Michelangelo Merisi (or Amerighi) da Caravaggio (Italian
pronunciation: [karaˈvaddʒo]; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian
artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1592 (1595) and 1610.
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 Baroque painting.
Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan under Simone
Peterzano who had himself trained under Titian. In his twenties Caravaggio
moved to Rome where, during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, many huge
new churches and palazzos 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 production
for some time after the Renaissance, no longer seemed adequate.
Caravaggio's novelty was a radical naturalism that combined
close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of
chiaroscuro. This 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 commissions or patrons,
yet he handled his success poorly. He was jailed on several occasions,
vandalized his own apartment, and ultimately had a death warrant issued for him
by the Pope.
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." In 1606 he killed a young man in a brawl and fled from Rome
with a price on his head. He was involved in a brawl in Malta in 1608, and
another in Naples in 1609, possibly a deliberate attempt on his life by
unidentified enemies. This encounter left him severely injured. A year later,
at the age of 38, he died under mysterious circumstances in Porto Ercole,
reportedly from a fever while on his way to Rome to receive a pardon.
Famous 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"). Art historian Andre Berne-Joffroy said of him:
"What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting
Early life (1571–1592)
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi or Amerighi) was born in
Milan where his father, Fermo (Fermo Merixio), was a household administrator
and architect-decorator to the Marchese of Caravaggio, a town not far from the
city of Bergamo. His mother, Lucia Aratori (Lutia de Oratoribus), came from a
propertied family of the same district. In 1576 the family moved to Caravaggio
(Caravaggius) to escape a plague which ravaged Milan, and Caravaggio's father
died there in 1577. It is assumed that the artist grew up in Caravaggio, but
his family kept up connections with the Sforzas and with the powerful Colonna
family, who were allied by marriage with the Sforzas and destined to play a
major role later in Caravaggio's life.
Caravaggio's mother died in 1584, the same year he began his
four-year apprenticeship to the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, described in
the contract of apprenticeship as a pupil of Titian. Caravaggio appears to have
stayed in the Milan-Caravaggio area after his apprenticeship ended, but it is
possible that he visited Venice and saw the works of Giorgione, whom Federico
Zuccari later accused him of imitating, and Titian. He would also have become
familiar with the art treasures of Milan, including Leonardo da Vinci's Last
Supper, and with the regional Lombard art, a style which valued simplicity and
attention to naturalistic detail and was closer to the naturalism of Germany
than to the stylised formality and grandeur of Roman Mannerism
Rome (1592/95–1600)
Caravaggio left Milan for Rome in 1592, in flight after
"certain quarrels" and the wounding of a police officer. He arrived
in Rome "naked and extremely needy ... without fixed address and without
provision ... short of money." A few months later he was performing
hack-work for the highly successful Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Clement VIII's
favourite artist, "painting flowers and fruit" in his factory-like
workshop. Known works from this period include a small Boy Peeling a Fruit (his
earliest known painting), a Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and the Young Sick
Bacchus, supposedly a self-portrait done during convalescence from a serious
illness that ended his employment with Cesari. All three demonstrate the
physical particularity for which Caravaggio was to become renowned: the
fruit-basket-boy's produce has been analysed by a professor of horticulture,
who was able to identify individual cultivars right down to "... a large
fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose
(Glomerella cingulata)."
Caravaggio left Cesari, determined to make his own way. At
this point he forged some extremely important friendships, with the painter
Prospero Orsi, the architect Onorio Longhi, and the sixteen-year-old Sicilian
artist Mario Minniti. Orsi, established in the profession, introduced him to
influential collectors; Longhi, more balefully, introduced him to the world of
Roman street-brawls; and Minniti served as a model and, years later, would be
instrumental in helping Caravaggio to important commissions in Sicily.
