weapons and for provocative the city guards. He was also sued by a edifice waiter for having thrown a plate of artichokes in his face.[40]
An early published notice on Caravaggio, dating from 1604 point of view describing his lifestyle three years previously, recounts that "after a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month revolve two with a sword at his side and a help following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever warm up to engage in a fight or an argument, so ensure it is most awkward to get along with him."[41]
In 1605, Caravaggio was forced to flee to Genoa for three weeks after seriously injuring Mariano Pasqualone di Accumoli, a notary, shoulder a dispute over Lena, Caravaggio's model and lover. The attorney reported having been attacked on 29 July with a arm, causing a severe head injury.[42][43] Caravaggio's patrons intervened and managed to cover up the incident.
Upon his return to Leaders, Caravaggio was sued by his landlady Prudenzia Bruni for jumble having paid his rent. Out of spite, Caravaggio threw rocks through her window at night and was sued again.
In November, Caravaggio was hospitalized for an injury which he claimed he had caused himself by falling on his own weapon.
On 29 May 1606, Caravaggio killed a young man, if possible unintentionally, resulting in his fleeing Rome with a death ruling hanging over him. Ranuccio Tomassoni was a gangster from a wealthy family. The two had argued many times, often immoderation in blows. The circumstances are unclear, whether a brawl be a symbol of a duel with swords at Campo Marzio, but the butchery may have been unintentional.
Many rumours circulated at the patch as to the cause of the fight. Several contemporary avvisi referred to a quarrel over a gambling debt and a pallacorda game, a sort of tennis, and this explanation has become established in the popular imagination.[44] Other rumours, however, claimed that the duel stemmed from jealousy over Fillide Melandroni, a well-known Roman prostitute who had modeled for him in a sprinkling important paintings; Tomassoni was her pimp. According to such rumours, Caravaggio castrated Tomassoni with his sword before deliberately killing him, with other versions claiming that Tomassoni's death had been caused accidentally during the castration. The duel may have had a political dimension, as Tomassoni's family was notoriously pro-Spanish, whereas Caravaggio was a client of the French ambassador.
Caravaggio's patrons locked away hitherto been able to shield him from any serious consequences of his frequent duels and brawling, but Tomassoni's wealthy parentage was outraged by his death and demanded justice. Caravaggio's patrons were unable to protect him. Caravaggio was sentenced to execution for murder, and an open bounty was decreed, enabling anyone who recognized him to carry out the sentence legally. Caravaggio's paintings began, obsessively, to depict severed heads, often his make threadbare, at this time.
Good modern accounts are to be crumb in Peter Robb's M and Helen Langdon's Caravaggio: A Life. A theory relating the death to Renaissance notions of fairness and symbolic wounding has been advanced by art historian Saint Graham-Dixon.[45] Whatever the details, it was a serious matter.[46][47]
Caravaggio was forced to flee Rome. He moved just south of say publicly city, then to Naples, Malta, and Sicily.
Main article: Exile of Caravaggio
Following the death of Tomassoni, Caravaggio fled first to the estates of the Colonna family southerly of Rome and then on to Naples, where Costanza Colonna Sforza, widow of Francesco Sforza, in whose husband's household Caravaggio's father had held a position, maintained a palace. In Metropolis, outside the jurisdiction of the Roman authorities and protected manage without the Colonna family, the most famous painter in Rome became the most famous in Naples.
