Caravaggio

Biography

Early life (1571–1592)

Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi or Amerighi) was born in Milan, where his father, Fermo (Fermo Merixio), was a household administrator and architect-decorator to the marquess of Caravaggio, a town 35 km (22 mi) to the east of Milan and south of Bergamo. It was previously assumed that he had been born in Caravaggio. In 1576 the family moved to Caravaggio to escape a plague that ravaged Milan, and Caravaggio's father and grandfather both died there on the same day in 1577. It is assumed that the artist grew up in Caravaggio, but his family kept up connections with the Sforzas and the powerful Colonna family, who were allied by marriage with the Sforzas and destined to play a major role later in Caravaggio's life.

Caravaggio's mother raised her five children in poverty. She died in 1584, the same year he began his four-year apprenticeship to the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, described in the contract of apprenticeship as a pupil of Titian. Caravaggio appears to have stayed in the Milan-Caravaggio area after his apprenticeship ended, but it is possible that he visited Venice and saw the works of Giorgione, whom Federico Zuccari later accused him of imitating, and Titian. He would also have become familiar with the art treasures of Milan, including Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, and with the regional Lombard art, a style that valued simplicity and attention to naturalistic detail and was closer to the naturalism of Germany than to the stylised formality and grandeur of Roman Mannerism. Graham-Dixon sees the influence of the popular images favored by the Counter-Reformation archbishop Charles Borromeo (who was later sainted).

Beginnings in Rome (1592/95–1600)

Following his initial training under Simone Peterzano, in 1592, Caravaggio left Milan for Rome in flight after "certain quarrels" and the wounding of a police officer. The young artist arrived in Rome "naked and extremely needy... without fixed address and without provision... short of money." During this period, he stayed with the miserly Pandolfo Pucci, known as "monsignor Insalata". A few months later he was working for the highly successful Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Clement VIII's favourite artist, "painting flowers and fruit" and other minor elements in his factory-like workshop. It is hard to establish the chronology of Caravaggio's early years due to his changing of addresses frequently – around ten times between 1592 and 1595.

In Rome, there was a demand for paintings to fill the many huge new churches and palaces being built at the time. It was also a period when the Church was searching for a stylistic alternative to Mannerism in religious art that was tasked to counter the threat of Protestantism. Caravaggio's innovation was a radical naturalism that combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of chiaroscuro known as tenebrism (the shift from light to dark with little intermediate value).

Caravaggio began working in Rome for Lorenzo Siciliano, a minor painter for whom he painted three heads a day, for very nominal pay, according Giovanni Bellori, a painter and an early biographer of Caravaggio.

Known works include the small Boy Peeling a Fruit (his earliest known painting). The next two works are from his time with Cesari: Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and Young Sick Bacchus, supposedly a self-portrait done during convalescence from a serious illness that ended his employment with Cesari. The title Sick Bacchus comes from Italian art historian Roberto Longhi. Whether the artwork references Caravaggio’s real life illness is up for question, though many scholars are convinced it is a self portrait. All three demonstrate the physical particularity for which Caravaggio was to become renowned: the fruit-basket-boy's produce has been analyzed by a professor of horticulture, who was able to identify individual cultivars right down to "...a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata)."

Caravaggio left Cesari, determined to make his own way after a heated argument. At this point he forged some extremely important friendships, with the painter Prospero Orsi, the architect Onorio Longhi, and the sixteen-year-old Sicilian artist Mario Minniti. Orsi, established in the profession, introduced him to influential collectors; Longhi, more balefully, introduced him to the world of Roman street brawls. Minniti served Caravaggio as a model and, years later, would be instrumental in helping him to obtain important commissions in Sicily. Minniti had fled Syracuse years prior, and he and Caravaggio allegedly dreamed together of rising to greater things. Minniti had a “moon-shaped” face and appeared in a number of Caravaggio’s early works. Ostensibly, the first archival reference to Caravaggio in a contemporary document from Rome is the listing of his name, with that of Prospero Orsi as his partner, as an 'assistant' in a procession in October 1594 in honour of St. Luke. The earliest informative account of his life in the city is a court transcript dated 11 July 1597, when Caravaggio and Prospero Orsi were witnesses to a crime near San Luigi de' Francesi.

