Michelangelo da Caravaggio

After staying in Milan for his apprenticeship, Michelangelo da Caravaggio arrived in Rome in 1592. There he started to paint with both realism and psychological analysis of the sitters. Caravaggio was as temperamental in his painting as in his wild life. As he also responded to prestigious Church commissions, his dramatic style and his realism were seen as unacceptable. Chiaroscuro had existed well before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique definitive, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light. His influence was immense, firstly through those who were more or less directly his disciples. Famous during his lifetime, Caravaggio had a great influence upon Baroque art. The Genoese and Neapolitan Schools derived lessons from him, and the great movement of Spanish painting in the seventeenth century was connected with these schools. In the following generations the best endowed painters oscillated between the lessons of Caravaggio and the Carracci. It took a mid-twentieth century art show in Milan to rediscover this Italian artist, emblematic of the Baroque period, who lived during the second half of the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries. Michelangelo Merisi was born to a family of modest means in 1571 near Milan. At the age of thirteen, he became an apprentice of the painter Simone Peterzano, who taught him artistic techniques and the use of colours. But he was attracted by Rome, with its fast pace of life and its loose morals. In 1597, he became the protégé to a noble cardinal who assisted him in securing important orders, such It was not until the middle of the 20th century that Caravaggio (15711610), an Italian painter long considered controversial, was rediscovered. An advocate of Realism, this artist of the CounterReformation challenged the establishment and returned a sense of humanity to images of the saints. The sensuality he gave them went beyond veneration to create an ambiguous eroticism, which incurred the wrath of the Church. Paradoxical and violent, this painter of shadows illustrated with solemnity his debauched lifestyle and dissolute morals. With his invention of chiaroscuro, he made his bloodsoaked i