1571–1610

Painter

A Stormy Youth in Lombardy.

The figure who was to revolutionize early Italian Baroque painting, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was born near Milan in 1571. His father served as an official in the household of one of the Sforza, the dynasty that had long controlled the great Northern Italian city and its surrounding countryside, Lombardy. Many of the early details of the young Caravaggio's life are shrouded in uncertainty, but it is clear that by 1584 he was living in Milan, where he was apprenticed to a painter. When his father died some years later, Michelangelo Merisi sold his claim to his inheritance and moved to Rome, arriving there in 1592. The earliest biographers of the painter point to certain legal problems that may have prompted Caravaggio to leave Lombardy. One points to quarrels in which the artist may have been engaged, while another...