A Controversial Painter of Post-Renaissance, Michelangelo...

Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio (1571-1610) is heralded as the last, and the most controversial painter of the Italian post-Renaissance. In an age when the papacy itself was self-indulgent, corrupt and immoral, Caravaggios sexual ambivalence, his propensity for violence and his scorn for the law made him the enfant terrible of the Italian aristocracy. Qualities that only succeeded in furthering Caravaggio’s notoriety and success. Caravaggios endeavors into art began In 1584 when he was apprenticed for four years in Milan to the Lombard painter Simone Peterzano (1540-1596), who claimed to have studied under Titian. Peterzano’s speciality ‘was doing frigid and cluttered pastiches of Michelangelo’ - Caravaggio - documentary by Robert Hughes (1975) 1 of 7 After which he moved to Rome. Caravaggio would use models from the street, hiring pimps, prostitutes and street urchins to pose as sensuous, sometimes nude models for the Catholic Churches commissions of sacred religious icons, dressing the New Testament figures in his paintings in the clothing of his own contemporaries, complete with bare feet and dirt under their fingernails. This radical naturalism shocked and delighted his patrons, who (in light of the Protestant reformation) were seeking a simpler, more direct art that would have a maximum effect in stirring emotion and recruiting the Protestant dissidents. What little is known of Caravaggio’s life is exposed as the artist having a deeply troubled personality,