His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both
physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative
influence on the Baroque school of painting.
Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan under a master who had himself trained
under Titian. In his early twenties Caravaggio moved to Rome where, during the
late 16th and early 17th centuries, many huge new churches and palazzi were
being built and paintings were needed to fill them. During the
Counter-Reformation the Roman Catholic Church searched for religious art with
which to counter the threat of Protestantism, and for this task the artificial
conventions of Mannerism, which had ruled art for almost a century, no longer
seemed adequate. Caravaggio's novelty was a radical naturalism which combined
close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of chiaroscuro
that came to be known as Tenebrism, the shift from light to dark with little
intermediate value. He burst upon the Rome art scene in 1600 with the success of
his first public commissions, the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and Calling of
Saint Matthew. Thereafter he never lacked for commissions or patrons, yet he
handled his success atrociously. An early published notice on him, dating from
1604 and describing his lifestyle three years previously, tells how "after a
fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his
side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to
engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with
him."[2] In 1606 he killed a young man in a brawl and fled from Rome with a
price on his head. In Malta in 1608 he was involved in another brawl, and yet
another in Naples in 1609, possibly a deliberate attempt on his life by
unidentified enemies. By the next year, after a relatively brief career, he was
dead.
Famous (and notorious) while he lived, Caravaggio was forgotten almost
immediately after his death, and it was only in the 20th century that his
importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. Despite this, his
influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from the ruins of
Mannerism, was profound. It can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of
Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Bernini, and Rembrandt, and artists in the following
generation heavily under his influence were called the "Caravaggisti" or "Caravagesques",
as well as Tenebrists or "Tenebrosi" ("shadowists"). Andre Berne-Joffroy, Paul
Valéry's secretary, said of him: "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is,
quite simply, modern painting."
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