Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

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. He left behind a body of work whose psychological intensity and physical realism had no real precedent.

Artwork