Michelangelo Merisi (or Amerighi) da Caravaggio, known as simply Caravaggio, was born on September 29, 1571 in Milan. His father was a household administrator and architect-decorator to the Marchese of Caravaggio, a town 35 km to the east of Milan. In order to escape a plague that ravaged the city, the Merisi family moved to Caravaggio in 1576. Caravaggio’s father and grandfather died the following year and his mother had to raise all of her five children in poverty. Young Caravaggio then probably grew up in his namesake town. Caravaggio’s mother died in 1584; the same year his older brother placed him in the workshop of the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, where he spent four years as an apprentice. During these years, young Caravaggio became familiar with the art treasures of Milan, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, and with the regional art of Lombardy, the larger region in which Milan is located. Italian art from Lombardy valued more simplicity and attention to naturalistic detail, and as such it was closer to the naturalism of the art of Germany (geographically closer to Lombardy) than to the stylization and grandiosity of the Mannerist art from Rome. Lionello Venturi (Italian historian and art critique, “Four steps toward modern art: Giorgione, Caravaggio, Manet, Cézanne”, 1956) stated that during his apprenticeship, Caravaggio was trained in the Mannerist technique. On the other hand, the ancient chronicler Giulio Mancini (“Considerazioni sulla pittura”, 1617-1621), said that young Caravaggio studied diligently for a period of about four years “although from time to time he did some extravagance caused by his heated and strong spirit”.
Next, hypotheses come about Caravaggio’s life. When he started working with Peterzano he was 12 years old. Mancini explained that he spent another four years there: making a total of 16. And the same author noted that when Caravaggio was 20 he was in Rome. What happened between 1588 and 1593? Some authors speculate that, during those years, he perfected his technique in Milan or Brescia, others —like Giovanni Pietro Bellori (“Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni”, 1672)— stated that he was in Venice. But these are, above all, old chroniclers. Today it seems accepted that around 1590 Caravaggio was already frequenting the Roman milieu. His precocity, in every way, could have passed off a 17-year-old boy for a 20-year-old.
In any case, we can easily imagine the art that young Caravaggio was exposed to during his stay in northern Italy before arriving in Rome. The region of Lombardy, although small in size, was important in artistic terms. Since the 15th century it had painters such as Vincenzo Foppa and Bergognone. And in the next century, with Lorenzo Lotto, Moretto da Brescia, Savoldo and Moroni who worked on the representation of less spectacular forms of religiosity and paid particular attention to the effects of light and shadow that foresaw paintings with scenes bathe in artificial lighting.
An ancient chronicler tells that Caravaggio was involved in some “quarrels” and a police officer was wounded while he was in Milan. Although this information now seems to us to be part of the legend of the “cursed” painter, the truth is that Caravaggio’s life in Rome became a true picaresque novel. When he arrived, miserable, at the Eternal City, Caravaggio spent some period living among the lower depths of Roman society in the company of other exiles from Lombardy, all artists waiting for commissions. He then began to work for a rich prelate, a “beneficiary of Saint Peter” who had a Vatican “pension” named Pandolfo Pucci, whom the painter will later call “monsignor Insalata” (Monsignor Salad), given the lame vegetarian diet to which he was subjected. From there he passed under the tutelage of Lorenzo Siciliano, for whom he made “heads” for so many paintings (and it seems that he managed to make three a day). Later he collaborated with a Sienese friend of his, Antiveduto Gramatica, in whose workshop the demands were “half figures”. Caravaggio’s art was rising in quality, but always within the deepest poverty.
Sick, he entered the hospice for the Poor of Consolation, and during his convalescence he painted some pictures that the prior will take later to his land. Now, that land —mentioned in an old document— is interpreted by some as Sicily and by others (Roberto Longhi) as Seville. That is why the great Italian historian wondered if one of the origins —20 years later— of the Sevillian painting school of Sánchez Cotán, Velázquez and Zurbarán, to mention a few, could not be seen in the early export of these works by Caravaggio. We are here in the field of speculation.
