Ebook: The complete paintings of Caravaggio

The name of Caravaggio has passed down the centuries as that of an enfant terrible, a prophet of realism and the creator of an aesthetic revolution. He has been alternately villain and hero, sometimes both at once. To his contemporaries he was a phenomenon, whom they feared, admired and did not quite understand. To the next generation he was a gifted painter but a dangerous influence who had undermined the established laws of art.The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries largely lost interest in him. To Ruskin he was the 'black slave' of painting. In our own time, however, his reputation has risen higher than ever before. He has been called the first modern painter; he has been set up as the original anti-academic and antiidealist artist, the arch-rebel who first bravely sacrificed beauty for the sake of truth.