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Caravaggioborn: Caravaggio or Milan, Lombardy [now Italy]; 29 September 1571
died: Port'Ercole, Tuscany [now Italy]; 18 July 1610
alt spelling: Caravggio
Caravaggio was the bastard son of Fermo Merisi, steward and architect for Francesco Sforzao, the Marquis of Caravaggio. Fermo died in 1577, when Caravaggio was 11. In the spring of 1584, the Marquis apprenticed him for four years to the painter Simone Peterzano in Milan. He was in Lombardy at least until May of 1592 when the final dispensation of Fermo's estate was held.
By autumn of 1592 the twenty-one year old Caravaggio was in Rome, with his painterly skills and some money from his father's estate, to seek adventure and fortune. He lived in the household of Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci and settled into life by frequenting the Campo Marzio, a decaying neighborhood of art dealers, inns, eating houses, temporary shelters and prostitutes. This area suited both his circumstances and his temperament. He had little money. His inclinations were always toward young boys, pugilism, anarchy, and artistic reform. The Campo Marzio fitted him perfectly.
Caravaggio arrived at about the same time Clement VIII started his reign as pope and began to encourage the arts in Rome. Money began to flow to prepare Rome for the Jubilee year of 1600 by refurbishing and decorating the churches. The Cardinals of this period were patrons of the arts and ran courts worthy of kings. Rome was filled with artists including Annibale Carracci who arrived in 1594 to work for Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. There was also a new artistic style in the air, to which both Caravaggio and Carracci would be major contributors.
The first years in Rome Caravaggio did hack work for other painters, never staying long on any one job. He worked for Lorenzo Siciliano, Antiveduto Gramatica and then Cavaliere d'Arpino, for whom he painted flowers and fruit. About 1595 he began sell his own pictures using a dealer in the Campo Marzio.
Caravaggio's pictures initially did not sell well. Perhaps the style he used was too realistic. A 20th Century person might call it photo-realist. He always painted from live models. If the models were not good actors, then their expressions of self-awarness show in the finished picture.
David Hockney conjectures that this extreme realism can be explained if Caravaggio painted based on images projected on to his canvas by a mirror or a lens. There is some indirect evidence for this method on the canvas itself. X-ray examination reveals no charcoal sketches of Caravaggio's extraordinary accurate pictures, but there are indentations in the canvas at key points that might have been used to reposition the model so that the projection matched the developing picture. No other explanation for these indentation has been offered, and the reason for their being there has been considered a mystery since they were first detected.
His personality showed in his choice of models and subject matter: young adolescent and preadolescent street urchins.
alt spellings: caravagio caravage carravagio ceravaggio ceravagio
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Boy with a Basket of Fruit |
Boy Peeling Fruit |
Boy Bitten by a Lizard |
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The Musicians |
Concert |
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Cardsharps Taking a Young Nobleman |
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Cardinal Francesco del Monte, a prelate of great influence in the papal court, purchased several of Caravaggio's paintings through a dealer. Soon thereafter Caravaggio came under the protection of Del Monte and was invited to live in the cardinal's palace, Palazzo Madama. He had room enough to work on larger subjects and the means to do it. He lived there until about the end of 1600. The Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani also admired Caravaggio. Both bought many Caravaggio paintings, and both he and del Monte had a variant of the The Lute Player. Both pictures are really of the same boy, Pedro Montoya, a Spanish castrato who lived in del Monte palace; so the picture should really be named The Singer.
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Gypsy Fortune Teller |
The Lute Player |
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Self as Bacchus |
detail |
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Sick Bacchus |
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Caravaggio, though in his mid-twenties, was clearly in the top rank of painters. There were plenty of orders for his pictures, both from individuals and from the church. Caravaggio's Roman patrons included some of the greatest names in art collecting in the period including the Barberini, Borghese, Costa, Massimi and Mattei families. Around this time, Caravaggio joined the Accademia di San Luca, the artists guild. He had become famous enough, and outspoken enough, to be embroiled in a libel suit brought against him by the artist Giovanni Baglione.
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Still Life |
Italian painters used fruit and leaves as framing and background. In a major departure from tradition this picture moves the basket, leaves, and fruit to the center of attention. Note that in his picture of 1593: Boy with a Basket of Fruit [the first picture on this web page], the boy and the still life share equal prominence. Still life pictures had been common in the Northern countries for many years, and Italian composite pictures by Arcimboldo and Francesco Zucci existed, but this seems to be the first real still life in Italian painting.
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Amor Victorious |
Narcissus |
These early photo-realist works by Caravaggio exhibited a refreshing change in style to some viewers, but to others it was offensive -- anti-art.
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Judith Beheading Holofernes |
Medusa |
The Beheading of Holofernes was the first of Caravaggio's dramatic, violent, narrative pictures which would eventually dominate his work.
Through Del Monte in 1597 Caravaggio obtained the commission
for the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei
Francesi in Rome. This established him, at the age of 24, as an important
painter. The commission called for three large paintings showing scenes from
the saint's life: St. Matthew and the Angel, The Calling of St.
Matthew and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. In all three pictures
Caravaggio used his dramatic contemporary realism instead of the traditional
idealized images that were usually used to show saints. These works are novel
not only because peasants are used as models but also the lighting and positioning
of the models creates a highly dramatic picture. The
first version of St. Matthew inspired by the Angel 
was in the Kaiser-Frederic Museum, Berlin, Germany, which was bombed by the
allies in World War II and it became collateral ecclesiastical damage. This
was the painting that was to go over the altar in the Contarelli Chapel; it
offended the canons of San Luigi dei Francesi so much, that it had to be replaced
by Caravaggio. The second version of the picture is shown below.