Recovered, Caravaggio went to work with a painter more important than his previous patrons: Giuseppe Cesari, who was known by the title of Cavaliere d’Arpino, Pope Clement VIII’s favorite artist. He was perhaps an easy artist, but not a mere “manufacturer” as Caravaggio’s previous patrons were. Caravaggio stayed for a short time in that workshop, but it can be assumed that his two early paintings: Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the Young Sick Bacchus, both in Rome, must date from that time. Once free from the hands of the Cavaliere d’Arpino —who had the reputation of exploit talented young artists— Caravaggio found free lodging at the home of a prelate, Monsignor Fantin-Petrignani. At this point of the story, biographers begin to agree and acknowledge that Bacchus (Florence), The Fortune Teller (Louvre), Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Rome), Magdalene (Rome) and the Boy Bitten by a Lizard (London) were all painted in this period.
The novelty of the art of Caravaggio was going to be exerted on several simultaneous planes. On the one hand, there was his choice of themes, or better —as Lionello Venturi said— of the “motifs”: Bacchus, yes, but desacralized. There is also a certain picturesqueness that Caravaggio is going to impose. In a title like ‘Boy Bitten by a Lizard’, we don’t see now the audacity, but there was then, and it was huge. At that time the works were announced as “heads”, “busts”, “half figures”: it was the format that distinguished them from each other. At the same time, these works by the young Caravaggio were not limited to displaying a novel name, but what was more important; they also carried a different way of approaching reality. Even half a century after his death, the current opinion considered that Caravaggio only painted what was despicable, what was found in the streets and, therefore, it was material that didn’t reach the accepted levels of “decency”. At that time, painting in Italy moved between two poles: on the one hand, there was the somber art that strictly followed the principles stated in the Council of Trent; on the other, there was the art displaying a superficial fantasy in the manner of Barocci or of the Cavalier d’Arpino himself.
Caravaggio also believed in the concept of “ritrarre dal naturale,” that is, painting from life, rather than using an idea or the imagination as inspiration. He often used as models people from everyday life instead of idealized figures from ancient models or his imagination. He usually assigned to his models roles that contradicted their physiognomy. In this sense, Caravaggio’s painting style wasn’t completely accepted by the elites, buyers, and fellow artists of the time. Caravaggio also painted straight on to his canvases without sketching first as it was customary.
On the other hand, the implacable lucidity of Caravaggio, that all-powerful eye and yet capable of unitary vision and not of mere curious detail, had to make it a brutal novelty, a fact that was difficult to admit by the contemporary Roman circles that commanded and influenced taste and artistic tendencies.
For example, paintings such as The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, The Fortune Teller, are transitional works and can be accepted without much resistance. In the first, although the composition had to seem “impossible”, with the angel from behind and in the central axis of the painting dividing it into two halves, the color and light are clear, diffuse and irresistibly suggest the works by Giorgione. In The Fortune Teller, the half figures express an action, but do they really express it? Actually, it is about two psychological studies placed in parallel and in the same painting. They are—according to Venturi’s phrase—two “moral” portraits that oppose each other under the pretext of a fortune teller. The great novelty must have resided, however (as in the contemporary Repentant Magdalene), in the neutral, indeterminate background, against which the characters were outlined.
Great innovations with respect to the painting of the time were very soon displayed in Caravaggio’s art, and these at all levels. Take, for example, the case of the still life. Until then, this genre was considered in Italy as a simple curiosity imported from northern Europe. Caravaggio, who said that “it was as much work for him to make a good painting of flowers as it was of figures”, begins by placing —as in Bacchus or the Lute Player (Russia)—, next to a character in full life and engaged in action, a group of flowers and fruits in “stopped (still) life”. He later isolated this last sub-scene and ventured to present it alone: this was the case of the famous Basket of Fruits (Milan). At first, painters represented exquisite dishes and sweets, precious objects such as Murano glasses and Bohemian crystals. Caravaggio, from the start, had dared to immortalize the vulgar basket full of ordinary fruits, even including the chopped ones and some wilted leaves. And it was only because of the quality of his painting that he imposed his version of the reality of things, of all kind of things. There is something like a lesson in humility in his undertaking: all that is part of Creation has the right to be copied and even exalted. All beings and things from the Creation must be recorded, like the reflections of a mirror. And although the mirror puts “distance” between us and observed things, it indeed treat us all in the same way, reflecting things as they are. It’s a bit like Caravaggio’s attitude and, in that, it was extraordinarily modern. His approach was anti-Renaissance in the sense that he didn’t create an anthropocentric world but rather he considered our carnality and even our spirituality as “facts” given to him once and for all and which he refused to interpret in a philosophical or deeply intellectual way. Roberto Longhi spoke of this “instantaneous psychological reflex”: the boy bitten by the lizard pulls his hand away from him, frowns; a cry of surprise makes him open his mouth. As strange as it may seem to us, this was advanced for the people of the times, who weren’t used to that type of instantaneity and were reluctant to admit paintings “without a story behind”.
