Tenebrism, live models, and a murder that forced exile
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) pinned his figures in harsh shafts of light against deep shadow, painted live models straight onto canvas, and spent his last years on the run after killing Ranuccio Tomassoni in a brawl and being sentenced to death for murder.
He was born in Milan in 1571, not in the town of Caravaggio as once assumed, though his father worked for the marquess of Caravaggio as a household administrator. Plague drove the family to that town, about 35 km east of Milan, in 1576, and the next year his father and grandfather died there on the same day. His mother raised five children in poverty and died in 1584, the year he began a four-year apprenticeship with Simone Peterzano, a painter billed as a pupil of Titian.
In 1592, after quarrels and the wounding of a police officer, he left for Rome broke and without a fixed address. He painted three heads a day for a minor painter, then flowers and fruit in the busy workshop of Giuseppe Cesari, the pope’s favourite artist, until an illness and a row ended that job. New friends mattered: Prospero Orsi introduced him to collectors, Onorio Longhi to street fights, and the young Sicilian Mario Minniti modelled for him.
The Fortune Teller, in which a girl slips a ring off a youth’s finger while reading his palm, and The Cardsharps, which survives in more than 50 copies, were bought by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. Caravaggio worked without preparatory drawings, showing faces with their flaws, and set scenes in tenebrism, a sharp jump from light to dark. The Calling and Martyrdom of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel, delivered in 1600, caused a sensation and brought steady commissions.
After the killing he rebuilt his name in Naples, then went to Malta and Sicily in 1607 while seeking a papal pardon. Back in Naples in 1609 he was attacked and his face disfigured, and he died in July 1610. Later forgotten, he was rediscovered in the 20th century, when André Berne-Joffroy declared that modern painting starts with him; Rubens, Velázquez and Rembrandt all show his influence.
Source: Caravaggio
