One of these signs of his incredible genius was the precocity of his talent. The technical training necessary for practising such an art as painting generally requires many years. Yet Caravaggio showed a great mastery of technique as early as twenty-two years old. During this period of his career, his manner of treating light and colour, characteristic of his chiaroscuro palette, as well as his pictorial trend towards Realism had already manifested. Many established facts sap the strength of the words of certain critics who have focused on the lack of education of the young painter or his difficulty to meditate, as he was obliged to work for a living and was deprived of any contact with enlightened and educated men. Just four years after arriving in Rome, Caravaggio was living at Cardinal Del Monte’s, his mind keen for knowledge and scientific discoveries which the Cardinal’s protection could offer him. It was at the Cardinal’s that the intellectual reflection of the painter took shape and that his pictorial work began to be directed towards Rationalism.
This is how the great painter’s aesthetic revolution took place; a man in love with music and the darkness, a quarrelsome criminal, gambler, and a rebel who on many occasions proved himself incapable of submitting to social and moral constraints, and who, despite everything, lived as one who did good and had no burden on his conscience.
Caravaggio led against the unreality of myths and traditions the same satirical battle as the one fought at the same moment by Miguel de Cervantes in the fabulous and chivalrous poems of his Don Quixote. Even if his followers may have attributed the same merit to him, that is a reaction against the abuse of Classicism, the connection between art and life, the distrust for the predominant Greek and Roman aesthetics that Boileau denounced: “who will deliver us from the Greeks and the Romans?” Why not pay this tribute to him – here is Caravaggio’s talent who, first and foremost, promoted such a rebellion in his painting.
He was not only pursuing the “realism of form”, to which many of his precursors may have dedicated themselves, but was expressly searching for the “realism of facts” which made him unique in comparison to other artists of his time or those who had preceded him. His mind, which some have called rough, regarded history and the world from the critical point of view of a philosopher. Any distortion of facts, events, and personalities due to mythology, legends, illusion, or the simple exaggeration, in which an impetuous human being indulges, was rejected by him and mocked, cast off or sent back to its real dimension. Escaping the persecution perpetrated by Herod, the Holy Family abandons itself to the deep sleep that is shared by all tired mortals, a sleep that cannot be interrupted by the angel’s violin music (Rest on the Flight into Egypt). Like all human beings, the Holy Family eats bread and salad and drinks wine. Death gives Christ’s body the same pallid colour as any other corpse and foul-smelling putrefaction exudes from the belly of the dead Madonna (The Death of the Virgin). In the same way, Saint John, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Thomas, and Mary Magdalene could not be more devoid of holiness (The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, The Conversion of Saint Paul, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, and Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy). The proximity of Christ with mankind is clearly shown in the crucifixion scene exhibited in Cleveland (The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew).
Though he sometimes represented Christ in majesty, he did not surround him with musicians, nor even with doctors of the Church followed by a cortege of saints, but with a circle of human beings confronted with the harshness of life (Madonna di Loreto) and with characters who seem to beg that an end is put to their long misery (Madonna of the Rosary).
In the work of Caravaggio, the Holy Trinity itself is disrespectfully thrown down to earth. In The Annunciation in the museum in Nancy, or the Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence, he did not add any kind of halo above Mary’s head. His angels show very visible roundness and strong muscles (The Seven Works of Mercy), suggesting that these divinities were born human.
Far from simply copying reality, Caravaggio was a coherent thinker about truth, which he defended in the most unfavourable conditions, even against the taste and thinking of his time.
The in-depth study left to us by the historian Baldinucci is therefore rich in teachings on the academic filiations of Caravaggio, a forerunner of the Naturalist movement. Michelangelo Merisi, with his critical, independent, and creative mind and strong personality, was unable to conform to the work of a school which required the artist to submit and reproduce with application and faithfulness the masters who preceded him. It is vain and artificial to question the respective value of the work of Carracci and Caravaggio or to try to contrast them.