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You've seen Caravaggio's stunning paintings, but do you know the story behind the images? Caravaggio was a violent and tragic figure who likely died because of his commitment to his art. He became "the most famous painter in Rome" in 1600 and gave birth to the Baroque style and the technique of chiaroscuro, but when he wasn't painting, Caravaggio surrounded himself with thieves, prostitutes, and fights.
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Whether you know it or not, you've seen Caravaggio's influential paintings
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Caravaggio pioneered the chiaroscuro technique and practically gave birth to the Baroque style
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But he was plagued by a violent temper that was his ultimate undoing
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Today, we're brushing up on Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio, the artist who died for his art
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in 1571 Milan saw the birth of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio sharing a name with another famous
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Michelangelo you know the Sistine Chapel guy the young boy seemed destined for greatness but this
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particular Michelangelo didn't paint a chapel or sculpt a statue instead he became renowned for a
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decidedly different art style as a young boy in 16th century Italy he faced the devastation of
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the plague head-on. He lost several family members, including his mother, father, and both
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grandparents, leaving him an orphan. At age 10, the same year his mother died, he began an
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apprenticeship with the painter Simone Pettorzano in Milan. Pettorzano helped train the young boy
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ultimately launching his art career. But the trauma and tragedy would always haunt Caravaggio
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and show up in his art throughout the years, like Tim Burton, if he actually had something to be sad
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about. Caravaggio painted more than just light and shadow. His art, often brutal and violent
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regularly contained severed heads, almost like a macabre signature. This guy would have been
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Henry VIII's favorite poker buddy. One painting depicts Medusa, her scream frozen in time
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as the snakes on her head writhe in pain. It's a little freaky. Another painting showed the
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biblical giant Goliath being relieved of his noggin. But he's not the only subject of the work
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In the painting, which features the biblical King David removing Goliath's head
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savvy viewers will notice that Caravaggio put his own features on Goliath's face
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So why did things come to a head? At this time in his career, Caravaggio's habit of causing real-life
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bloodshed had earned him a conviction and a sentence of decapitation. More on that later
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And as the artist desperately tried to avoid the law, he exercised his fears in the form of obsessive depictions of his own impending fate
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It's one thing to be self-deprecating, but self-decapitating? You'll never succeed with that attitude, Caravaggio
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But the great artist's fascination with all things beheaded didn't begin with his own predicament
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In 1599 Pope Clement VIII passed a fatal sentence on a noblewoman named Beatrice Sensi in Rome for the crime of plotting to whack her chronically abusive father When authorities refused to do anything about her father behavior the family including Beatrice her mom and sisters bludgeoned him to the end of his life
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The man arguably had more coming to him than a wine-drunk Amazon customer
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so many Romans believed the crime to be justified. But the Pope feared a slippery slope of copycat
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crimes, as well as the air of proto-revolutionary class warfare, so he ordered a public execution
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to stop all that stuff in its tracks. Caravaggio happened to be in the audience that day
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and his admiration of Beatrice's poise as she faced her executioner inspired him to paint his biblical masterpiece, Judith Beheading Holofernes
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Now, the legends say that Beatrice reappears on the Sant'Angelo Bridge every year on the anniversary of her death, holding her own severed head
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Hopefully she gets a chance to check out some art while she's in town. Caravaggio knew he had talent, and he used it to criticize his rivals
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One of his contemporaries, Giovanni Baglione, once said, At times he would speak badly of the painters of the past and also of the present
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no matter how distinguished they were, because he thought that he alone had surpassed all the other artists in his profession
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In other words, he thought he was the Muhammad Ali of art. And Caravaggio used his paintings to insult people
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Naturally, one of them involved a horse's butt. Caravaggio's The Conversion of Saint Paul features a large horse next to the much smaller saint
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While that might not seem like much of an insult on its own, location is everything
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When it was displayed in Rome's Santa Maria del Popolo church, the horse's butt was aimed directly at a rival artist's painting of the Virgin Mary
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Risking blasphemy for a petty swipe at an enemy? Classic Caravaggio. But not everyone got the joke
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One church official demanded to know why the horse was positioned in the middle and the saint on the ground
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Caravaggio replied, he stands in God's light, presumably while trying not to giggle
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Believe it or not, despite the pettiness, the painting does represent an important Christian value and is still considered a masterpiece today
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In 1592, Caravaggio wrapped up his apprenticeship with Simone Pettisano. And after being involved in some aggressive quarrels that resulted in a wounded police officer, he fled to Rome
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presumably to lay low while he had new passports made. While in Rome, he found employment in Giuseppe Cesari's workshop
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Cesari held the enviable position of being Pope Clement's favorite artist, and he mostly painted still-life renderings of flowers and fruit