The Fortune Teller, his first composition with more than one
figure, shows Mario being cheated by a gypsy girl. The theme was quite new for
Rome, and proved immensely influential over the next century and beyond. This,
however, was in the future: at the time, Caravaggio sold it for practically
nothing. The Cardsharps — showing another naïve youth of privilege falling the
victim of card cheats — is even more psychologically complex, and perhaps
Caravaggio's first true masterpiece. Like the Fortune Teller, it was immensely
popular, and over 50 copies survive. More importantly, it attracted the
patronage of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, one of the leading
connoisseurs in Rome. For Del Monte and his wealthy art-loving circle,
Caravaggio executed a number of intimate chamber-pieces — The Musicians, The
Lute Player, a tipsy Bacchus, an allegorical but realistic Boy Bitten by a
Lizard — featuring Minniti and other adolescent models.
The realism returned with Caravaggio's first paintings on
religious themes, and the emergence of remarkable spirituality. The first of
these was the Penitent Magdalene, showing Mary Magdalene at the moment when she
has turned from her life as a courtesan and sits weeping on the floor, her
jewels scattered around her. "It seemed not a religious painting at all
... a girl sitting on a low wooden stool drying her hair ... Where was the
repentance ... suffering ... promise of salvation"
It was understated, in the Lombard manner, not histrionic in
the Roman manner of the time. It was followed by others in the same style:
Saint Catherine; Martha and Mary Magdalene; Judith Beheading Holofernes; a
Sacrifice of Isaac; a Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy; and a Rest on the
Flight into Egypt. The works, while viewed by a comparatively limited circle,
increased Caravaggio's fame with both connoisseurs and his fellow artists. But
a true reputation would depend on public commissions, and for these it was
necessary to look to the Church.
Already evident was the intense realism or naturalism for
which Caravaggio is now famous. He preferred to paint his subjects as the eye
sees them, with all their natural flaws and defects instead of as idealised
creations. This allowed a full display of Caravaggio's virtuosic talents. This
shift from accepted standard practice and the classical idealism of
Michelangelo was very controversial at the time. Not only was his realism a
noteworthy feature of his paintings during this period, he turned away from the
lengthy preparations traditional in central Italy at the time. Instead, he
preferred the Venetian practice of working in oils directly from the subject –
half-length figures and still life. One of the characteristic paintings by
Caravaggio at this time which gives a good demonstration of his virtuoso talent
was his work Supper at Emmaus from c.1600–1601.
"Most famous painter in Rome" (1600–1606)
In 1599, presumably through the influence of Del Monte,
Caravaggio was contracted to decorate the Contarelli Chapel in the church of
San Luigi dei Francesi. The two works making up the commission, the Martyrdom
of Saint Matthew and Calling of Saint Matthew, delivered in 1600, were an
immediate sensation. Caravaggio's tenebrism (a heightened chiaroscuro) brought
high drama to his subjects, while his acutely observed realism brought a new
level of emotional intensity. Opinion among Caravaggio's artist peers was
polarized. Some denounced him for various perceived failings, notably his
insistence on painting from life, without drawings, but for the most part he
was hailed as a great artistic visionary: "The painters then in Rome were
greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around
him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as
miracles."
Caravaggio went on to secure a string of prestigious
commissions for religious works featuring violent struggles, grotesque
decapitations, torture and death, most notable and most technically masterful
among them The Taking of Christ of circa 1602 for the Mattei Family, recently
rediscovered in Ireland after two centuries. For the most part each new
painting increased his fame, but a few were rejected by the various bodies for
whom they were intended, at least in their original forms, and had to be
re-painted or find new buyers. The essence of the problem was that while
Caravaggio's dramatic intensity was appreciated, his realism was seen by some
as unacceptably vulgar.
His first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel, featured
the saint as a bald peasant with dirty legs attended by a lightly clad
over-familiar boy-angel, was rejected and a second version had to be painted as
The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. Similarly, The Conversion of Saint Paul was
rejected, and while another version of the same subject, the Conversion on the
Way to Damascus, was accepted, it featured the saint's horse's haunches far
more prominently than the saint himself, prompting this exchange between the
artist and an exasperated official of Santa Maria del Popolo: "Why have
you put a horse in the middle, and Saint Paul on the ground"
"Because!" "Is the horse God" "No, but he stands in God's
light!"
