Caravaggio
Caravaggio is a magnificent painter and it was a pity that his excesses and bully life led to a premature death at 38. He killed a young man and the Pope put a price on his head and he had to run away. He was a pupil of Titian. He was commissioned with important works for the Church.
He painted many religious scenes.
Caravaggio must have been a psychopath by our current standards, by the violence he perpetrated on other people, his truculunt life and suspicions of what we now name paedophilia.
His cupid (Amor vincit omnia) is not the idealized beautiful fair angel, rather a boy with a grin impertinent look, naughty kid.
When I think of Baroque I think of Rubens or Titian. Caravaggio seems too realist.
IOn Caravaggio's neoclassicism
think that classifications are useful and a way to organize our thought, but they are also limitative because they tend to generalize very distinctive characteristics of certain artists. Caravaggio has this distinctive quality. The chiaroscuro is really one of the characteristics that shows in many other painters he probably influenced and he has this photographic quality that turns the paintings so alive.
Many other painters have distinctive features, like the Renaissance painter El Greco with his elongated figures. Coming from Crete his orthodox origin may have influenced his paintings from the orthodox icon paintings, which also have the elongated feature. At the time, Crete was under Venetian rule and he studied in Venetia where great schools existed, like Titian and Tintoretto. He works for the Church in Rome, then he goes to Spain and remained for the rest of his life in Toledo. He painted many portraits, but the religious scenes for churches are probably the most iconic with all those saints with ascetic looks like St. Sebastian martyrdom - http://www.el-greco-foundation.org/ or St. Martin and the Beggar.
His Cardinal suggested me another impressive painting by Francis Bacon The Pope, though the source for his inspiration seems to have been Velasquez.
