It’s difficult to believe, given the current high reputation of
Michelangelo Merisi
da Caravaggio (1571–1610), that he was ever considered to be
anything but one of the great figures of Italian painting. To his
contemporaries, his horrifying, voluptuous religious
dramas—cinematic stagings of crucial instants in the lives of saints and
martyrs, briefly illuminated for a rapt audience by shafts of
dazzling light—seemed the most exciting work of the time; witness
the numbers of painters who assiduously followed his lead.
Today, even though they are in many ways paradigmatic
of the values of the fiercely religious Counter-Reformation Rome
where Caravaggio mainly worked, from about 1590 to 1606, his
paintings bear witness to an individual struggle between official
pieties and personal observation that seems timeless. Yet, from the
mid-seventeenth century until about fifty years ago, Caravaggio
would not have been included in a list of megastars of Italian
painting.

In his own day, Caravaggio riveted collectors and
fellow artists alike with his virtuoso reporting on things seen.
Sophisticated viewers
were struck
by his insistence on specifics, with his ability to translate subtle
optical and tactile distinctions into painterly effects—a
sharp-eyed realism that he described in what amounts to his only
documented statement about art as knowing “how to paint well and to
imitate natural things well.” In the category of natural things, he
included the transparency and reflectiveness of glass, the subtle
color shifts of overripe fruit, and the differences between velvet and
silk, metal and pottery, young skin and