Other works included Entombment, the Madonna di Loreto
(Madonna of the Pilgrims), the Grooms' Madonna, and the Death of the Virgin.
The history of these last two paintings illustrates the reception given to some
of Caravaggio's art, and the times in which he lived. The Grooms' Madonna, also
known as Madonna dei palafrenieri, painted for a small altar in Saint Peter's
Basilica in Rome, remained there for just two days, and was then taken off. A
cardinal's secretary wrote: "In this painting there are but vulgarity,
sacrilege, impiousness and disgust...One would say it is a work made by a
painter that can paint well, but of a dark spirit, and who has been for a lot
of time far from God, from His adoration, and from any good thought..."
The Death of the Virgin, then, commissioned in 1601 by a wealthy jurist for his
private chapel in the new Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala, was
rejected by the Carmelites in 1606. Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini
records that it was rejected because Caravaggio had used a well-known
prostitute as his model for the Virgin.
Giovanni Baglione, another contemporary, tells us it was due
to Mary's bare legs —a matter of decorum in either case. Caravaggio scholar
John Gash suggests that the problem for the Carmelites may have been
theological rather than aesthetic, in that Caravaggio's version fails to assert
the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary, the idea that the Mother of God did not
die in any ordinary sense but was assumed into Heaven. The replacement
altarpiece commissioned (from one of Caravaggio's most able followers, Carlo
Saraceni), showed the Virgin not dead, as Caravaggio had painted her, but
seated and dying; and even this was rejected, and replaced with a work which
showed the Virgin not dying, but ascending into Heaven with choirs of angels.
In any case, the rejection did not mean that Caravaggio or his paintings were
out of favour. The Death of the Virgin was no sooner taken out of the church
than it was purchased by the Duke of Mantua, on the advice of Rubens, and later
acquired by Charles I of England before entering the French royal collection in
1671.
One secular piece from these years is Amor Victorious,
painted in 1602 for Vincenzo Giustiniani, a member of Del Monte's circle. The
model was named in a memoir of the early 17th century as "Cecco", the
diminutive for Francesco. He is possibly Francesco Boneri, identified with an
artist active in the period 1610–1625 and known as Cecco del Caravaggio
('Caravaggio's Cecco'), carrying a bow and arrows and trampling symbols of the
warlike and peaceful arts and sciences underfoot. He is unclothed, and it is
difficult to accept this grinning urchin as the Roman god Cupid – as difficult
as it was to accept Caravaggio's other semi-clad adolescents as the various
angels he painted in his canvases, wearing much the same stage-prop wings. The
point, however, is the intense yet ambiguous reality of the work: it is
simultaneously Cupid and Cecco, as Caravaggio's Virgins were simultaneously the
Mother of Christ and the Roman courtesans who modeled for them.
Exile and death (1606–1610)
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 several pages. On
29 May 1606, he killed, possibly unintentionally, a young man named Ranuccio
Tomassoni from Terni (Umbria). The circumstances of the brawl and the death of
Ranuccio Tomassoni remain mysterious. Several contemporary avvisi referred to a
quarrel over a gambling debt and a tennis game, and this explanation has become
established in the popular imagination. But recent scholarship has made it
clear that more was involved. Good modern accounts are to be found in Peter
Robb's "M" and Helen Langdon's "Caravaggio: A Life". An
interesting theory relating the death to Renaissance notions of honour and
symbolic wounding has been advanced by art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon.
Previously his high-placed patrons had protected him from the consequences of
his escapades, but this time they could do nothing. Caravaggio, outlawed, fled
to Naples. There, outside the jurisdiction of the Roman authorities and
protected by the Colonna family, the most famous painter in Rome became the
most famous in Naples. His connections with the Colonnas led to a stream of
important church commissions, including the Madonna of the Rosary, and The
Seven Works of Mercy.