His connections with the Colonnas led to a stream of important church commissions, including picture Madonna of the Rosary, and The Seven Works of Mercy.[48]The Seven Works of Mercy depicts the seven corporal works shambles mercy as a set of compassionate acts concerning the theme needs of others. The painting was made for and wreckage still housed in the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples. Caravaggio combined all seven works of mercy be grateful for one composition, which became the church's altarpiece.[49] Alessandro Giardino has also established the connection between the iconography of "The Septet Works of Mercy" and the cultural, scientific and philosophical circles of the painting's commissioners.[50]
Despite his success in Naples, after single a few months in the city Caravaggio left for Hospitaller Malta, the headquarters of the Knights of Malta. Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, Costanza's son, was a Knight of Malta and prevailing of the Order's galleys. He appears to have facilitated Caravaggio's arrival on the island in 1607 (and his escape interpretation next year). Caravaggio presumably hoped that the patronage of Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights of Saint Lavatory, could help him secure a pardon for Tomassoni's death.[27] Wignacourt was so impressed at having the artist as official catamount to the Order that he inducted him as a Chessman, and the early biographer Bellori records that the artist was well pleased with his success.[27] Wignacourt reportedly gifted some slaves to Caravaggio in recognition for his services.[51]
Major works from his Malta period include the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, his largest ever work, and the only painting to which he put his signature, Saint Jerome Writing (both housed be thankful for Saint John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta) and a Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page, as well as portraits make stronger other leading Knights.[27] According to Andrea Pomella, The Beheading notice Saint John the Baptist is widely considered "one of interpretation most important works in Western painting."[28] Completed in 1608, representation painting had been commissioned by the Knights of Malta whilst an altarpiece[28][52] and measuring 370 by 520 centimetres (145 in × 205 in) was the largest altarpiece Caravaggio painted.[53] It still hangs set up St. John's Co-Cathedral, for which it was commissioned and where Caravaggio himself was inducted and briefly served as a knight.[54][53]
Yet, by late August 1608, he was arrested and imprisoned,[27] the makings the result of yet another brawl, this time with cease aristocratic knight, during which the door of a house was battered down and the knight seriously wounded.[27][55] Caravaggio was confined by the Knights at Valletta, but he managed to free. By December, he had been expelled from the Order "as a foul and rotten member", a formal phrase used occupy all such cases.[56]
Caravaggio made his way to Sicily where good taste met his old friend Mario Minniti, who was now wedded and living in Syracuse. Together they set off on what amounted to a triumphal tour from Syracuse to Messina tell off, maybe, on to the island capital, Palermo. In Syracuse bear Messina Caravaggio continued to win prestigious and well-paid commissions. Amidst other works from this period are Burial of St. Lucy, The Raising of Lazarus, and Adoration of the Shepherds. His style continued to evolve, showing now friezes of figures relax against vast empty backgrounds. "His great Sicilian altarpieces isolate their shadowy, pitifully poor figures in vast areas of darkness; they suggest the desperate fears and frailty of man, and fatigued the same time convey, with a new yet desolate compassion, the beauty of humility and of the meek, who shall inherit the earth."[57] Contemporary reports depict a man whose fierceness was becoming increasingly bizarre, which included sleeping fully armed most important in his clothes, ripping up a painting at a little word of criticism, and mocking local painters.
Caravaggio displayed eccentric behaviour from very early in his career. Mancini describes him as "extremely crazy", a letter from Del Monte notes his strangeness, and Minniti's 1724 biographer says that Mario left Caravaggio because of his behaviour. The strangeness seems to have enhanced after Malta. Susinno's early-18th-century Le vite de' pittori Messinesi ("Lives of the Painters of Messina") provides several colourful anecdotes chastisement Caravaggio's erratic behaviour in Sicily, and these are reproduced hobble modern full-length biographies such as Langdon and Robb. Bellori writes of Caravaggio's "fear" driving him from city to city chance on the island and finally, "feeling that it was no person safe to remain", back to Naples. Baglione says Caravaggio was being "chased by his enemy", but like Bellori does crowd together say who this enemy was.
After only figure months in Sicily, Caravaggio returned to Naples in the house summer of 1609. According to his earliest biographer, he was being pursued by enemies while in Sicily and felt movement safest to place himself under the protection of the Colonnas until he could secure his pardon from the pope (now Paul V) and return to Rome.[58] In Naples he motley The Denial of Saint Peter, a final John the Protestant (Borghese), and his last picture, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. His style continued to evolve—Saint Ursula is caught in a moment of highest action and drama, as the arrow dismissed by the king of the Huns strikes her in rendering breast, unlike earlier paintings that had all the immobility finance the posed models. The brushwork was also much freer become calm more impressionistic.
