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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ( 1571- 1610), often short Caravaggio after his hometown, was an Italian Renaissance painter, whose large religious works portrayed saints and other biblical figures as ordinary people.
Though these paintings were controversial in the church, the wealthy purchased them for their drama, their spectacular technical accomplishment, their startling originality, and even their homoeroticism .
The Cardsharps, ( Kimbell Art Museum It would be hard to overestimate the impact that Caravaggio's innovations had upon painters of his generation and the generations that followed. His gritty realism, his choice of models, his theatrical lighting, his "night paintings" the rich passages of still life, his eye for color
A short list of artists who owe much to his stylistic breakthroughs would have to include Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, Georges de La Tour, Ribera.
A group of Catholic artists from Utrecht, the "Utrecht Caravaggisti" travelled to Rome as students in the first years of the 17th century and were profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, as Bellori describes. On their return to the north this trend had a short-lived but intense development in the 1620s among painters like Hendrick ter Brugghen , Gerrit van Honthorst Andries Both (illustration, left) and Dirck van Baburen. In the following generation less intense effects of Caravaggio can be traced even in Rubens, Vermeer, RembrandtRembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn ( July 15, 1606 October 4, 1669) is generally considered one of the greatest painters in European art history, and the most important United Provinces ( Netherlands) painter of the seventeenth century. Rembrandt was also a p, and Velazquez, who likely saw his work during his various sojourns in Italy.
In modern times, contemporary painters like the Norwegian Odd NerdrumFigurative painter Odd Nerdrum (born april 8 1944) from Norway has been a controversial artist for many years, claiming among other things that his art should be understood as kitsch rather than art as such. He represents the greco-roman tradition in pain and the Romanian Tibor Csernus make no secret of their attempts to emulate and update his work. Perhaps no single artist in the entire Western canon, outside of Giotto and Massacio, had so much influence beyond his time.