Despite his success in Naples, after only a few months in
the city Caravaggio left for Malta, the headquarters of the Knights of Malta,
presumably hoping that the patronage of Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the
Knights, could help him secure a pardon for Tomassoni's death. De Wignacourt
proved so impressed at having the famous artist as official painter to the
Order that he inducted him as a knight, and the early biographer Bellori
records that the artist was well pleased with his success. Major works from his
Malta period include a huge Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (the only
painting to which he put his signature) and a Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt
and his Page, as well as portraits of other leading knights. Yet by late August
1608 he was arrested and imprisoned. The circumstances surrounding this abrupt
change of fortune have long been a matter of speculation, but recent
investigation has revealed it to have been the result of yet another brawl,
during which the door of a house was battered down and a knight seriously
wounded. He was imprisoned by the knights and managed to escape. By December he
had been expelled from the Order "as a foul and rotten member."
Caravaggio made his way to Sicily where he met his old
friend Mario Minniti, who was now married and living in Syracuse. Together they
set off on what amounted to a triumphal tour from Syracuse to Messina and,
maybe, on to the island capital, Palermo. In Syracuse and Messina Caravaggio
continued to win prestigious and well-paid commissions. Among other works from
this period are Burial of St. Lucy, The Raising of Lazarus, and Adoration of
the Shepherds. His style continued to evolve, showing now friezes of figures
isolated against vast empty backgrounds. "His great Sicilian altarpieces
isolate their shadowy, pitifully poor figures in vast areas of darkness; they
suggest the desperate fears and frailty of man, and at the same time convey,
with a new yet desolate tenderness, the beauty of humility and of the meek, who
shall inherit the earth." Contemporary reports depict a man whose
behaviour was becoming increasingly bizarre, sleeping fully armed and in his
clothes, ripping up a painting at a slight word of criticism, mocking the local
painters.
After only nine months in Sicily, Caravaggio returned to
Naples. According to his earliest biographer he was being pursued by enemies
while in Sicily and felt it safest to place himself under the protection of the
Colonnas until he could secure his pardon from the pope (now Paul V) and return
to Rome. In Naples he painted The Denial of Saint Peter, a final John the
Baptist (Borghese), and his last picture, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. His
style continued to evolve — Saint Ursula is caught in a moment of highest
action and drama, as the arrow fired by the king of the Huns strikes her in the
breast, unlike earlier paintings which had all the immobility of the posed
models. The brushwork was much freer and more impressionistic.
In Naples an attempt was made on his life, by persons
unknown. At first it was reported in Rome that the "famous artist"
Caravaggio was dead, but then it was learned that he was alive, but seriously
disfigured in the face. He painted a Salome with the Head of John the Baptist
(Madrid), showing his own head on a platter, and sent it to de Wignacourt as a
plea for forgiveness. Perhaps at this time he painted also a David with the
Head of Goliath, showing the young David with a strangely sorrowful expression
gazing on the severed head of the giant, which is again Caravaggio's. This
painting he may have sent to his patron the unscrupulous art-loving Cardinal
Scipione Borghese, nephew of the pope, who had the power to grant or withhold
pardons.
In the summer of 1610 he took a boat northwards to receive
the pardon, which seemed imminent thanks to his powerful Roman friends. With him
were three last paintings, gifts for Cardinal Scipione. What happened next is
the subject of much confusion and conjecture. The bare facts are that on 28
July an anonymous avviso (private newsletter) from Rome to the ducal court of
Urbino reported that Caravaggio was dead. Three days later another avviso said
that he had died of fever on his way from Naples to Rome. A poet friend of the
artist later gave 18 July as the date of death, and a recent researcher claims
to have discovered a death notice showing that the artist died on that day of a
fever in Porto Ercole, near Grosseto in Tuscany. Human remains found in a
church in Porto Ercole in 2010 are believed to almost certainly belong to
Caravaggio. The findings come after a year-long investigation using DNA, carbon
dating and other analyses.
Some scholars argue that Caravaggio was murdered by the same
"enemies" that had been pursuing him since he fled Malta, possibly
Wignacourt and/or factions in the Order of St. John. Caravaggio might have died
of lead poisoning. Bones with high lead levels were recently found in a grave
likely to be Caravaggio's. Paints used at the time contained high amounts of
lead salts. Caravaggio is known to have indulged in violent behavior, as caused
by lead poisoning.
