Caravaggio Read Online Free PDF

copious tears he shed during religious services—indulged his interest in philosophy, science, and literature. Under the auspices of Cinzio Aldobrandini, the famous poet Torquato Tasso was invited to Rome, where he remained to work on his epic, Gerusalemme Liberata .
    Caravaggio’s entry into the higher echelons of Roman social and cultural life was not nearly so seamless or smooth. Penniless, dependent on the hospitality of strangers, he moved frequently from cheap inns to spare rooms in the homes of acquaintances of his father’s former employer and of his uncle, a church official. His departures rarely featured fond farewells and warm invitations to return. For a while, he stayed in the Palazzo Colonna, with Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci, a steward in the household of the sister of the former pope, Sixtus V. But Pucci forced the proud young artist to do work that he found degrading, and to make knockoff copies of devotional paintings. In addition, he nearly starved him on a frugal diet, so that later Caravaggio referred to Pucci as Monsignor Insalata .
    After his unsatisfactory sojourn with Monsignor Insalata , Caravaggio briefly and barely supported himself by making pictures to sell on the street. The biographical accounts of whom he stayed with and how he survived are as jumbled and contradictory as his life must have been during this unsettled period. He was said to have spent time in the atelier of a Sicilian who produced cheap art, and it was there that he may have met Mario Minniti, a young Sicilian artist with whom he lived, possibly for years, and who served as a model for several of the luscious, dark-eyed boys in Caravaggio’s early paintings. Ultimately, Minniti returned to Sicily, married, and had children—and was later called upon to be his old friend’s protector, host, guide, and business agent in 1608 , when Caravaggio turned up in Syracuse, in flight from Rome, Naples, and Malta.
    In a marginal note, written by Bellori in the manuscript of Baglione’s biography of Caravaggio—the same inscription that notes that Caravaggio was forced to leave Milan after having committed a murder—Bellori writes that the young painter found work painting three heads a day in the studio of Lorenzo Siciliano, and from there moved on to the employ of Antiveduto Grammatica, a more esteemed and established painter of heads. But the first job that has been convincingly documented took Caravaggio, for eight months or so, into the busy, prosperous studio of Giuseppe Cesari, later known as the Cavaliere d’Arpino.
    A favorite of at least two popes and several powerful cardinals, Cesari was nearly as prickly and difficult as Caravaggio, but far more tractable and eager to please—qualities reflected in the safe presentability of his art. After working on the Vatican frescoes, he was awarded a series of prestigious commissions that included frescoes in the Churches of Santa Prassede and San Luigi dei Francesi, and in the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, where he demonstrated his ability to manipulate perspective and foreshortening in order to give the viewer a sense of rising into the firmament in the company of the apostles and saints.
    If Caravaggio’s paintings are brilliant, nearly photographic representations of miracles in progress, Cesari’s frescoes more often evoke the illustrations in Sunday school textbooks. Indeed, Cesari is one of the many of Caravaggio’s contemporaries whose work reminds us of what it is easy to forget or overlook—that is, how revolutionary Caravaggio was, how much he changed and rejected: the baby-blue heavens, the pillowy clouds, the airy ascensions accompanied by flocks of pigeonlike cherubs and choirs of attractive angels. For Caravaggio, the lives of the saints and martyrs and their dramas of suffering and redemption were played out among real men and women, on earth, in the here and now, and in almost total darkness.
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