CARAVAGGIO Michelangelo Merisi da 1573 - 1610 (Italy) Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573 - 1610) 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. It would be hard to overestimate the impact that Caravaggio's innovations had upon painters of his generation and the generations that followed. A short list of artists who owe much to his stylistic breakthroughs would have to include La Tour, Ribera, Rubens, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and even Velazquez, who likely saw his work during his various sojourns in Italy. Contemporary painters like the Norwegian Odd Nerdrum 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. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia.