AMERIGHI DA CARAVAGGIO, OBSERVATING HUMAN STATE

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the Italian painter who died on a day like today in 1610.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (also Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi da Caravaggio; 29 September 1571-18 July 1610), known mononymously as Caravaggio, was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of his life, he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily until his death. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.

Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He made the technique a dominant stylistic element, transfixing subjects in bright shafts of light and darkening shadows.

Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes, often featuring violent struggles, torture, and death. He worked rapidly with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and work directly onto the canvas. His inspiring effect on the new Baroque style that emerged from Mannerism was profound. His influence can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Peter Paul Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Rembrandt. Artists heavily under his influence were called the Caravaggisti or Caravagesques, as well as tenebrists or tenebrosi (shadowists).

Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan before moving to Rome when he was in his twenties. He developed a considerable name as an artist and as a violent, touchy and provocative man. He killed Ranuccio Tommasoni in a brawl, which led to a death sentence for murder and forced him to flee to Naples. There he again established himself as one of the most prominent Italian painters of his generation. He travelled to Malta and on to Sicily in 1607 and pursued a papal pardon for his sentence. In 1609, he returned to Naples, where he was involved in a violent clash; his face was disfigured, and rumours of his death circulated. Questions about his mental state arose from his erratic and bizarre behavior. He died in 1610 under uncertain circumstances while on his way from Naples to Rome. Reports stated that he died of a fever, but suggestions have been made that he was murdered or that he died of lead poisoning.

Caravaggio's innovations inspired Baroque painting, but the latter incorporated the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism. The style evolved and fashions changed, and Caravaggio fell out of favour. 

In the 20th century, interest in his work revived, and his importance to the development of Western art was reevaluated. The 20th-century art historian André Berne-Joffroy stated: What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.

More information: Caravaggio

Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi or Amerighi) was born in Milan, where his father, Fermo (Fermo Merixio), was a household administrator and architect-decorator to the marquess of Caravaggio, a town 35 km to the east of Milan and south of Bergamo.

Caravaggio led a tumultuous life. He was notorious for brawling, even in a time and place when such behavior was commonplace, and the transcripts of his police records and trial proceedings fill many pages.

Since the 1970s art scholars and historians have debated the inferences of homoeroticism in Caravaggio's works as a way to better understand the man.

Caravaggio never married and had no known children, and Howard Hibbard observed the absence of erotic female figures in the artist's oeuvre: In his entire career he did not paint a single female nude, and the cabinet-pieces from the Del Monte period are replete with full-lipped, languorous boys ... who seem to solicit the onlooker with their offers of fruit, wine, flowers -and themselves suggesting an erotic interest in the male form.

Caravaggio put the oscuro (shadows) into chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro was practised long before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique a dominant stylistic element, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light.

Caravaggio's work has been widely influential in late-20th-century American gay culture, with frequent references to male sexual imagery in paintings such as The Musicians and Amor Victorious.

More information: The Art Story

All works, no matter what or by whom painted,
are nothing but bagatelles and childish trifles...
unless they are made and painted from life,
and there can be nothing...
better than to follow nature.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio