Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan into a family with roots in Caravaggio, where he spent part of his childhood and trained in Milan before settling in Rome around 1592. Working for cardinals and religious orders, he painted altarpieces and half-length genre scenes with unprecedented naturalism and dramatic light. Repeated violence and legal trouble marked his career; after killing a man in 1606 he fled through Naples, Malta, and Sicily. He died at Porto Ercole in 1610 while seeking a papal pardon.
Signature works include The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600; Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome), Bacchus (c. 1596; Uffizi Gallery, Florence), Medusa (c. 1597; Uffizi), The Entombment of Christ (1603–04; Vatican Museums), and David with the Head of Goliath (1609–10; Galleria Borghese, Rome). Later Neapolitan and Maltese altarpieces extend the same language of light and flesh.
Caravaggio’s tenebrism—figures struck by a hard light from deep shadow—reshaped Baroque painting across Europe. He used ordinary models for saints and staged sacred drama as contemporary street theatre. Followers from Rome to Utrecht and Seville made that stark realism an international language. His influence remains visible wherever strong chiaroscuro is used to heighten sacred or secular drama.