"Most famous painter in Rome" (1600–1606)

In 1599, presumably through the influence of del Monte, Caravaggio was contracted to decorate the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. The two works making up the commission, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and The Calling of Saint Matthew, delivered in 1600, were an immediate sensation. Thereafter he never lacked commissions or patrons.

Caravaggio's tenebrism (a heightened chiaroscuro) brought high drama to his subjects, while his acutely observed realism brought a new level of emotional intensity. Opinion among his artist peers was polarized. Some denounced him for various perceived failings, notably his insistence on painting from life, without drawings, but for the most part he was hailed as a great artistic visionary: "The painters then in Rome were greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles."

Caravaggio went on to secure a string of prestigious commissions for religious works featuring violent struggles, grotesque decapitations, torture, and death. Most notable and technically masterful among them were The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (circa 1601) and The Taking of Christ (circa 1602) the latter only rediscovered by Sergio Benedetti in the 1990s in Dublin after remaining unrecognized for two centuries. For the most part, each new painting increased his fame, but a few were rejected by the various bodies for whom they were intended, at least in their original forms, and had to be re-painted or find new buyers. While Caravaggio's dramatic intensity was appreciated, his realism was seen by some as unacceptably vulgar. Another reason for rejection was when Caravaggio's images did not correspond to religious texts.

His first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel, featuring the saint as a bald peasant with dirty legs attended by a lightly clad over-familiar boy-angel, was rejected and a second version had to be painted as The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. Similarly, The Conversion of Saint Paul was rejected, and while another version of the same subject, the Conversion on the Way to Damascus, was accepted, it featured the saint's horse's haunches far more prominently than the saint himself, prompting this exchange between the artist and an exasperated official of Santa Maria del Popolo: "Why have you put a horse in the middle, and Saint Paul on the ground?" "Because!" "Is the horse God?" "No, but he stands in God's light!"

Legal problems and flight from Rome (1606)

Caravaggio led a tumultuous life. He was notorious for brawling, even in a time and place when such behavior was commonplace, and the transcripts of his police records and trial proceedings fill many pages.

Bellori claims that around 1590–1592, Caravaggio, already well known for brawling with gangs of young men, committed a murder which forced him to flee from Milan, first to Venice and then to Rome.

On 28 November 1600, while living at the Palazzo Madama with his patron Cardinal Del Monte, Caravaggio beat nobleman Girolamo Stampa da Montepulciano, a guest of the cardinal, with a club, resulting in an official complaint to the police. Episodes of brawling, violence, and tumult grew more and more frequent. Caravaggio was often arrested and jailed at Tor di Nona.

After his release from jail in 1601, Caravaggio returned to paint first The Taking of Christ and then Amor Vincit Omnia. In 1603, he was arrested again, this time for the defamation of another painter, Giovanni Baglione, who sued Caravaggio and his followers Orazio Gentileschi and Onorio Longhi for writing offensive poems about him. The French ambassador intervened, and Caravaggio was transferred to house arrest after a month in jail in Tor di Nona.

Between May and October 1604, Caravaggio was arrested several times for possession of illegal weapons and for insulting the city guards. He was also sued by a tavern waiter for having thrown a plate of artichokes in his face.

An early published notice on Caravaggio, dating from 1604 and describing his lifestyle three years previously, recounts that "after a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him."

In 1605, Caravaggio was forced to flee to Genoa for three weeks after seriously injuring Mariano Pasqualone di Accumoli, a notary, in a dispute over Lena, Caravaggio's model and lover. The notary reported having been attacked on 29 July with a sword, causing a severe head injury. Caravaggio's patrons intervened and managed to cover up the incident.

Exile and death (1606–1610)

Following the death of Tomassoni, Caravaggio fled first to the estates of the Colonna family south of Rome and then on to Naples, where Costanza Colonna Sforza, widow of Francesco Sforza, in whose husband's household Caravaggio's father had held a position, maintained a palace. In Naples, outside the jurisdiction of the Roman authorities and protected by the Colonna family, the most famous painter in Rome became the most famous in Naples.