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The Calling |
St. Matthew Inspired |
The Martyrdom |
1599-1600
Contarelli Chapel
San Luigi dei Francesi
Rome, Italy
These three paintings for the Contarelli Chapel caused a scandal in Rome. But Caravaggio saw this approach as a way to success; thus it also caused a radical change in his artistic style. In the future almost all his paintings were of traditional religious subjects, to which, he gave a whole new lower class iconography and thus a common-man interpretation. He also often chose violent, dramatic, or macabre subjects, which seemed to also suite the pugilistic part of his character. His interest in young boys remained; he used them as models for angles and St. John the Baptist.
Dramatic pictures in a photo-realist style fascinated and sometimes repelled other artists, men of learning, and prelates. But the negative reactions generally reflected a self-protective reaction by other artists, or the conservative mindset of the traditional clergy; a conservatism shared by much of the general populace. Carracci hated the realism of the Caravaggio style while appreciating its technical precision.
The more brutal aspects of Caravaggio's paintings were often condemned mostly because Caravaggio's common people bear no relation to the graceful idealized models popular in much Mannerist art, and not because of the violence itself. Caravaggio painted plain working men, prostitutes, and young males off the streets; those are characters that dignified people should not be associated with, but they are people Caravaggio felt close to.
In late 1600, Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio received a join commission from Tiberio Cerasi to decorate his chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. It is clear that he had decided to make the decoration of his chapel into a competition between the two greatest artists of the day. Carracci was to do the frescos and the central painting of the Assumption of the Virgin; Caravaggio was to do the two side paintings: The Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion of St Paul.
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The Crucifixion |
The Cerasi Chapel |
The Conversion |
1600-01
Cerasi Chapel
Santa Maria del Popolo
Rome, Italy
Another version of the conversion of St. Paul exists:
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Conversion of St. Paul |
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Supper at Emmaus |
Supper at Emmaus |
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St. Francis in Meditation |
Stigmatization of St. Francis |
Some pictures produced in this period, when he was at the height of his powers are shown below. The last two paintings provoked violent reactions. The Madonna di Loreto, for the Church of San Agostino, became a controversy because of the "dirty feet and torn, filthy cap" of the two old people kneeling in the foreground. The most famous dirty feet in art history. The Death of the Virgin was refused by the Carmelites because of the indignity of the Virgin's plebeian features, bared legs, and swollen belly. Later, in April 1607, on the advice of Peter Paul Rubens, the picture was bought by the Duke of Mantua and was displayed for a week to the Rome artistic community before it left for Mantua.
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Madonna di Loreto |
Death of the Virgin |
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The Taking of Christ |
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Christ Crowned with Thorns |
The Entombment of Christ |
John the Baptist remained a favorite subject.
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St John the Baptist |
St John the Baptist |
St. John the Baptist |
By February 1606 Caravaggio was back in Rome. On 29 May 1606 during a brawl about a wager over a game of tennis, Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni. Caravaggio was himself wounded in the fight. He fled Rome and found refuge in the nearby Colonna estates, Colonna was a relative of the Marquis of Caravaggio. He then drifted south hiding in other places until he eventually reached Naples, in February 1607. Hiding was difficult for a famous painter, and he could never stay long in any one place. His only hope was a pardon from the Pope. He had contacts enough to accomplish that, but it would take time.
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David with Head of Goliath |
At the end of 1607, 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 enclosed his subjects, is replaced by a high wall. One explanation for this dramatic change in style might be that Caravaggio had no place to set up his optical equipment so he had to draw from life, which may not have been his favorite way of working.
On July 14, 1608, Caravaggio was received into the Order of Malta as a "Knight of Justice". Soon afterward, probably because word of his crime had reached Malta, he was expelled from the order and imprisoned. He escaped from prison, perhaps with the connivance of Alof de Winnacourt, his protector in Malta, and sponsor for his entry into the Order of Malta.
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Alof de Wignacourt |
Alof de Wignacourt |
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The Seven Acts of Mercy
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John the Baptist |
Beheading of |
Salome with the Head of
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Caravaggio took refuge in Sicily, landing at Syracuse in October 1608. He undoubtedly feared pursuit. Yet his fame accompanied him; at Syracuse he painted 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 the Adoration with St. Francis and St. Lawrence for the Oratorio di San Lorenzo. The works created during Caravaggio's flight were painted under the most adverse of circumstances.
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Flagellation of Christ |
Burial of St Lucy |
The Raising |
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The Annunciation
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Adoration of |
His flight could end only with imprisonment or the pope's clemency. Caravaggio may have known that a pardon was close when he again moved north to Naples in October 1609. At the door of an inn in Naples, he became involved in another brawl. He was wounded so badly that rumors surfaced in Rome that he was dead. After a recovery of nine months he sailed in July 1610 from Naples to Rome. His health was still weak. He became involved in another fight and was arrested again during a port-of-call at Palo. Released a day later, he discovered that the boat had already sailed, taking his belongings. Trying to overtake the boat, he arrived at Port'Ercole exhausted; he died a few days later. News of his pardon arrived from the Vatican a few days after he died.
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