Boy With Basket of Fruit #1

Boy With Basket of Fruit by Caravaggio ... more

by Caravaggio

Title

Boy With Basket of Fruit #1

Artist

Caravaggio

Medium

Painting

Description

Boy With Basket of Fruit by Caravaggio

1610, Porto Ercole, Tuscany), leading Italian painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works.

While most other Italian artists of his time slavishly followed the elegant balletic conventions of late Mannerist painting, Caravaggio painted the stories of the Bible as visceral and often bloody dramas. He staged the events of the distant sacred past as if they were taking place in the present day, often working from live models whom he depicted in starkly modern dress. He accentuated the poverty and common humanity of Christ and his followers, the Apostles, saints, and martyrs, by emphasizing their ragged clothing and dirty feet. He also developed a highly original form of chiaroscuro, using extreme contrasts of light and dark to emphasize details of gesture or facial expression: an outflung arm, a look of despair or longing. His influence on the course of Western art has been immense and has not been limited to the field of painting alone. Caravaggio’s work shaped that of many later artists, ranging from Rembrandt in Holland and Diego Velázquez in Spain to Théodore Géricault in France. His dramatic sense of staging and innovative treatment of light and shade have also directly inspired many leading figures in the medium of cinema, including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Martin Scorsese.

Caravaggio’s reputation was clouded, during his own lifetime and in the aftermath of his untimely death, by the turbulent and ultimately tragic circumstances of his personal life. He committed murder and violent assault while at the peak of his success in Rome and consequently spent much of his later career—when he also created many of his most-compelling works—as a fugitive from justice. Since the mid-20th century his violent exploits and volatile character have enhanced his popular appeal as a perceived outsider and rebel against convention. His presumed but unproven homosexual tendencies, which have been inferred both from his paintings and from certain historical documents, have added greater intrigue to his legend. He might be described as the perfect Old Master for an age in love with the idea of celebrity and in thrall to the cult of a doomed self-destructive genius. In truth he was a more subtle, sensitive, and intellectually ambitious artist than the myths that have accumulated around him might suggest. He was also less of a hothead. Close inspection of the archival information concerning him, his friends, and his enemies—much expanded by late 20th-century research in the archives of Rome, Naples, and Malta—has revealed that even his most apparently impulsive acts were governed by a certain logic, even if it was often the logic of vendetta. He was a violent man, but he lived in violent times, and he was as much sinned against as sinning.

Uploaded

March 6th, 2020