Caravaggio's Artistic Techniques, Medium, and Impact on Roman History

This report delves into the art of Caravaggio, examining his life, artistic style, and significant contributions to Roman history and the art world. The report highlights Caravaggio's innovative use of tenebrism and extreme realism, showcasing his ability to capture dramatic moments with vivid intensity. It explores his revolutionary portrayals of religious figures and his impact on Baroque painting. Furthermore, the report provides a detailed analysis of Caravaggio's use of oil as his primary medium, discussing its advantages, such as the flexibility to add depth and create effects and its disadvantages, including the slow drying time, and how it enabled him to achieve his artistic vision. The report also touches upon the influence of his work on subsequent artists and the reevaluation of his significance in the 20th century. The report is written in response to an assignment brief that required an exploration of an artist's work, incorporating both artistic style and the technical aspects of the medium used, such as oil paint.

Running head: ROMAN HISTORY
Roman History
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Topic chosen: Caravaggio and his art
Information about the artist
Caravaggio, by name of Michelangelo Merisi, was born September 29, 1571 in Italy. He was a
leading Italian painter from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, renowned both for his vivid
and unsettling realism and violent exploits. His works blend a detailed physical and emotional
perception of the human condition with a radically inspired decoration of Baroque art. Before
traveling to Rome in his twenties Caravaggio studied in Milan as a painter (Poropat et al. 2018).
As an artist and a aggressive, touching and offensive individual he built a considerable
reputation. A uprising led to a killing penalty which coerced him into fleeing to Naples. Again,
he established himself there as one of his generation's leading Italian painters. He visited Malta
and Sicily in 1607 and requested papal remission of his conviction. In 1609 he engaged in a
brutal altercation in Naples, where he had a facial disfigurement and rumors spread of his death.
His erroneous and odd conduct posed concerns about his mental health (Jones 2017). On his
return to Rome from Naples he died in unknown circumstances in 1610. According to sources,
he was suffering from a fever, but claims that he was killed or died from lead poisoning were
made.
The style of Caravaggio
With the drastic use of tenebrism, Caravaggio, in his paintings, has used close physical
observation. The technique became a popular stylistic feature, with shadows darkening as well as
transfixing subjects down bright light shafts. Caravaggio depicted dramatic moments and events,
often with brutal combat, torture and killing. He was able to work on a rapid manner with live

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models and tended to skip sketches and work on the canvas directly. He had a major influence on
the modern, manneric Baroque style.
According to the researchers, while Caravaggio didn't invent the chiaroscuro technique, he was
the first painter to use the technique as the main stylistic feature, to darken the shadows and to
emphasize precisely defined rays of light. The style has become more popular in his later work
and is associated with more sophisticated photographs afterwards (Stone 2017). The populist
portrayals of religious figures by Caravaggio are revolutionary, with unidealized presentation of
biblical characters by incorporating indications of ages and hardship and use of contemporary
vestments. It aimed to humanize the Divine nature and make it more available to the average
audience. Caravaggio became a kind of theological imperialism in this work (Mormando 2018).
Caravaggio's naked, filthy feet combined the works of the artist with church doctrines, which
reflected Christ's suffering as well as the demands for purity in religious art after the Trent
Concilium (1545-1563). These portrayals have attracted some sharp criticism from Caravaggio,
considering this identification with the existing dogma.
The inventions of Caravaggio influenced the baroque painting, however the Baroqe had
incorporated the drama of Caravago's chiarcuro without incorporating the psychological realism.
The trend had grown and Caravaggio has been out of favor. His interest in his work was renewed
in the 20th century and his significance was reevaluated for the advancement of Western art. The
art historian of the 19th century, André Berne-Joffroy, stated that "What starts with the work of
Caravaggio is simply modern painting." Caravaggio "put the oscuro (shadows) into chiaroscuro."
Chiaroscuro was studied well prior to the emergence of Caravaggio, but the technique became a
dominant stylistic feature that distorted the darkness and turned the subject into a bright light

