The Canon Club: Caravaggio

Born outside Milan in 1571, Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio trained in a local workshop and then launched himself as an artist in Rome in his early 20s. His striking and highly individual style won him wide acclaim and patronage from high levels in the Church and the aristocracy.

But his quarrelsome personality and violence meant he was in and out of jail and culminated in his committing a murder, fleeing to Naples, Malta and Sicily and dying short of forty. 

Andrew Graham Dixon, one of the UK’s leading art historians, has called Caravaggio ‘the most wildly popular of all the old masters’.

In this episode, he details how, plague claimed his father, grandfather, and grandmother in quick succession. Caravaggio’s mother raised the remaining children in poverty, but she, too, died when the future artist was in his early teens.

We learn of how he developed the technique chiaroscuro, the sharp contrast between light and dark, to create a more lurid, cinematic perspective on religious art. Once he moved to Rome, Caravaggio became box office, producing works that shocked and captivated audiences.

His paintings were notable for their realism—biblical figures were depicted not as distant, ethereal beings but as ordinary people, often poor and rough, with dirt under their nails and wrinkles on their faces.

Yet despite his success, Caravaggio’s volatility unsettled those around him. He was arrested multiple times, and, in 1606, when killed a man in a duel, likely over a woman. Forced to flee Rome, Caravaggio sought refuge in Naples, then in Malta, with the infamous Knights of Malta, before dying tragically young.