The birth of Baroque
Caravaggio "put the oscuro (shadows) into
chiaroscuro." Chiaroscuro was practiced 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.
With this came the acute observation of physical and psychological reality
which formed the ground both for his immense popularity and for his frequent
problems with his religious commissions. He worked at great speed, from live
models, scoring basic guides directly onto the canvas with the end of the brush
handle; very few of Caravaggio's drawings appear to have survived, and it is
likely that he preferred to work directly on the canvas. The approach was
anathema to the skilled artists of his day, who decried his refusal to work
from drawings and to idealise his figures. Yet the models were basic to his
realism. Some have been identified, including Mario Minniti and Francesco
Boneri, both fellow artists, Mario appearing as various figures in the early
secular works, the young Francesco as a succession of angels, Baptists and
Davids in the later canvasses. His female models include Fillide Melandroni,
Anna Bianchini, and Maddalena Antognetti (the "Lena" mentioned in
court documents of the "artichoke" case as Caravaggio's concubine),
all well-known prostitutes, who appear as female religious figures including
the Virgin and various saints. Caravaggio himself appears in several paintings,
his final self-portrait being as the witness on the far right to the Martyrdom
of Saint Ursula.
Caravaggio had a noteworthy ability to express in one scene
of unsurpassed vividness the passing of a crucial moment. The Supper at Emmaus
depicts the recognition of Christ by his disciples: a moment before he is a
fellow traveler, mourning the passing of the Messiah, as he never ceases to be
to the inn-keeper's eyes, the second after, he is the Saviour. In The Calling
of St Matthew, the hand of the Saint points to himself as if he were saying
"who, me", while his eyes, fixed upon the figure of Christ, have
already said, "Yes, I will follow you". With The Resurrection of
Lazarus, he goes a step further, giving us a glimpse of the actual physical
process of resurrection. The body of Lazarus is still in the throes of rigor
mortis, but his hand, facing and recognizing that of Christ, is alive. Other
major Baroque artists would travel the same path, for example Bernini,
fascinated with themes from Ovid's Metamorphoses .
The Caravaggisti
The installation of the St. Matthew paintings in the
Contarelli Chapel had an immediate impact among the younger artists in Rome,
and Caravaggism became the cutting edge for every ambitious young painter. The
first Caravaggisti included Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Baglione.
Baglione's Caravaggio phase was short-lived; Caravaggio later accused him of
plagiarism and the two were involved in a long feud. Baglione went on to write
the first biography of Caravaggio. In the next generation of Caravaggisti there
were Carlo Saraceni, Bartolomeo Manfredi and Orazio Borgianni. Gentileschi,
despite being considerably older, was the only one of these artists to live
much beyond 1620, and ended up as court painter to Charles I of England. His
daughter Artemisia Gentileschi was also close to Caravaggio, and one of the
most gifted of the movement. Yet in Rome and in Italy it was not Caravaggio,
but the influence of Annibale Carracci, blending elements from the High
Renaissance and Lombard realism, which ultimately triumphed.
Caravaggio's brief stay in Naples produced a notable school
of Neapolitan Caravaggisti, including Battistello Caracciolo and Carlo
Sellitto. The Caravaggisti movement there ended with a terrible outbreak of
plague in 1656, but the Spanish connection – Naples was a possession of Spain –
was instrumental in forming the important Spanish branch of his influence.
A group of Catholic artists from Utrecht, the "Utrecht
Caravaggisti", travelled to Rome as students in the first years of the
17th century and were profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, as
Bellori describes. On their return to the north this trend had a short-lived
but influential flowering in the 1620s among painters like Hendrick ter
Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, Andries Both and Dirck van Baburen. In the
following generation the effects of Caravaggio, although attenuated, are to be
seen in the work of Rubens (who purchased one of his paintings for the Gonzaga
of Mantua and painted a copy of the Entombment of Christ), Vermeer, Rembrandt,
and Velázquez, the last of whom presumably saw his work during his various
sojourns in Italy.