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tube. This gave him a close look at physical and psychological reality, both because of his
tremendous success and because of his numerous issues with his religious commissions.
Li (2018) have stated that the artist possessed a commendable ability of expressing the passing
of a crucial moment in a single scene of unsuppressed vividness. The supper at Emmaus reflects
his disciples 'appreciation of Christ: a moment before, he is a traveler's friend, he mourns that the
Lord goes by, as he is still before the eyes of the innkeeper; the second after that, he becomes the
Savior. The hand of the saint gestures to himself in the Call of St. Matthew as if he is asking,
"What, me?" Although the eyes of him, focused on Christ's face, already have been thinking,
"Indeed, I will follow you." In Lazarus 'regeneration, he goes a little deeper and gives us an
glimpse into the real regeneration physical process. The Lazarus corpse is still in a hustle and
bustle of the mortis, but his hand is alive, embracing God and remembering him. Many major
baroque musicians, such as Bernini, obsessed with Ovid's Metamorphoses themes, would follow
the same route (Arenas 2016).
Along with tentebrism, another major style of Caravaggio included extreme realism. His
contemporaries hardly recognized Caravaggio's extreme degree of realism. The visionary people
behind the Council of Trent wanted art to be more realistic than the mannerist illusions, but
Caravaggio goes beyond this order. From filthy finger tips, filthy foot heads, blowjob and worm
holes on apples and trousers in split hands, this artist reveals everything. These specifics were
not sufficient for decorating the holy characters. There is one painting of a cardinal's secretary:
"There's little else than vulgarity, sacrilege, ungodliness and shame ... it's a work of a man who
can paint well with a dark mind, and for a long time he has been separated from God, His love,
and some decent thinking ..." Art historians have long been speculating about the source of the
realism of Caravaggio. Helen Langdon suggests that the unusual naturism that characterized the

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mature style of Caravaggio most likely stemmed from his development to be a young artist, as
there was a clear naturalistic theme in art of the Lombardy region.
Sapir (2017) have pointed out that one of the most mention worthy style of the painter includes
coextensive painting. Caravaggio had a rare ability to extend his work beyond the plane of the
image into the space of the audience. In the Supper of Emmaus, for instance, the viewer is like
one fifth actor on the scene. The apostle's arms on the right extend into our room, while the dusty
fruit can almost fall on the viewer's feet.
Impact of the Medium used by Caravaggio for his painting
As a medium of his painting Caravaggio used to use oil. Most of the Baroque artists
produced a large proportion of their income in Churches or elsewhere from significant fresco
commissions. However, Caravaggio declined to paint on canvas in fresco for his whole career,
and instead used oil. If Caravaggio did not have the capacity to paint fresco or whether this was
yet another unique peculiarity is unclear. However, according to a g0od number of researchers,
the artist used oil as his painting medium in order to enhance the details of the objects in his
paintings. The painter used to use ground oils on linen canvas for painting. One of the chief
advantages of using oil as the painting medium is that oil paints are more flexible than any other
form of paints like Fresco and they possess the potential to add more depth to the color.
The oil paints provides the painter the opportunity of applying it on canvas in several ways
ranging from glazed diluted with turpentine to dense thick impasto. Considering the fact that oil
paintings are slow today, artists possess the ability to continue working on the paint for a much
longer period of time. Another advantage of using oil as medium is that considering the fact that
oil possesses the potential to bled effortlessly with the surroundings of the paint, it becomes easer

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for the painter to come up with creative strokes and blends (Li 2018). However, while using
other paints, a painter might not be in the position to do it. Thus the medium selected by
Caravaggio helps him to enhance his painting skills.
However, some of the major disadvantage of oil painting is its slow drying property, though it
can be both advantageous and disadvantageous depending on the perspective of the painter, since
oil paintings takes a prolonged amount of time to dry, often it becomes difficult for painters to
move to the next step. Also there also exists a risk of mistakenly mixing colors that are not meant
to be mixed with each other (Stone 2017). When it comes to the method of painting used by
Caravaggio, his method of using the materials were unique. Caravaggio painted from live objects
instead of producing drawings. In the beginning he would trace the contours of the painting with
dark brush strokes. Highlights were applied to the method of building texture with white lead
paint. The outlines are incised with the back of the brush in the wet ink. Finally, it can be said
that the unique styles and paintings of Caravaggio has provided him a crucial place in the roman
history of arts.

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References
Poropat, F., Cozzi, G., Magnolato, A., Monasta, L., Borrometi, F., Krauss, B., Ventura, A. and
Barbi, E., 2018. Teaching pain recognition through art: the Ramsay-Caravaggio sedation scale.
Italian journal of pediatrics, 44(1), p.20.
Jones, P., 2017. Altarpieces and their viewers in the churches of Rome from Caravaggio to
Guido Reni. Routledge.
Stone, D., 2017. Talking Pictures: Sound in Caravaggio’s Art. In Caravaggio (pp. 105-122).
Routledge.
Pamboukian, E. and Carr, H., 2018. Final Writing Portfolio: Caravaggio and Courbet: Through
the Looking Glass.
Mormando, F., 2018. Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity, by Thomas, Troy. Religion and
the Arts, 22(3), pp.362-364.
Li, P., 2018, May. Realistic Exploration of Watercolor Paintings. In 8th International
Conference on Social Network, Communication and Education (SNCE 2018). Atlantis Press.
Arenas, A., 2016. Sex, Violence and Faith: The Art of Caravaggio. Arion: A Journal of
Humanities and the Classics, 23(3), pp.35-52.
Sapir, I., 2017. Shadowy Realism: Negative Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan
Painting. Nuncius, 32(3), pp.640-657.