A killer himself, Caravaggio died at 38 – desperate, disfigured and on the run from the Knights of St John. His greatest works – with which he bargained for his life – cast light on one of art’s darkest mysteries
Both artists were named after the archangel Michael, who cast out the rebel spirits from Heaven. Michelangelo typified the archangel’s immaculate tendency, a model for all artists to follow. Caravaggio tended to the saint’s violent strain, a virtuosic painter, but no angel.
Had Domenico Zampieri – Domenichino – been a happy man, he might never have painted a landscape. For all his talent, he was by nature timid and unsure, traits that invited jealous enemies – “of whom no painter ever had more”, as one Victorian apologist put it – to persecute him both as a person and as an artist. His landscapes – a low genre of art in the 17th century – were
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