His connections with the Colonnas led to a stream of important church commissions, including the Madonna of the Rosary, and The Seven Works of Mercy. The Seven Works of Mercy depicts the seven corporal works of mercy as a set of compassionate acts concerning the material needs of others. The painting was made for and is still housed in the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples. Caravaggio combined all seven works of mercy in one composition, which became the church's altarpiece. Alessandro Giardino has also established the connection between the iconography of "The Seven Works of Mercy" and the cultural, scientific and philosophical circles of the painting's commissioners.

Despite his success in Naples, after only a few months in the city Caravaggio left for Hospitaller Malta, the headquarters of the Knights of Malta. Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, Costanza's son, was a Knight of Malta and general of the Order's galleys. He appears to have facilitated Caravaggio's arrival on the island in 1607 (and his escape the next year). Caravaggio presumably hoped that the patronage of Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights of Saint John, could help him secure a pardon for Tomassoni's death. Wignacourt was so impressed at having the artist as official painter to the Order that he inducted him as a Knight, and the early biographer Bellori records that the artist was well pleased with his success. Wignacourt reportedly gifted some slaves to Caravaggio in recognition for his services.

Major works from his Malta period include the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, his largest ever work, and the only painting to which he put his signature, Saint Jerome Writing (both housed in St John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta) and a Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page, as well as portraits of other leading Knights. According to Andrea Pomella, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is widely considered "one of the most important works in Western painting." Completed in 1608, the painting had been commissioned by the Knights of Malta as an altarpiece and measuring 370 by 520 centimetres (145 in × 205 in) was the largest altarpiece Caravaggio painted. It still hangs in St. John's Co-Cathedral, for which it was commissioned and where Caravaggio himself was inducted and briefly served as a knight.

Death

Caravaggio had a fever at the time of his death, and what killed him was a matter of controversy and rumour at the time and has been a matter of historical debate and study since. Contemporary rumours held that either the Tomassoni family or the Knights had him killed in revenge. Traditionally historians have long thought he died of syphilis. Some have said he had malaria, or possibly brucellosis from unpasteurised dairy. Some scholars have argued that Caravaggio was actually attacked and killed by the same "enemies" that had been pursuing him since he fled Malta, possibly Wignacourt or factions of the Knights.

Caravaggio was buried in the San Sebastiano cemetery of Porto Ercole (in Grosseto) and the remains were moved to the St. Erasmus cemetery when the former closed in 1956. In 2010, archaeologists conducted a year-long investigation of remains found in three crypts and, after using DNA, carbon dating and other methods, declared that they believe with a high degree of confidence that they have identified them to be Caravaggio's. Initial tests suggested Caravaggio might have died of lead poisoning – paints used at the time contained high amounts of lead salts – and Caravaggio is known to have indulged in violent behavior, such as is caused by lead poisoning. Later research published in 2018 concluded he died as the result of a wound sustained in a brawl in Naples, specifically from sepsis caused by Staphylococcus aureus.

Vatican documents released in 2002 support the theory that the wealthy Tomassoni family had him hunted down and killed as a vendetta for Caravaggio's murder of gangster Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a botched attempt at castration after a duel over the affections of model Fillide Melandroni.

Sexuality

Since the 1970s art scholars and historians have debated the inferences of homoeroticism in Caravaggio's works as a way to better understand the man. Caravaggio never married and had no known children, and Howard Hibbard observed the absence of erotic female figures in the artist's oeuvre: "In his entire career he did not paint a single female nude", and the cabinet-pieces from the Del Monte period are replete with "full-lipped, languorous boys ... who seem to solicit the onlooker with their offers of fruit, wine, flowers—and themselves" suggesting an erotic interest in the male form. The model for Amor vincit omnia, Cecco del Caravaggio, lived with the artist in Rome and stayed with him even after he was obliged to leave the city in 1606. The two may have been lovers.

A connection with a certain Lena is mentioned in a 1605 court deposition by Pasqualone, where she is described as "Michelangelo's girl". According to G. B. Passeri, this 'Lena' was Caravaggio's model for the Madonna di Loreto; and according to Catherine Puglisi, 'Lena' may have been the same person as the courtesan Maddalena di Paolo Antognetti, who named Caravaggio as an "intimate friend" by her own testimony in 1604. Caravaggio was also rumoured to be madly in love with Fillide Melandroni, a well known Roman prostitute who modeled for him in several important paintings.

