Caravaggio Prints

About Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan in September 1571 and apprenticed there for four years from 1584 to Simone Peterzano before moving to Rome in 1592. He began by painting half-length figures for the market, fruit, boys with lutes, the Bacchus and the Basket of Fruit, and found a patron in Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who bought The Fortune Teller and The Cardsharps. In 1599 he was contracted to paint the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi; The Calling of Saint Matthew, delivered in 1600, made him the most talked-about painter in Rome. He worked from live models, without preparatory drawing, and lit them from a single high source against darkness, the technique known as tenebrism that painters across Europe copied within a decade. In May 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight and fled the city under sentence of death, working in Naples, Malta and Sicily before dying at Porto Ercole in July 1610 at thirty-eight. Caravaggio's pictures were designed to stop people in a chapel doorway, and they do the same from a wall: a face, a hand and a bowl of fruit pulled out of black.