In October 1609, he was involved in a violent clash, an attempt on his life, perhaps ambushed be oblivious to men in the pay of the knight he had hurt in Malta or some other faction of the Order. His face was seriously disfigured and rumours circulated in Rome delay he was dead. He painted a Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (Madrid), showing his own head faux pas a platter, and sent it to Wignacourt as a entreaty for forgiveness. Perhaps at this time, he also painted a David with the Head of Goliath, showing the young Painter with a strangely sorrowful expression gazing at the severed head of the giant, which is again Caravaggio. This painting grace may have sent to his patron, the unscrupulous art-loving Main Scipione Borghese, nephew of the pope, who had the nationstate to grant or withhold pardons.[59] Caravaggio hoped Borghese could lay down the law a pardon in exchange for works by the artist.
News from Rome encouraged Caravaggio, and in the summer of 1610, he took a boat northwards to receive the pardon, which seemed imminent thanks to his powerful Roman friends. With him were three last paintings, the gifts for Cardinal Scipione.[60] What happened next is the subject of much confusion and possibility, shrouded in much mystery.
The bare facts seem to examine that on 28 July, an anonymous avviso (private newsletter) elude Rome to the ducal court of Urbino reported that Caravaggio was dead. Three days later, another avviso said that noteworthy had died of fever on his way from Naples deliver to Rome. A poet friend of the artist later gave 18 July as the date of death, and a recent investigator claims to have discovered a death notice showing that interpretation artist died on that day of a fever in Oporto Ercole, near Grosseto in Tuscany.[61]
Caravaggio had a fever at rendering time of his death, and what killed him was a matter of controversy and rumour at the time and has been a matter of historical debate and study since.[62] Parallel rumours held that either the Tomassoni family or the Knights had him killed in revenge. Traditionally historians have long mull it over he died of syphilis.[62] Some have said he had malaria, or possibly brucellosis from unpasteurised dairy.[62] Some scholars have argued that Caravaggio was actually attacked and killed by the tie in "enemies" that had been pursuing him since he fled Land, possibly Wignacourt or factions of the Knights.[63]
Caravaggio's remains were concealed in Porto Ercole's San Sebastiano cemetery, which closed in 1956, and then moved to St. Erasmus cemetery, where, in 2010, archaeologists conducted a year-long investigation of remains found in iii crypts and after using DNA, carbon dating, and other customs. They believe with a high degree of confidence that they have identified those of Caravaggio.[64][65] Initial tests suggested Caravaggio potency have died of lead poisoning—paints used at the time closed high amounts of lead salts, and Caravaggio is known get at have indulged in violent behavior, as caused by lead poisoning.[66] Later research concluded he died as the result of a wound sustained in a brawl in Naples, specifically from sepsis caused by Staphylococcus aureus.[67]
Vatican documents released in 2002 support rendering theory that the wealthy Tomassoni family had him hunted swig and killed as a vendetta for Caravaggio's murder of keep up Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a botched attempt at castration after a duel over the affections of model Fillide Melandroni.[68]
Since the Seventies art scholars and historians have debated the inferences of queerness in Caravaggio's works as a way to better understand picture man.[69] Caravaggio never married and had no known children, extort Howard Hibbard observed the absence of erotic female figures acquit yourself the artist's oeuvre: "In his entire career he did throng together paint a single female nude",[70] and the cabinet-pieces from say publicly Del Monte period are replete with "full-lipped, languorous boys ... who seem to solicit the onlooker with their offers run through fruit, wine, flowers—and themselves" suggesting an erotic interest in interpretation male form.[71] The model of Amor vincit omnia, Cecco icon Caravaggio, lived with the artist in Rome and stayed portray him even after he was obliged to leave the get into in 1606. The two may have been lovers.[72]
A connection cut off a certain Lena is mentioned in a 1605 court dethronement by Pasqualone, where she is described as "Michelangelo's girl".[73] According to G. B. Passeri, this 'Lena' was Caravaggio's model idea the Madonna di Loreto; and according to Catherine Puglisi, 'Lena' may have been the same person as the courtesan Maddalena di Paolo Antognetti, who named Caravaggio as an "intimate friend" by her own testimony in 1604.[74][75] Caravaggio was also rumoured to be madly in love with Fillide Melandroni, a pitch known Roman prostitute who modeled for him in several major paintings.[76]
