Michelangelo de Caravaggio – Artist, Painter, Irreverent Hero

I was a teenager when I discovered Caravaggio.

In 1981, when I was twelve years old and in the seventh grade, I spent a great deal of time skipping school and immersing myself in art. I would wander the halls of the MIA[1], the grand museum in my hometown, but there were no Caravaggio’s there, not in the permanent collection.

I discover the renaissance and late renaissance masters without him. And so, five years later when I did encounter the great Michaelangelo de Caravaggio, it was at the Uptown Theatre on Hennepin Avenue, my neighborhood “art-house” cinema. I was introduced to him through a film by Derek Jarman, starring Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean; it captured a great deal of his story, including the character of his life and his irreverent nature…which endeared me to him, it was only then that I became aware of his revolutionary work and extraordinary influence.

The 1986 film titled: Caravaggio was lovely and somewhat surreal, it familiarized me with Caravaggio’s significance to the history of painting, his foremost achievement being the mastery of foreshortening, a technique which allowed his images to leap from the canvass with the illusion of three dimensionality; and then there was his development of the chiaroscuro, the raw power and beauty of bringing light from the darkness which was his signature style.

In 1990 I stood in front of a Caravaggio canvas for the first time. I was in the Navy at the time and on weekend liberty while I was attending Hospital Corps School at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center just north of the city; standing in front of the giant canvas, titled of Mars whipping Cupid, I was stunned and amazed at the dramatic realism in his work.

From that point forward if somebody were to ask me who my favorite painter is, I would say Caravaggio, without hesitation. The more I learned about this masterful artist the more this remained true.

Five years later I was taking a course in art history as an undergraduate at the University of Saint Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota; it was then that I discovered what an anti-establishment hero he was, and because of that spirit within him, even more than his skill as an artist, I consider him a person of heroic stature.

As an Italian painter artist his principle patron was the Church, and the most common subjects he was commissioned to paint were scenes of religious devotion, but…he was imprisoned for his depiction of The Death of the Virgin, because he used the bloating corpse of a prostitute, which  he had taken from the river, as his model. He painted Mary as his model lay, in a state of corruption and decay, which was an act of heresy in his day, because the church taught that Mary was inviolate and incorruptible…even in death.

When he was commissioned to paint the Conversion of Saint Paul, he devoted seventy-five percent of the canvass to the ass of the horse Paul fell from when he was blinded by God while on the road to Damascus…another great joke Caravaggio played on his patron, a heroic gesture, for which he is now well loved.

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[1] Minneapolis Institute of Arts