The Violence of Caravaggio

Subject  > Art Essays  > Works of Art

The Violence of Caravaggio Caravaggio is considered to be one of the greatest artists of all time; his style was one of a kind, especially compared to the art in Italy. His method of painting was one of a kind, and a great reason for his popularity. He set the trend for future painters; he had many followers who took after him, but compared to the painters of his time, he was unique. He was a very different man, he looked at figures and stories in a completely different light (literally). His life was very short, as were many artists' lives in the early centuries, but still action-packed. He was born in a time of many ...

... adhered to the established pictorial norms of his time. The artist's taste for violence and realism was not located in his subconscious--however offensive his personal behavior may have been--or in the world of devotional aesthetics, but rather in his conscious recollection of the real violence that permeated his and his viewers' everyday experience. In the Rome of his time, punishment for crime focused more on retribution than on rehabilitation, and he appears to have been uniquely predisposed to benefit from the opportunities afforded by violent spectacles such as public executions and corporal punishments. When he depicted violent scenes, especially toward the end of his life, he created them from the experience that he shared with

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