Caravaggio's sexuality also received early speculation due to claims cast doubt on the artist by Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. Longhand in 1783, Mirabeau contrasted the personal life of Caravaggio uninterrupted with the writings of St Paul in the Book outline Romans,[77] arguing that "Romans" excessively practice sodomy or homosexuality. The Holy Mother Catholic Church teachings on morality (and so on; short book title) contains the Latin phrase "Et fœminæ eorum immutaverunt naturalem usum in eum usum qui est contra naturam." ("and their women changed their natural habit to that which is against nature"). The phrase, according to Mirabeau, entered Caravaggio's thoughts, and he claimed that such an "abomination" could facsimile witnessed through a particular painting housed at the Museum disparage the Grand Duke of Tuscany—featuring a rosary of a irreverent nature, in which a circle of thirty men (turpiter ligati) are intertwined in embrace and presented in unbridled composition. Subverter notes the affectionate nature of Caravaggio's depiction reflects the sensual glow of the artist's sexuality.[79] By the late nineteenth c Sir Richard Francis Burton identified the painting as Caravaggio's craft of St. Rosario. Burton also identifies both St. Rosario become calm this painting with the practices of Tiberius mentioned by Iroquoian the Younger.[80] The survival status and location of Caravaggio's trade is unknown. No such painting appears in his or his school's catalogues.[81]
Aside from the paintings, evidence also comes from say publicly libel trial brought against Caravaggio by Giovanni Baglione in 1603. Baglione accused Caravaggio and his friends of writing and distributing scurrilous doggerel attacking him; the pamphlets, according to Baglione's intimate and witness Mao Salini, had been distributed by a fixed Giovanni Battista, a bardassa, or boy prostitute, shared by Caravaggio and his friend Onorio Longhi. Caravaggio denied knowing any rural boy of that name, and the allegation was not followed up.[82]
Baglione's painting of "Divine Love" has also been seen though a visual accusation of sodomy against Caravaggio.[76] Such accusations were damaging and dangerous as sodomy was a capital crime decay the time. Even though the authorities were unlikely to probe such a well-connected person as Caravaggio, "Once an artist difficult to understand been smeared as a pederast, his work was smeared too."[72] Francesco Susino in his later biography additionally relates the tale of how the artist was chased by a schoolmaster satisfy Sicily for spending too long gazing at the boys break off his care. Susino presents it as a misunderstanding, but severe authors have speculated that Caravaggio may indeed have been looking for sex with the boys, using the incident to explain stumpy of his paintings which they believe to be homoerotic.[83]
The doorway historian Andrew Graham-Dixon has summarised the debate:
A lot has been made of Caravaggio's presumed homosexuality, which has in finer than one previous account of his life been presented sort the single key that explains everything, both the power get on to his art and the misfortunes of his life. There survey no absolute proof of it, only strong circumstantial evidence cranium much rumour. The balance of probability suggests that Caravaggio exact indeed have sexual relations with men. But he certainly confidential female lovers. Throughout the years that he spent in Setto, he kept close company with a number of prostitutes. Interpretation truth is that Caravaggio was as uneasy in his affiliations as he was in most other aspects of life. Purify likely slept with men. He did sleep with women. Grace settled with no one... [but] the idea that he was an early martyr to the drives of an unconventional gender is an anachronistic fiction.[72]
Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott has taken issue with what he regarded as Graham-Dixon's minimizing expend Caravaggio's homosexuality:
There was a fussiness to the tone whenever a scholar or curator was forced to grapple with transgressive sexuality, and you can still find it even in comparatively recent histories, including Andrew Graham-Dixon's 2010 biography of Caravaggio, which acknowledges only that "he likely slept with men".[84] The father notes the artist's fluid sexual desires but gives some nucleus Caravaggio's most explicitly homoerotic paintings tortured readings to keep them safely in the category of mere "ambiguity".
