_Caravaggio_ (Naturalist: 1569-1609).
Michael Angelo Amerighi, the son of a mason, is usually called
Caravaggio from his birthplace, a town of that name near
Milan.[99] He was the leader of the so-called "Naturalist"
School (see introduction to "The Later Italian Schools"),
which numbered among its disciples Spagnoletto (235) and the
Dutch Gerard von Honthorst (1444). The characteristics of his
art, as described below, were not out of keeping with the
sombre character of the man.[100] He had established himself
as a painter at Rome, when he had to fly for homicide. He was
playing at tennis and became so violent in a dispute that he
killed his companion. After a short stay at Naples he went to
Malta, where he gained the favour of the grand-master, and was
made a Knight of the Cross of Malta. His ungovernable temper,
however, again led him into trouble, and quarrelling with one
of the knights, he was cast into prison. He escaped to Sicily
and thence returned to Naples. Having procured the Pope's
pardon for his original offence, he hired a felucca and set
sail for Rome. The coast-guard arrested him in mistake for
another person; the crew of the felucca plundered him of all
his belongings; and after wandering disconsolately along the
coast, he was seized with fever, and died at the early age of
forty.
One notices first in this picture the least important things--the
supper before the company, the roast chicken before Christ. Next one
sees how coarse and almost ruffianly are the disciples, represented
as supping with their risen Lord at Emmaus (Luke xxiv. 30, 31). Both
points are characteristic of the painter, who was driven by the
insipidities of the preceding mannerists into a crude "realism," which
made him resolve to describe sacred and historical events just as
though they were being enacted in a slum by butchers and fishwives.
"He was led away," says Lanzi (i. 452), "by his sombre genius, and
represented objects with very little light. He ridiculed all artists
who attempted a noble expression of countenance or graceful folding of
drapery." His first altar-piece was removed by the priests for whom it
was painted, as being too vulgar for such a subject. "Many interesting
studies from the taverns of Italy remain to prove Caravaggio's
mastery over scenes of common life. For the historian of manners in
seventeenth-century Italy, those pictures have a truly precious value,
as they are executed with such passion as to raise them above the more
careful but more lymphatic transcripts from beer-cellars in Dutch
painting. But when he applied his principles to higher subjects, then
vulgarity became apparent. It seems difficult for realism, either
in literature or art, not to fasten upon ugliness, vice, pain, and
disease, as though these imperfections of our nature were more real
than beauty, goodness, pleasure, and health. Therefore Caravaggio, the
leader of a school which the Italians christened Naturalists, may be
compared to Zola" (_Symonds_, vii. 221).