Caravaggio Read Online Free

to the rural areas by refugees from the city. In one night, Caravaggio’s father and grandfather succumbed to the plague; his uncle had died not long before. Michelangelo’s mother was left alone (fortunately, with the support of her parents) to raise her four children and a stepdaughter.
    Caravaggio is believed to have received at least the rudiments of a formal education, which at that time would have included the Greek and Latin classics. Decades later, his work would display the lifelong legacy of an effective religious training. His younger brother would go on to study at a prestigious Jesuit college in Rome, and it seems likely that the two brothers started out in school together. Even for a painter, however, Caravaggio had notably little interest in writing—unlike, say, Leonardo da Vinci, who composed learned treatises on subjects ranging from art to medicine and warfare. Nor was he moved to record, or comment on, the events of his life, as was Jacopo Pontormo, whose diary offers intimate updates on the fluctuating state of his appetite and his digestion. No letters from Caravaggio survive; neither, like Michelangelo Buonarroti, did he leave us written work that included poems and grocery lists. Not a single drawing or preparatory sketch by Caravaggio has ever been discovered.
    As far as we know, Caravaggio wrote nothing about himself, certainly nothing about his childhood, and his adult life seems to have included no one who had known him as a boy. Indeed, when his younger brother, Giovan Battista, who had become a priest, asked to see him in Rome, Caravaggio—by then a successful artist—claimed that he did not know him, that they were not brothers at all, that he had no relatives. The rejected Giovan Battista replied “with tenderness” that he had not come for his own sake but for that of his older brother, and for that of his family, if God was someday to grant Michelangelo a wife and children of his own. Tenderness, indeed! Perhaps there was a double edge to this selfless fraternal valediction, since by then it must have been clear to all involved that Caravaggio was unlikely to settle down and become a family man.
    After the horrors of the 1576 plague, Caravaggio vanishes from recorded history until April 6 , 1584 , when a contract was drawn up to certify the official beginning of his apprenticeship in the Milan studio of Simone Peterzano, a former pupil of Titian and a competent but unexceptional painter of religious scenes. Little is known about why young Michelangelo chose a career in art, nor is there much evidence about the earliest manifestations of his talent, though one anecdote relates how, as a small boy helping his father in his duties as a builder for the Colonna family, Michelangelo prepared glue for, and became fascinated with, a group of painters hired to fresco the palace walls. One biographer claims that he attracted attention when, as a child, he scrawled in charcoal on a wall. What does seem undeniable is that the young Caravaggio had plenty of opportunity to study great painting and sculpture in the churches of Milan and even in his hometown, where frescoes by Bernardino Campi decorated a local church.
    According to the terms of Michelangelo Merisi’s contract with Simone Peterzano, the thirteen-year-old apprentice agreed to live with the painter for four years, to work constantly and diligently, to respect his master’s property, and to pay a fee of twenty gold scudi . In return Peterzano agreed to instruct his pupil in the necessary skills (presumably drawing, perspective, anatomy, fresco painting, and the transformation of pigment into paint) so that, at the end of his apprenticeship, he would be capable of making his living as an artist.
    In 1588, the apprenticeship ended. The next year, Caravaggio’s mother died. For a brief time after that, Michelangelo shuttled back and forth between Milan and Caravaggio, settling, sorting out, and rapidly