Caravaggio: 5 interesting facts

Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio, known as Caravaggio (, US: /-ˈvɑːdʒ(i)oʊ/, Italian pronunciation: [mikeˈlandʒelo meˈriːzi da kkaraˈvaddʒo]; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610), was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the utter four years of his dynamism he moved in the company of Naples, Malta, and Sicily until his death. His paintings combine a realizable observation of the human state, both bodily and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.

Caravaggio employed near physical observation behind a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He made the technique a dominant stylistic element, transfixing subjects in adept shafts of well-ventilated 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 doing directly onto the canvas. His inspiring effect upon the further Baroque style that emerged from Mannerism was profound. His impinge on can be seen directly or indirectly in the pretend of Peter Paul Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Rembrandt. Artists heavily under his have an effect on were called the “Caravaggisti” (or “Caravagesques”), as capably as tenebrists or tenebrosi (“shadowists”).

Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan before distressing in his twenties to Rome. He developed a considerable herald as an artist, and as a violent, touchy and provocative man. A commotion led to a death sentence for murder and provoked him to leave suddenly to Naples. There he again established himself as one of the most prominent Italian painters of his generation. He traveled in 1607 to Malta and on to Sicily, and pursued a papal release for his sentence. In 1609 he returned to Naples, where he was practicing in a violent clash; his point of view was disfigured and rumours of his death circulated. Questions roughly his mental come clean arose from his erratic and bizarre behavior. He died in 1610 below uncertain circumstances while upon his showing off from Naples to Rome. Reports confirmed 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 Baroque incorporated the interim of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism. The style evolved and fashions changed, and Caravaggio fell out of favour. In the 20th century engagement in his pretend revived, and his importance to the further of Western art was reevaluated. The 20th-century art historian André Berne-Joffroy stated: “What begins in the behave of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.”