The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600)
Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome
A beam of light follows Christ's pointing hand to the tax collector Matthew at a counting table
Image: Gleb Simonov · CC0, Wikimedia Commons
Art
Caravaggio
1571–1610 · Italian
Baroque
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio revolutionised painting in Rome around 1600 with dramatic, realistic religious scenes lit by harsh light against deep shadow. His violent life — he killed a man in 1606 and spent his last years as a fugitive — is as famous as his art. His followers across Europe were known as the Caravaggisti.
How to spot them
- ▸Tenebrism: figures picked out by a hard, raking light against pitch-black backgrounds
- ▸Saints and apostles modelled on street people, with dirty feet, torn clothes and wrinkled faces
- ▸Frozen moments of maximum drama — a beheading, a conversion, a gesture of recognition
- ▸Early works: sensual, androgynous boys with fruit and wine (Bacchus, Boy Bitten by a Lizard)
Key works
Supper at Emmaus (1601)
National Gallery, London
A beardless risen Christ is recognised; a basket of fruit teeters over the table's edge
Image: Caravaggio · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1598–1599)
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica (Palazzo Barberini), Rome
Judith coolly saws through the general's neck as blood spurts
Image: Caravaggio · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Bacchus (c. 1596)
Uffizi, Florence
A languid youth offers a glass of wine; painted for Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte
Image: Caravaggio · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Medusa (c. 1597)
Uffizi, Florence
The screaming severed head painted on a convex ceremonial shield
Image: Caravaggio · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Death of the Virgin (c. 1604–1606)
Louvre, Paris
Rejected by the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala for its bloated, barefoot Virgin
Image: Caravaggio · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Quick-fire facts
- •His real name was Michelangelo Merisi; Caravaggio is the town near Milan his family came from.
- •In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in Rome and fled a death sentence, moving between Naples, Malta and Sicily.
- •In Malta he was made a Knight of the Order of St John but was soon expelled; his Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in Valletta is his only signed painting.
- •He died in 1610 at Porto Ercole, on his way back to Rome to seek a papal pardon.
- •His Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence was stolen from an oratory in Palermo in 1969 and has never been recovered.
- •The Taking of Christ was rediscovered in 1990 in a Jesuit house in Dublin and is on loan to the National Gallery of Ireland.
- •The term "tenebrism" (from Italian tenebroso, murky) is closely associated with his style.
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Caravaggio
- National Gallery, London — The Supper at Emmaus (collection entry)
- E. H. Gombrich — The Story of Art