Caravaggio

Caravaggio is one of the most sensuous painters of all time. And of the major European painters who sought to overthrow established artistic orthodoxies through a return to, or a strengthening of, naturalism (Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Courbet, Manet), Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (1571-1610), was perhaps the most revolutionary.

John Gash, Lecturer in Art History at the University of Aberdeen, examines how Caravaggio's principal innovations--his use of chiaroscuro, his practice of painting directly from posed models--formed part of a polemical yet highly expressive rhetoric of the real.