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But although Caravaggio was pretty good at it he found the work tedious and unfulfilling It was the 16th century equivalent of drawing Garfield calendars for the Pope and no one likes doing the same thing over and over again So young Caravaggio growing tired of these still lifes
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fought with Cesare and eventually struck off on his own to make a name for himself
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And that newly found name made plenty of people mad. Making money as an artist is never easy
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Around 1600, the Catholic Church was the most important source of funds for artists like Caravaggio
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But the spirited painter liked to push boundaries and didn't hesitate to do so
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whether or not he offended the church in the process. For example, one of the artist's more controversial habits was the use of Rome's poorest classes as models
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Thieves, vagrants, and prostitutes worked as stand-ins for Caravaggio's paintings. This backfired on him in 1601, when he lost the commission for the Church of Santa Maria della Scala
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who didn't care for the idea of using a well-known sex worker to model the Virgin Mary
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But the painting became popular outside Italy. Charles I of England acquired it, and it remains a permanent part of the French Musée de Louvre collection today
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alongside plenty of other Caravaggio works. From 1592 to 1606, Caravaggio worked tirelessly and earned the nickname the most famous painter in Rome
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which is a tough nickname to have if you want to make friends with other painters. Luckily, he had the skills to back it up
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If his art itself wasn't already considered highly influential, Caravaggio could have made a name for himself through his pioneering techniques alone
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His work challenged existing art techniques, especially his controversial realism. The subjects of his paintings were rendered with every wrinkle, squint, and imperfection
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making him a constant subject of art criticism. Writer Francesco Scanelli was appalled by Caravaggio's paintings of, quote
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terrible naturalism, astonishing deceptions, which attracted and ravished human sight. But none of this stopped Caravaggio from creating his masterpieces
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and his techniques even spawned an entirely new type of artistic expression
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His chiaroscuro technique used intense black shadows and bright light to create vivid images
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with high contrasts and implied three-dimensional volumes. Historians and artists have often wondered
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how he came up with the idea before spotlights even existed. One modern painter, David Hockney
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suggests he used a mirror to reflect his model's bright image into a darkly lit room
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Or maybe he had a spotlight and a time machine. Either way, his technique, known today as
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tenebrism, helped define the new Baroque style and influenced everyone from Gian Lorenzo Bernini
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to Rembrandt. When he wasn making religious paintings Caravaggio painted a particular young man several times The man name was Francesco but most people just called him Checo
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like he was one of the Marx brothers. Census records from the time show that Checo lived
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with Caravaggio in 1605, and the artist painted or included him in several works. Sometimes
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Caravaggio changed Checo's hair color to make it look like a different person, but he wasn't fooling
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anyone. Now, Checo might have just been a devout pupil, a Caravaggiest, if you will, but English
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diarist Richard Simons observed Caravaggio and Checo at work and insisted the two were lovers
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After Caravaggio's death, Checo became a painter himself. Art historian Gianni Papi believes Checo's
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real name was Francesco i, who took Caravaggio's ideas and ran with them
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Violence and a short temper plagued most of Caravaggio's life. In 1592, he fled Milan for Rome after wounding a police officer
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In 1606, he mortally defeated a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni in a duel
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And as Caravaggio expert Andrew Graham Dixon wrote, when a Roman waiter questioned his taste, he responded by smashing a plate into the man's mouth
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When a young painter insulted him behind his back, Caravaggio stalked him by night and then
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attacked his rival from behind with a sword. In other words, insulting Caravaggio was like
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insulting Joe Pesci in a Scorsese movie. Despite landing himself in so much trouble, Caravaggio
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never cooled off or learned from his scrapes. Even in the final years of his life, he attacked
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a knight in Malta and suffered a permanent disfigurement from the encounter, which is
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what happens when you're an artist and you pick a fight with a knight. Eventually, Caravaggio's
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reputation became so tainted by his violent outbursts that the Pope put a death warrant on
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the artist's head. But he wouldn't be a fugitive for very long. The artist managed to duck the
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Pope's judgment for four more years, ultimately passing away in 1610 at the age of 38, while
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still a fugitive. Initially, historians thought the disfigurement he received in Malta caused his
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death, but new evidence suggests otherwise. Italian researcher Silvano Vincetti located and identified Caravaggio's bones. When he tested them, he found the remains were embedded with a
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toxic level of lead, and lead happened to be a key ingredient in Caravaggio's paints
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As Vincetti said, the lead likely came from his paints. He was known to be extremely messy with
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them. Sorry Marie Kondo, in this case, we do not love mess. The high levels of lead probably led
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to poisoning and madness, and drove him mad. These factors combined with the sunstroke and
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infected wounds received from his fight with the knight likely led to Caravaggio's demise
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Hey, at least he kept his head