Works by Caravaggio

Caravaggio painted straight onto the canvas from live models, preferring to skip drawings, and threw a hard shaft of light across figures that stand out of near-black shadow.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio trained in Milan under Simone Peterzano and came to Rome in 1592, penniless. In The Cardsharps a boy in dark velvet studies his hand while an older man reads it over his shoulder and signals with two gloved fingers, and the cheat on the right keeps spare cards tucked behind his back. That picture and The Fortune Teller, where a girl eases a ring off a youth's finger as she reads his palm, caught the eye of Cardinal del Monte, who bought both.

After his pictures for the Contarelli Chapel in 1600 he had all the church work he wanted, though some was turned away. The Carmelites refused Death of the Virgin, where the apostles weep under a hanging red curtain, in 1606: one early writer said a known prostitute had posed for Mary, another blamed her bare legs. Supper at Emmaus of 1601 stops at the instant two disciples know Christ, one flinging out his arms, the other gripping his chair to rise, while a fruit basket sits on the very edge of the table.

In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, perhaps by accident, and fled a death sentence to Naples, Malta and Sicily. Severed heads began to recur, often with his own features. In Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, which he sent to the Grand Master of Malta to ask forgiveness, the Baptist's face on the platter is his.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Royal Collections Gallery, National Gallery, Kimbell Art Museum, Louvre.