Fundicril caravaggio biography

Home / General Biography Information / Fundicril caravaggio biography

It seems apt that his professional name is linked to the area where he suffered the greatest sense of loss.

In 1584, when he was 13 years old, Caravaggio began a four-year long apprenticeship with a rather unexceptional local artist by the name of Simone Peterzano who had reportedly studied under Titian.

fundicril caravaggio biography

The brushwork was much freer and more impressionistic.

The artist's last years were spent desperately running from one city to another, all the while trying to get a papal pardon to be able to return to Rome. Caravaggio sustained his wound from Tommassoni’s brother, his second, who attempted to shield the mortally wounded Tommassoni from further assaults from Caravaggio.

Whatever the case, by 1592 the impetuous 21-year-old artist decided to pack his bags and move to Rome without any money in his pocket and without having completed a single notable commission that would help him gain work. He ran his workshop like an assembly-line, with Caravaggio in charge of executing all flowers and fruits. Living with a bounty placed on him only encouraged Caravaggio to react violently to anyone he thought might threaten him.

Pope Paul V, whose painting Caravaggio had just finished, issued the death warrant.

Family members were beset by fevers, chills, vomiting, and diarrhoea.

Caravaggio ended up dealing the young Tomassoni a fatal stab wound in the groin. Although no records exist to clarify the exact date of birth, Caravaggio was probably born on the 29th of September, the feast day of the archangel Saint Michael.

Yet by late August 1608 he was arrested and imprisoned.

By 1595, after leaving the employment of the Cesari brothers, Caravaggio was able to make a living from his own work.

Although his family was fairly well-off, as a boy Caravaggio would have witnessed intense pain and suffering all around.

Caravaggio Biography In Details

Caravaggio led a tumultuous life.

Caravaggio's numerous legal problems often meant that the artist would suddenly have to flee Rome or be otherwise unable to complete a commission. Known for his innovative use of light and shadow, later known as tenebrism, his work was also uniquely realistic. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It is assumed that he spent a great deal of time in Milan which was a hotbed of violence and crime which suited the rather irascible young man.

According to that report, money wagered over a tennis match between the two men resulted in a brawl where Caravaggio stabbed Tommassoni in the thigh, likely severed his femoral artery, and caused his death. "His great Sicilian altarpieces isolate their shadowy, pitifully poor figures in vast areas of darkness; they suggest the desperate fears and frailty of man, and at the same time convey, with a new yet desolate tenderness, the beauty of humility and of the meek, who shall inherit the earth." Contemporary reports depict a man whose behaviour was becoming increasingly bizarre, sleeping fully armed and in his clothes, ripping up a painting at a slight word of criticism, mocking the local painters.

After only nine months in Sicily Caravaggio returned to Naples.



After the death of his father, Caravaggio's mother moved her family back to the small town from where the artist got his name. An early published notice on him, dating from 1604 and describing his lifestyle some three years previously, tells how "after a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him." In 1606 he killed a young man in a brawl and fled from Rome with a price on his head.



Cardinal del Monte not only commissioned works from Caravaggio (The Musicians, The Lute Player and The Stigmatization of St. Francis), but also used his influence to secure the young artist the important public commissions necessary to launch his career.

Caravaggio was well known for his ill-temper and lack of consideration of others even in a time of brawling and violence.