Michael caravaggio biography dixon

Caravaggio's art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonised human experience.

A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church.

Michael caravaggio biography dixon

Faces are brightly illuminated. Yet always the shadows encroach, pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all.

Caravaggio's life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights. He was one of the most original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting — the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was elicited when he was under interrogation for the capital crime of libel.

Much of what is known about him has been discovered in the criminal archives of his time.

He lived much of his life as a fugitive, but is caught, now and again, by the sweep