Free Essays, Term Papers, Research Papers at Anti Essays

I. Caravaggio and the Naturalism


At the beginning of 1600 Europe set out towards a very hard economic crisis causing famines
and pestilences, with a slowdown of the commerce, of the manufacturing activities and the
agriculture. While nations like Holland and England were able to find new resources to escape the situation of recession, the Italian states find themselves embarking upon a long period of darkening due to the shift of the commercial interest towards the colonies ,started the previous century. It also owed to the different political choices made by the Italian states towards the European powers.

In this substantially declining situation, the arts and the sciences knew an intense and fecund
period. In Italy we had the revolutionary discoveries of Galileo Galilei and the birth of a new
artistic movement promoted by the Roman patronage which , from the Council of Trent
(1545-1563), had never stopped in promoting cultural initiatives.

The tired repetitiveness of some manieristici schemes in the paintings of the last decades of
the Cinquecento produced a lively intolerance of a few young Lombard artists which, in a
short time, become the protagonists of a radical reform of the painting.

Michelangelo Merisi, well know as Caravaggio, and the three Carracci come from a common cultural background, the Lombard naturalism, and embrace a deep renewal of the figurative culture, abandoning the virtuosity and the artifice of the Mannerism to bring back likelihood to the works of art.

Michelangelo Merisi was born in Milan in 1571 but his family came from the city of Caravaggio. In 1592 he moved to Rome where he started to work in the art bottega of Giuseppe Cesari, well know as Cavalier D’Arpino, one of the last exponents of the Mannerism. His duty was to paint compositions of fruits and flowers.
Giovanni Baglione, a biographer...