Death and rebirth of a reputation
Caravaggio's innovations inspired the Baroque, but the
Baroque took the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism.
While he directly influenced the style of the artists mentioned above, and, at
a distance, the Frenchmen Georges de La Tour and Simon Vouet, and the Spaniard
Giuseppe Ribera, within a few decades his works were being ascribed to less
scandalous artists, or simply overlooked. The Baroque, to which he contributed
so much, had evolved, and fashions had changed, but perhaps more pertinently
Caravaggio never established a workshop as the Carracci did, and thus had no
school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying
philosophical approach to art, the psychological realism which can only be
deduced from his surviving work.
Thus his reputation was doubly vulnerable to the critical
demolition-jobs done by two of his earliest biographers, Giovanni Baglione, a
rival painter with a personal vendetta, and the influential 17th century critic
Gian Pietro Bellori, who had not known him but was under the influence of the
earlier Giovanni Battista Agucchi and Bellori's friend Poussin, in preferring
the "classical-idealistic" tradition of the Bolognese school led by
the Carracci. Baglione, his first biographer, played a considerable part in
creating the legend of Caravaggio's unstable and violent character, as well as
his inability to draw.
In the 1920s, art critic Roberto Longhi brought Caravaggio's
name once more to the foreground, and placed him in the European tradition:
"Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without
him. And the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly
different". The influential Bernard Berenson agreed: "With the
exception of Michelangelo, no other Italian painter exercised so great an
influence."
Oeuvre
Only about 80 paintings by Caravaggio have survived, but
some lost works have been found from time to time. One, The Calling of Saints
Peter and Andrew, was recently authenticated and restored; it had been in
storage in Hampton Court, mislabeled as a copy. Richard Francis Burton writes
of a "picture of St. Rosario (in the museum of the Grand Duke of Tuscany),
showing a circle of thirty men turpiter ligati" which is not known to have
survived. The rejected version of The Inspiration of Saint Matthew intended for
the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome was destroyed during
the bombing of Dresden, though black and white photographs of the work exist.
In June 2011 it was announced that a previously unknown Caravaggio painting of
Saint Augustine dating to about 1600 had been discovered in a private
collection in Britain. Called a "significant discovery", the painting
had never been published and is thought to have been commissioned by Vincenzo
Giustiniani, a patron of the painter in Rome.
Epitsph
Caravaggio's epitaph was composed by his friend Marzio
Milesi. It reads:
"Michelangelo Merisi, son of Fermo di Caravaggio – in
painting not equal to a painter, but to Nature itself – died in Port' Ercole –
betaking himself hither from Naples – returning to Rome – 15th calend of August
– In the year of our Lord 1610 – He lived thirty-six years nine months and
twenty days – Marzio Milesi, Jurisconsult – Dedicated this to a friend of
extraordinary genius."
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| The Calling of St Matthew (Caravaggio) |
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| Michelangelo Merisi or Amerighi da Caravaggio (Italian, Milan 1571 - 1610 Porto Ercole), Saint John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram), 1602, Capitoline Museums, Rome |
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| Caravaggio or Michelangelo Merisi o Amerighi da Caravaggio (Italian 1571?–1610) [Baroque] The Denial of Saint Peter, circa 1610. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. |
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| Caravaggio or Michelangelo Merisi o Amerighi da Caravaggio (Italian 1571?–1610) [Baroque] David with the Head of Goliath, 1609–1607. Galleria Borghese, Rome. |
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| Caravaggio or Michelangelo Merisi o Amerighi da Caravaggio (Italian 1571?–1610) [Baroque] The Seven Works of Mercy, 1607. Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples. |
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| Caravaggio or Michelangelo Merisi o Amerighi da Caravaggio (Italian 1571?–1610) [Baroque] Narcissus, 1599. National Gallery of Ancient Art, Rome. |
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| The Calling of St Matthew, (detail) Caravaggio, ca. 1599 |
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