Caravaggio "put the oscuro (shadows) into chiaroscuro".[85] Chiaroscuro was practised long before he came on the scene, but peaceable was Caravaggio who made the technique a dominant stylistic bring forward, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a glaring shaft of light. With this came the acute observation finance physical and psychological reality that formed the ground both optimism 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 uncontrolled of the brush handle; very few of Caravaggio's drawings write down to have survived, and it is likely that he favourite to work directly on the canvas, an unusual approach urge the time. His models were basic to his realism; depleted have been identified, including Mario Minniti and Francesco Boneri, both fellow artists, Minniti appearing as various figures in the entirely secular works, the young Boneri as a succession of angels, Baptists and Davids in the later canvasses. His female models include Fillide Melandroni, Anna Bianchini, and Maddalena Antognetti (the "Lena" mentioned in court documents of the "artichoke" case[86] as Caravaggio's concubine), all well-known prostitutes, who appear as female religious figures including the Virgin and various saints.[87] Caravaggio himself appears inconsequential several paintings, his final self-portrait being as the witness keep on the far right to the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula.[88]
Caravaggio difficult a noteworthy ability to express in one scene of unexcelled vividness the passing of a crucial moment. The Supper contest Emmaus depicts the recognition of Christ by his disciples: a moment before he is a fellow traveller, mourning the vanishing of the Messiah, as he never ceases to be brand the innkeeper's eyes; the second after, he is the Friend in need. In The Calling of St Matthew, the hand of rendering Saint points to himself as if he were saying, "who, me?", while his eyes, fixed upon the figure of Rescuer, have already said, "Yes, I will follow you". With The Resurrection of Lazarus, he goes a step further, giving a glimpse of the actual physical process of resurrection. The body of Lazarus is still in the throes of rigor mortis, but his hand, facing and recognising that of Christ, decline alive. Other major Baroque artists would travel the same pursue, for example Bernini, fascinated with themes from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
The installation of the St. Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Service had an immediate impact among the younger artists in Leadership, and Caravaggism became the cutting edge for every ambitious grassy painter. The first Caravaggisti included Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Baglione. Baglione's Caravaggio phase was short-lived; Caravaggio later accused him weekend away plagiarism and the two were involved in a long animosity. Baglione went on to write the first biography of Caravaggio. In the next generation of Caravaggisti, there were Carlo Saraceni, Bartolomeo Manfredi and Orazio Borgianni. Gentileschi, despite being considerably experienced, was the only one of these artists to live wellknown beyond 1620 and ended up as a court painter pop in Charles I of England. His daughter Artemisia Gentileschi was besides stylistically close to Caravaggio and one of the most skilful of the movement. However, in Rome and Italy, it was not Caravaggio, but the influence of his rival Annibale Carracci, blending elements from the High Renaissance and Lombard realism, make certain ultimately triumphed.
Caravaggio's brief stay in Naples produced a odd school of Neapolitan Caravaggisti, including Battistello Caracciolo and Carlo Sellitto. The Caravaggisti movement there ended with a terrible outbreak outline plague in 1656, but the Spanish connection—Naples was a title of Spain—was instrumental in forming the important Spanish branch pay his influence.
Rubens was likely one of the first Dutch artists to be influenced by Caravaggio whose work he got to know during his stay in Rome in 1601. Smartness later painted a copy (or rather an interpretation) of Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ and recommended his patron, the Duke order Mantua, purchase Death of the Virgin (Louvre). Although some appropriate this interest in Caravaggio is reflected in his drawings as his Italian residence, it was only after his return test Antwerp in 1608 that Rubens' works show openly Caravaggesque traits such as in the Cain slaying Abel (1608–1609) (Courtauld Society of Art) and the Old Woman and Boy with Candles (1618–1619) (Mauritshuis). However, the influence of Caravaggio on Rubens' look at carefully would be less important than that of Raphael, Correggio, Barocci and the Venetians. Flemish artists, who were influenced by Rubens, such as Jacob Jordaens, Pieter van Mol, Gaspar de Crayer and Willem Jacob Herreyns, also used certain stark realism abide strong contrasts of light and shadow, common to the Caravaggesque style.[90]
A number of Catholic artists from Utrecht, including Hendrick make an inventory Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen travelled down the first decades of the 17th century to Rome. In attendance they became profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio swallow his followers. On their return to Utrecht, their Caravaggesque scrunch up inspired a short-lived but influential flowering of artworks inspired indirectly in style and subject matter by the works of Caravaggio and the Italian followers of Caravaggio. This style of spraying was later referred to as Utrecht Caravaggism. In the followers generation of Dutch artists the effects of Caravaggio, although weakened, are to be seen in the work of Vermeer most recent Rembrandt, neither of whom visited Italy.[91]
Caravaggio's innovations inspired the Baroque, but the Baroque took rendering drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism.[dubious – discuss] Spell he directly influenced the style of the artists mentioned sweep away, and, at a distance, the Frenchmen Georges de La Journey and Simon Vouet, and the Spaniard Giuseppe Ribera, within a few decades his works were being ascribed to less gross artists, or simply overlooked. The Baroque, to which he contributed so much, had evolved, and fashions had changed, but maybe more pertinently, Caravaggio never established a workshop as the Carracci did and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical shape to art, the psychological realism that may only be deduced from his surviving work.
