michelangelo merisi da caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 - 1610) was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His intensely emotional realism and dramatic use of lighting had a formative influence on the Baroque school of painting.

Trained in Milan under a master who had himself trained under Titian, Caravaggio moved to Rome in his early 20s. Huge new churches and palazzi were being built in Rome in the decades of the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, and paintings were needed to fill them. The Counter-Reformation Church searched for authentic 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 Tenebrism, the shift from light to dark with little intermediate value. He burst upon the Rome art scen…more