Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Caravaggio changed European painting in about fifteen years and spent his last four on the run for murder. Born Michelangelo Merisi near Milan in 1571, he was orphaned by plague, apprenticed in Milan, and arrived in Rome around 1592 destitute, painting flowers and fruit in another artist's workshop. Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte took him in around 1595, and the commission for the Contarelli Chapel in 1599 made him famous almost overnight. His method broke with everything taught. He worked directly onto the canvas from live models without preparatory drawings, and used the models he had — prostitutes, street boys, labourers — for saints and apostles, with dirty feet and worn faces. His light comes from a single sharp source out of surrounding darkness, so figures are struck out of blackness. The technique is called tenebrism, and it makes each scene feel like an event rather than an icon. The Calling of St Matthew shows a tax collector at a table of card-sharps pointing at himself in disbelief. Several altarpieces were rejected by their commissioners as indecorous, including a Death of the Virgin for which he was said to have used a drowned woman. He was violent and repeatedly arrested — for carrying a sword without licence, for throwing artichokes at a waiter, for libel. In May 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight and fled Rome under a death sentence. He worked in Naples, Malta, where he was made a knight and then imprisoned, and Sicily, painting faster and darker. He died at Porto Ercole in 1610, aged thirty-eight, pursuing a papal pardon.

• Lived: 1571 CE – 1610 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: painter