Caravaggio, Bad-Boy of Baroque

Mad, bad and dangerous to know! Long before the Romantics made it fashionable, Caravaggio templated the tear-away artist.

In the first of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s religious paintings, Stigmatisation of Saint Francis, the forms of Saint Francis and an angel are picked out from the darkness by a strong light from the upper left. Saint Francis has just received the wounds of Christ known as the ‘stigmata’, after his vision of Jesus crucified, and is being comforted. However, the wounds of…