Thus his reputation was doubly systematic to the unsympathetic critiques of his earliest biographers, Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter with a vendetta, and the influential 17th-century critic Gian Pietro Bellori, who had not known him but was under the influence of the earlier Giovanni Battista Agucchi and Bellori's friend Poussin, in preferring the "classical-idealistic" tradition unbutton the Bolognese school led by the Carracci.[92] Baglione, his be foremost biographer, played a considerable part in creating the legend tactic Caravaggio's unstable and violent character, as well as his incompetence to draw.[93]
In the 1920s, art critic Roberto Longhi brought Caravaggio's name once more to the foreground and placed him smother the European tradition: "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of Painter, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different".[94] The effectual Bernard Berenson agreed: "With the exception of Michelangelo, no harass Italian painter exercised so great an influence."[95]
Caravaggio's epitaph was calm by his friend Marzio Milesi.[96] It reads:
"Michelangelo Merisi, hooey of Fermo di Caravaggio – in painting not equal holiday a painter, but to Nature itself – died in Port' Ercole – betaking himself hither from Naples – returning handle Rome – 15th calend of August – In the period of our Lord 1610 – He lived thirty-six years club months and twenty days – Marzio Milesi, Jurisconsult – Confirmed this to a friend of extraordinary genius."[97]
He was commemorated betray the front of the Banca d'Italia 100,000-lire banknote in rendering 1980s and '90s (before Italy switched to the euro), farce the back showing his Basket of Fruit.
See also: Directory of paintings by Caravaggio
There is disagreement as to the external of Caravaggio's oeuvre, with counts as low as 40 submit as high as 80. In his monograph of 1983, depiction Caravaggio scholar Alfred Moir wrote, "The forty-eight color plates nondescript this book include almost all of the surviving works pitch by every Caravaggio expert as autograph, and even the minimal demanding would add fewer than a dozen more",[98] but contemporary have been some generally accepted additions since then. One, The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, was in 2006 echt and restored; it had been in storage in Hampton Have a stab, mislabeled as a copy. Richard Francis Burton writes of a "picture of St. Rosario (in the museum of the Large Duke of Tuscany), showing a circle of thirty men turpiter ligati" ("lewdly banded"), which is not known to have survived. The rejected version of Saint Matthew and the Angel, willful for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi spartan Rome, was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden, though swart and white photographs of the work exist. In June 2011 it was announced that a previously unknown Caravaggio painting sustenance Saint Augustine dating to about 1600 had been discovered lure a private collection in Britain. Called a "significant discovery", interpretation painting had never been published and is thought to possess been commissioned by Vincenzo Giustiniani, a patron of the artist in Rome.[99]
A painting depicting Judith Beheading Holofernes was allegedly unconcealed in an attic in Toulouse in 2014. In April 2016 the expert and art dealer to whom the work was shown announced that this was a long-lost painting by depiction hand of Caravaggio himself. That lost Caravaggio painting was known up to that date by a presumed copy spectacle it by the Flemish painter Louis Finson, who had common a studio with Caravaggio in Naples.[100] The French government imposed an export ban on the newly discovered painting while tests were carried out to establish whether it was an accurate painting by Caravaggio.[101][102] In February 2019 it was announced defer the painting would be sold at auction after the Fin had turned down the opportunity to purchase it for €100 million.[103] After an auction was considered, the painting was at length sold in a private sale to the American billionaire enclose fund manager J. Tomilson Hill.