When did Caravaggio live?
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Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio (, , ; 28 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian painter active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily from the early 1590s to 1610. His paintings combine 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
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Completed in 1608 in Malta, the painting had been commissioned by the Knights of Malta as an altarpiece; it was the largest altarpiece which Caravaggio would ever paint. It still hangs in St. John's Co-Cathedral, for which it was commissioned and where Caravaggio himself was inducted and briefly served as a knight. Caravaggio's service to the Order was brief and troubled, however, as he was soon a fugitive from justice, having escaped while imprisoned for an unrecorded crime. When Caravaggio was defrocked "in absentia" as a "foul and rotten member" by the Order about six months after his induction, the ceremony took place in the Oratory, before this very painting.
Caravaggio did several pieces depicting the moments after the event depicted here. One of these is on display in London's National Gallery; the other, in the Royal Palace of Madrid. It is believed that one of these may be the image that Caravaggio was said to have sent in an effort to appease Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights who expelled Caravaggio, but this is not certainly known.
The Beheading of St John the Baptist (Caravaggio)
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According to tradition Caravaggio painted flowers and fruit when he first came to Rome. Individual pieces of this "Still Life with Flowers and Fruit" are brilliantly painted and call to mind the mastery of such subjects that Caravaggio showed in early works such as "Boy with a Basket of Fruit", as well as his reported comment that it took as much trouble to paint a flower as it did to paint a man. Nevertheless, the overall composition is awkward and it is not accepted as genuine. The painting is ascribed to an artist known as the Painter of the Wadsworth Atheneum Still-Life, after a work in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.
Paintings attributed to Caravaggio
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"The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist" has been badly damaged, though it did receive some restoration in the 1950s prior to a notable exhibition in Rome in 1955–56, which brought the work considerable attention. It was during the restoration that Caravaggio's signature in the blood became visible to modern viewers. The signature is a matter of some dispute. The work is signed "f. Michelang.o" (the "f" to indicate his brotherhood in the order), but it is popularly claimed that Caravaggio signed "I, Caravaggio, did this" in confession of some crime—perhaps connected to the 1606 death of Ranuccio Tomassoni at Caravaggio's hands, which had caused the painter to flee Rome.
The Beheading of St John the Baptist (Caravaggio)
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The "Death of the Virgin", 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 showing 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.
Caravaggio
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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 his rival Annibale Carracci, blending elements from the High Renaissance and Lombard realism, which ultimately triumphed.
Caravaggio
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As an adult, Caravaggio still lives under the roof and paints with the funding of Del Monte. Caravaggio is shown employing street people, drunks and prostitutes as models for his intense, usually religious paintings (see the article on the painter for examples). He is depicted as frequently brawling, gambling, getting drunk and is implied to sleep with both male and female models. In the art world, Caravaggio is regarded as vulgar and entitled due to his Vatican connections.
Caravaggio (1986 film)
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This is the earliest known work by Caravaggio, painted soon after his arrival in Rome from his native Milan in mid 1592. His movements in this period are not certain. According to his contemporary Giulio Mancini he stayed for a short time with Monsignor Pandulfo Pucci in the Palazzo Colonna, but disliked the way Pucci treated him and left after a few months. (Pucci fed his boarders exclusively on greens, and Caravaggio referred to him later as 'Monsignor Salad'). He copied religious pictures for Pucci, (none survive), and apparently did a few pieces of his own for personal sale, of which "Boy Peeling a Fruit" would be the only known example. The piece may also date from slightly later, when he was working for Giuseppe Cesari, the "cavaliere d'Arpino". As Caravaggio is said to have been painting only "flowers and fruit" for d'Arpino, this would again be a personal piece done for sale outside the workshop, but it was among the works seized from d'Alpino by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1607, together with two other early Caravaggios, the "Young Sick Bacchus" and the "Boy with a Basket of Fruit". It is not known how these works came to be in Cesari's collection at the time.
Boy Peeling Fruit (Caravaggio)
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In 1601/02 Caravaggio was apparently living and painting in the palazzo of the Mattei family, inundated with commissions from wealthy private clients following the success of the Contarelli chapel where in 1600 he had displayed "The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew" and "The Inspiration of Saint Matthew". It was one of the most productive periods in a productive career. Ciriaco Mattei's notebook records two payments to Caravaggio in July and December of that year, marking the beginning and completion of the original "John the Baptist". The payment was a relatively modest 85 scudi, because John was a single figure. The copy may have been made at the same time or very soon after. In January of that year Caravaggio received a hundred and fifty scudi for "Supper at Emmaus". For Vincenzo Giustiniani there was "The Incredulity of Saint Thomas", and in January 1603 Ciriaco paid a hundred and twenty-five scudi for "The Taking of Christ". Each of these increased the immense popularity of Caravaggio among collectors - twenty copies survive of the "Supper at Emmaus", more of the "Taking of Christ".
John the Baptist (Caravaggio)
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The Caravaggisti (or the "Caravagesques") were stylistic followers of the 16th-century Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. His influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from Mannerism was profound. Caravaggio never established a workshop as most other painters 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. But it can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Bernini, and Rembrandt. Famous while he lived, Caravaggio himself was forgotten almost immediately after his death. Many of his paintings were reascribed to his followers, such as "The Taking of Christ", which was attributed to the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst until 1990. It was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. In the 1920s Roberto Longhi once more 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 stated: "With the exception of Michelangelo, no other Italian painter exercised so great an influence."
Caravaggisti
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In 1607 it was part of Cardinal Federico Borromeo’s collection, a provenance which raises the plausibility of a conscious reference to the Book of Amos. Borromeo, who was archbishop of Milan, was in Rome approximately 1597-1602 and a house guest of Del Monte in 1599. He had a special interest in the Northern European painters such as Paul Bril and Jan Brueghel the Elder, who were also in Rome at the time, (indeed, he took Breughel into his own household), and in the way they did landscapes and flowers in paintings as subjects in their own right, something not known at the time in Italian art. He would have seen the way Caravaggio did still life as incidental accessories in paintings such as "Boy Bitten by a Lizard", "Bacchus", in Del Monte's collection, and "The Lute Player" in the collection of Del Monte's friend Vincenzo Giustiniani. The scholarly Giustiniani wrote a treatise on painting years later, wherein, reflecting the hierarchical conventions of his day, he placed flowers "and other tiny things" only fifth on a twelve-scale register, but he said also that Caravaggio once said to him "that it used to take as much workmanship for him to do a good picture of flowers as it did to do one of human figures."
Basket of Fruit (Caravaggio)