From then on, everything changed with Caravaggio: Bacchus is an ordinary boy who poses for a few coins; the Magdalene will not be the sappy image of a woman of the world “doing the Magdalene”, but a weeping peasant woman withdrawn tearfully, deep on her own thoughts and with a large dark empty space around her, a space that we must interpret as a true “painted silence”. What he wanted to destroy in these works —that is, the anecdote— seems tempted in The Fortune Teller that we have already mentioned, although in it there is hardly an attempt at action. On the other hand, in The Cardsharps (Texas), Caravaggio seems to lose that same dispensable discretion and exaggerates the diabolism of the moustached character. It is a feat that he won’t repeat again.
Until 1951-1952 it was assumed that all the vicissitudes of Caravaggio’s hectic life had happened to him in two or three years. Thanks to new documents, scholars are inclined to believe in a longer Roman period and that it would go from 1591 or 1593 (the year in which it appears inscribed in the Academy of Saint Luke, Accademia di San Luca, in Rome) until the year 1596, at which time he must have painted The Basket of Fruit (Milan). Caravaggio’s style is asserting itself, although that does not mean that it is well received everywhere. The painter continues to undersell his works until a professional reseller named Valentino introduces him to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, one of the leading art connoisseurs in Rome. The material hardships of the painter will come to an end under the patronage of Cardinal del Monte: with a secure home and food, he can throw himself fully into painting as he understands it. For his protector he seems to have painted at that time the already mentioned Cardsharps and the Lute Player, plus the shield with the threatening face of the Medusa (Florence).
As important as this period was, so far we have not arrived at the two typical traits of Caravaggio in the face of traditional art history as it is told: his “realism” and his “tenebrism”. We are approaching the moment when they are both going to hatch. In 1951 important articles by J. Hess, Denis Mahon and Roberto Longhi appeared disputing the dates of the work for the Contarelli chapel in the Roman church of San Luigi dei Franchesi (Saint Louis of the French). That same year, Venturi, with the experience of his age and knowledge about Caravaggio, said: “When a painting is not dated by written sources, it can be classified stylistically in a given group, but specifying the years seems to me to be exaggerating”. We will abide by this call to prudence. Everything seems to indicate today that Caravaggio did not receive the commission for the French Church of Rome until the end of 1597 or the beginning of 1598. At that time, he was no longer only a protégé of Cardinal Del Monte, but also of Vincenzo Giustiniani, Ciriaco Mattei, the Barberinis and the Massimos, all powerful names in Rome.
60 × 55 cm (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy). Cardinal del Monte is again responsible for this commission to Caravaggio. In Greek mythology, the Gorgon Medusa is killed by the demigod Perseus. By the 16th century Medusa was a symbol of the triumph of reason over the senses; this may be the reason why Cardinal Del Monte commissioned Caravaggio to paint it. The artist chose to depict the severed head of Medusa right after the very moment of her decapitation; though the head is decapitated, it still appears conscious to us, with the painting capturing its final moments before death.
The history of the paintings for San Luigi dei Francesi is exemplary… in a bad way: the greatest scholars of our days fail to agree on almost any of the essential points. It is not a question here of restating these problems. Among the ancient chroniclers: Mancini, van Mander, Baglione and Bellori; and our contemporaries: those already mentioned, plus Arslan, Urbani and Friedländer, it can be said that if the issue has not been fully clarified, it at least gives us the impression of being, once and for all, circumscribed.
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Genre Painting: A term that refers to paintings depicting scenes of everyday life. In Europe, genre painting developed particularly in Holland in the 17th century. The most typical subjects were scenes of peasant life or drinking in taverns, and tended to be small in scale.
Still Life: A work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or human-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, etc.). Originated in the Middle Ages and in the Ancient Greco-Roman art, still-life painting emerged as a distinct genre in Western painting by the late 16th century.
The Artistic Adventure of Mankind 