Caravaggio's sexuality also received early speculation due to claims about the artist by Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. Writing in 1783, Mirabeau contrasted the personal life of Caravaggio directly with the writings of St Paul in the Book of Romans, arguing that "Romans" excessively practice sodomy or homosexuality. The Holy Mother Catholic Church teachings on morality (and so on; short book title) contains the Latin phrase "Et fœminæ eorum immutaverunt naturalem usum in eum usum qui est contra naturam." ("and their women changed their natural habit to that which is against nature"). The phrase, according to Mirabeau, entered Caravaggio's thoughts, and he claimed that such an "abomination" could be witnessed through a particular painting housed at the Museum of the Grand Duke of Tuscany—featuring a rosary of a blasphemous nature, in which a circle of thirty men (turpiter ligati) are intertwined in embrace and presented in unbridled composition. Mirabeau notes the affectionate nature of Caravaggio's depiction reflects the voluptuous glow of the artist's sexuality. By the late nineteenth century, Sir Richard Francis Burton identified the painting as Caravaggio's painting of St. Rosario. Burton also identifies both St. Rosario and this painting with the practices of Tiberius mentioned by Seneca the Younger. The survival status and location of Caravaggio's painting is unknown. No such painting appears in his or his school's catalogues.

As an artist

The birth of Baroque

Caravaggio "put the oscuro (shadows) into chiaroscuro". Chiaroscuro was practised long before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique a dominant stylistic element, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light. With this came the acute observation of physical and psychological reality that formed the ground both for his immense popularity and for his frequent problems with his religious commissions.

He worked at great speed, from live models, scoring basic guides directly onto the canvas with the end of the brush handle; very few of Caravaggio's drawings appear to have survived, and it is likely that he preferred to work directly on the canvas, an unusual approach at the time. His models were basic to his realism; some have been identified, including Mario Minniti and Francesco Boneri, both fellow artists, Minniti appearing as various figures in the early secular works, the young Boneri as a succession of angels, Baptists and Davids in the later canvasses. His female models include Fillide Melandroni, Anna Bianchini, and Maddalena Antognetti (the "Lena" mentioned in court documents of the "artichoke" case as Caravaggio's concubine), all well-known prostitutes, who appear as female religious figures including the Virgin and various saints. Caravaggio himself appears in several paintings, his final self-portrait being as the witness on the far right to the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula.

Caravaggio had a noteworthy ability to express in one scene of unsurpassed vividness the passing of a crucial moment. The Supper at Emmaus depicts the recognition of Christ by his disciples: a moment before he is a fellow traveller, mourning the passing of the Messiah, as he never ceases to be to the innkeeper's eyes; the second after, he is the Saviour. In The Calling of St Matthew, the hand of the Saint points to himself as if he were saying, "who, me?", while his eyes, fixed upon the figure of Christ, have already said, "Yes, I will follow you". With The Resurrection of Lazarus, he goes a step further, giving a glimpse of the actual physical process of resurrection. The body of Lazarus is still in the throes of rigor mortis, but his hand, facing and recognising that of Christ, is alive. Other major Baroque artists would travel the same path, for example Bernini, fascinated with themes from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The Caravaggisti

The installation of the St. Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had an immediate impact among the younger artists in Rome, and Caravaggism became the cutting edge for every ambitious young painter. The first Caravaggisti included Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Baglione. Baglione's Caravaggio phase was short-lived; Caravaggio later accused him of plagiarism and the two were involved in a long feud. Baglione went on to write the first biography of Caravaggio. In the next generation of Caravaggisti, there were Carlo Saraceni, Bartolomeo Manfredi and Orazio Borgianni. Gentileschi, despite being considerably older, was the only one of these artists to live much beyond 1620 and ended up as a court painter to Charles I of England. His daughter Artemisia Gentileschi was also stylistically close to Caravaggio and one of the most gifted of the movement. However, in Rome and Italy, it was not Caravaggio, but the influence of his rival Annibale Carracci, blending elements from the High Renaissance and Lombard realism, that ultimately triumphed.

