Luc van den Heuvel’s Reviews > Caravaggio > Status Update

As a lodger at the Palazzo Madama, he became a prominent artist: controversial, admired and hated in equal measure, but above all, famous.

[…] Caravaggio was struck down by an illness - Roman fever or the plague - that was raging throughout the peninsula. […] Death seemed certain. […] He survived, but the experience marked him forever […].

At eighteen, full of impatience, ambition and the desire to paint, he set off for Rome.

There was no escape, however, for Caravaggio’s father and uncle, who both fell victim to the epidemic. His mother brought up her five children in grinding poverty.

[…] “People speak of Michelangelo de Caravaggio, calling him now a master of shadow, now a master of light. What has been forgotten is that Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different.” And this Caravaggio began a second career as an old master.

At the time, not a single signed painting was known; even today, only one is known.

[…] “In the aftermath of the Renaissance, what begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.”