Caravaggio: Light and Shadow, Life and Death

Harvard FAS

He came into the world to destroy painting, Nicolas Poussin was recorded to have said of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Caravaggio emerges as a painter in Rome in the 1590s with a radically different take on painting, what subjects were worthy of depiction and how they ought to be conveyed. Nevertheless, he was branded derivative and iconoclastic by his contemporaries. His biographies characterize him as a violent anti-intellectual brute. The paintings show another side. He was a…