Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (1571–1610), was a Lombard painter trained in Milan and active in Rome from 1592. Working from living models, he gave religious subjects the physical immediacy of everyday experience. Figures placed close to the picture plane and sharply contrasting illumination establish a direct relationship with the viewer. His early production included still lifes and isolated figures, before the major religious commissions that expanded the scale of his work.

In The Supper at Emmaus of 1601, now in the National Gallery, the disciples’ gestures make their sudden recognition of Christ visible. Light concentrates the action and heightens its dramatic tension. After Rome, Caravaggio worked in Naples, Malta and Sicily. His naturalism and his use of shadow prompted numerous distinct responses across seventeenth-century European painting.

Works recorded at auction