Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 - 1610) worked in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily in a career of barely two decades, yet his invention of tenebrism — the dramatic use of deep shadow against concentrated light — transformed European painting so completely that nearly every major painter of the seventeenth century defined themselves in relation to him. Born in Milan in 1571, he was as notorious for his life as for his art: he killed a man in a brawl in 1606 and spent his final four years as a fugitive, continuing to produce masterpieces while fleeing a death sentence. He died in 1610 at around 38, under circumstances that remain disputed, leaving behind a body of work whose psychological intensity and physical realism had no real precedent.