Caravaggio's brief stay in Naples produced a notable school of Neapolitan Caravaggisti, including Battistello Caracciolo and Carlo Sellitto. The Caravaggisti movement there ended with a terrible outbreak of plague in 1656, but the Spanish connection—Naples was a possession of Spain—was instrumental in forming the important Spanish branch of his influence.

Rubens was likely one of the first Flemish artists to be influenced by Caravaggio whose work he got to know during his stay in Rome in 1601. He later painted a copy (or rather an interpretation) of Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ and recommended his patron, the Duke of Mantua, purchase Death of the Virgin (Louvre). Although some of this interest in Caravaggio is reflected in his drawings during his Italian residence, it was only after his return to Antwerp in 1608 that Rubens' works show openly Caravaggesque traits such as in the Cain slaying Abel (1608–1609) (Courtauld Institute of Art) and the Old Woman and Boy with Candles (1618–1619) (Mauritshuis). However, the influence of Caravaggio on Rubens' work would be less important than that of Raphael, Correggio, Barocci and the Venetians. Flemish artists, who were influenced by Rubens, such as Jacob Jordaens, Pieter van Mol, Gaspar de Crayer and Willem Jacob Herreyns, also used certain stark realism and strong contrasts of light and shadow, common to the Caravaggesque style.

A number of Catholic artists from Utrecht, including Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen travelled in the first decades of the 17th century to Rome. Here they became profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio and his followers. On their return to Utrecht, their Caravaggesque works inspired a short-lived but influential flowering of artworks inspired indirectly in style and subject matter by the works of Caravaggio and the Italian followers of Caravaggio. This style of painting was later referred to as Utrecht Caravaggism. In the following generation of Dutch artists the effects of Caravaggio, although attenuated, are to be seen in the work of Vermeer and Rembrandt, neither of whom visited Italy.

Death and rebirth of a reputation

Caravaggio's innovations inspired the Baroque, but the Baroque took the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism. While he directly influenced the style of the artists mentioned above, and, at a distance, the Frenchmen Georges de La Tour and Simon Vouet, and the Spaniard Giuseppe Ribera, within a few decades his works were being ascribed to less scandalous artists, or simply overlooked. The Baroque, to which he contributed so much, had evolved, and fashions had changed, but perhaps more pertinently, Caravaggio never established a workshop as the Carracci did and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical approach to art, the psychological realism that may only be deduced from his surviving work.

Thus his reputation was doubly vulnerable to the unsympathetic critiques of his earliest biographers, Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter with a vendetta, and the influential 17th-century critic Gian Pietro Bellori, who had not known him but was under the influence of the earlier Giovanni Battista Agucchi and Bellori's friend Poussin, in preferring the "classical-idealistic" tradition of the Bolognese school led by the Carracci. Baglione, his first biographer, played a considerable part in creating the legend of Caravaggio's unstable and violent character, as well as his inability to draw.

In the 1920s, art critic Roberto Longhi brought Caravaggio's name once more to the foreground and placed him in the European tradition: "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different". The influential Bernard Berenson agreed: "With the exception of Michelangelo, no other Italian painter exercised so great an influence."

Epitaph

Caravaggio's epitaph was composed by his friend Marzio Milesi. It reads:

"Michelangelo Merisi, son of Fermo di Caravaggio – in painting not equal to a painter, but to Nature itself – died in Port' Ercole – betaking himself hither from Naples – returning to Rome – 15th calend of August – In the year of our Lord 1610 – He lived thirty-six years nine months and twenty days – Marzio Milesi, Jurisconsult – Dedicated this to a friend of extraordinary genius."

He was commemorated on the front of the Banca d'Italia 100,000-lire banknote in the 1980s and '90s (before Italy switched to the euro), with the back showing his Basket of Fruit.

