Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1599

Rome, Palazzo Barberini, Inv: 2533

Image here via: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caravaggio_Judith_Beheading_Holofernes.jpg

“It is a work made by a painter that can paint well, but of a dark spirit, and who has been for a lot of time, far from God and from His adoration and from any good thought.”

So said a cleric of Caravaggio and his painting of the Madonna, in 1606.

Best-sellers have been written about this artist in our own time, and his cult sprang up not long after his untimely death in 1610. Over the course of the seventeenth century, his techniques and “tricks” influenced a host of Western artists, from Spain to the Netherlands. Velázquez, Rembrandt, Artemisia Gentileschi… they were all Caravaggists in one way or another. It all came down to the treatment of light. The early renaissance artists had understood the dramatic potential of light and shade, but Caravaggio took this to a whole new level, with tenebrism – a heightened contrast of light and dark, which makes every moment and gesture pregnant with dramatic meaning.

And in his life as in his art, drama was never far away from this violent, turbulent artist. Let’s go on the run with him – all the way from Rome to Malta, via Naples and Sicily. Fortunately, he left plenty of paintings in his wake.

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