Carravagio

====Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a====

====formative influence on the Baroque school of painting.Caravaggio trained under a master as a painter in Milan. In his early twenties, Caravaggio moved to Rome. During the Counter-Reformation the Roman Catholic Church searched for religious art with which to counter the threat of Protestantism, and for this task the artificial conventions of Mannerism, which had ruled art for almost a century, no longer seemed adequate. Caravaggio's novelty was a radical naturalism which combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He burst upon the Rome art scene in 1600 with the success of his first public commissions, the //Martyrdom of Saint Matthew// and //Calling of Saint Matthew//. Thereafter he never lacked for commissions or patrons, yet he handled his success atrociously. He was thrown in jail on several occasions, vandalized his own apartment, and ultimately had a death warrant issued for him by the Pope. In 1606 he killed a young man in a brawl and fled from Rome with a price on his head. In Malta in 1608 he was involved in another brawl, and yet another in Naples in 1609, possibly a deliberate attempt on his life by unidentified enemies, and in the next year he died.Infamous while he lived, Caravaggio was forgotten almost immediately after his death, and it was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. Despite this, his influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from the ruins of Mannerism, was profound.====



//Calling of St. Matthew//, painting



Martyrdom of St. Matthew, painting