Oeuvre

There is disagreement as to the size of Caravaggio's oeuvre, with counts as low as 40 and as high as 80. In his monograph of 1983, the Caravaggio scholar Alfred Moir wrote, "The forty-eight color plates in this book include almost all of the surviving works accepted by every Caravaggio expert as autograph, and even the least demanding would add fewer than a dozen more", but there have been some generally accepted additions since then. One, The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, was in 2006 authenticated and restored; it had been in storage in Hampton Court, mislabeled as a copy. Richard Francis Burton writes of a "picture of St. Rosario (in the museum of the Grand Duke of Tuscany), showing a circle of thirty men turpiter ligati" ("lewdly banded"), which is not known to have survived. The rejected version of Saint Matthew and the Angel, intended for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, was acquired by Vincenzo Giustiniani, and ultimately acquired by the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (now the Gemäldegalerie) in Berlin. It was among the large paintings transported to the Friedrichshain flak tower. It is presumed to have been destroyed during a fire in 1945, though black and white photographs of the work exist. In June 2011 it was announced that a previously unknown Caravaggio painting of Saint Augustine dating to about 1600 had been discovered in a private collection in Britain. Called a "significant discovery", the painting had never been published and is thought to have been commissioned by Vincenzo Giustiniani, a patron of the painter in Rome.

A painting depicting Judith Beheading Holofernes was allegedly discovered in an attic in Toulouse in 2014. In April 2016 the expert and art dealer to whom the work was shown announced that this was a long-lost painting by the hand of Caravaggio himself. That lost Caravaggio painting was only known up to that date by a presumed copy of it by the Flemish painter Louis Finson, who had shared a studio with Caravaggio in Naples. The French government imposed an export ban on the newly discovered painting while tests were carried out to establish whether it was an authentic painting by Caravaggio. In February 2019 it was announced that the painting would be sold at auction after the Louvre had turned down the opportunity to purchase it for €100 million. After an auction was considered, the painting was finally sold in a private sale to the American billionaire hedge fund manager J. Tomilson Hill. The art historical world is not united over the attribution of the work, with the art dealer who sold the work promoting its authenticity with the support of art historians who were given privileged access to the work, while other art historians remain unconvinced mainly based on stylistic and quality considerations. Some art historians believe it may be a work by Louis Finson himself.

Theft

In October 1969, two thieves entered the Oratory of Saint Lawrence in Palermo, Sicily, and stole Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence from its frame. Experts estimated its value at $20 million.

Following the theft, Italian police set up an art theft task force with the specific aim of re-acquiring lost and stolen artworks. Since the creation of this task force, many leads have been followed regarding the Nativity. Former Italian mafia members have stated that Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence was stolen by the Sicilian Mafia and displayed at important mafia gatherings. Former mafia members have said that the Nativity was damaged and has since been destroyed.

The whereabouts of the painting are still unknown. A reproduction currently hangs in its place in the Oratory of San Lorenzo.

In December 1984, Saint Jerome Writing (Caravaggio, Valletta) was stolen from the St. John's Co-Cathedral, Malta. The canvas was cut out of the frame. The painting was recovered two years later, following negotiations between the thieves and Fr. Marius J. Zerafa, then the Director of Museums in Malta. A full account of the theft and successful recovery had been recorded by Fr. Marius J. Zerafa in his book Caravaggio Diaries.

In popular culture

Caravaggio's work has been widely influential in late-20th-century American gay culture, with frequent references to male sexual imagery in paintings such as The Musicians and Amor Victorious. Several poems written by Thom Gunn were responses to specific Caravaggio paintings, and British filmmaker Derek Jarman made a critically applauded biopic entitled Caravaggio in 1986.

Another biopic, L'Ombra di Caravaggio (Caravaggio's Shadow), directed by Michele Placido and starring Riccardo Scamarcio, was released in 2022.

Caravaggio was prominently featured as motif in Steven Zaillian's Netflix series Ripley, based on Patricia Highsmith's book The Talented Mr. Ripley. The murder of Rannucchio is also depicted. Caravaggio is portrayed by Daniele Rienzo.

Caravaggio, a full-length documentary on his life by Phil Grabsky and David Bickerstaff was released in November 2025.

Contemporary analysis

Caravaggio's baroque art was reassessed as self-consciously political in the 1999 book Quoting Caravaggio by Mieke Bal.