Caravaggio lived a hot, violent fist of a life. Brief, full of angst, upset, blood, death and a total revolution in painting on a scale only rarely approached in other periods in the history of art.
Michelangelo Merisi, who got his nickname from having grown up in Caravaggio, near Milan, is one of just a handful of artist who completed changed art, shifted the continuum in a new direction.
Along with Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Michelangelo, Turner, Picasso and Duchamp let armchair art historians in the audience suggest who else should be on this list , Caravaggio was a game-changer, invoking a level of naturalism, drama, dramatic use of lighting, and surprising interpretation to religious scenes that turned the art world on its head.
We often hear of how he was a difficult character, and of course know that he fled Rome after having killed a rival, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a fight possibly over a tennis match, certainly due to gang rivalries, and probably because they were both in relationships with the same women, a prostitute , and spent the remainder of his brief life traveling in hopes of a papal pardon for the murder, rarely is his life as a criminal the focal point.
As a professor specializing in art crime, I usually come to Caravaggio from the standpoint of crimes in which his art was the object. But when I teach art history, I teach Caravaggio paintings as whodunit mysteries. Approaching the study of art in terms of detective stories, and then studying detective stories involving works of art, has been my academic focus.
