Abstract
Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio lived a dramatic, turbulent and short life at the uneasy age of the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. He left his native Milan for Rome and helped him create a center of new art with his paintings before he had to flee to justice - prosecuted for murder - in southern Italy and Malta.
He transformed painting by conceiving the demands of the Trident reform: by using the contrast of light and shadow, he brought new means of expression to the emerging Baroque epoch; he again denied the painters' interest in the illusory depiction of the world in its finest qualities and man in the depths of his psyche.