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Caravaggio painted with a single hard light and let everything else fall into darkness. He worked in Rome, then in flight across Naples, Malta and Sicily. He used street models for saints and gave sacred scenes the shock of ordinary flesh. The pictures are dramatic rather than decorative. Hung well, a Caravaggio print brings weight to a room: deep shadow, one lit face, and the sense that something has just happened.
Caravaggio (1571-1610) changed European painting in under twenty years. Born Michelangelo Merisi in Lombardy, he worked mainly in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily, and died at thirty-eight after a violent and much-documented life. His method was to paint from live models in a darkened room. A single hard light falls across the figures, and everything behind them drops into blackness. The Calling of Saint Matthew turns a tax office into a scene of revelation. David with the Head of Goliath is thought to carry his own face on the severed head. Painters across Europe copied the manner for a century.
The range holds the religious pictures that made his name. Among them are The Taking of Christ, the Conversion on the Way to Damascus and Saint Jerome Writing. Beside them sits the early Roman work: Boy with a Basket of Fruit, the still life of a fruit basket, and the young musicians. Narcissus bending over his reflection sits between the two. Reproduction matters more here than for most painters, because so much of each picture is dark. These prints are made to hold detail in the shadows.
Dark paintings want dark walls. Charcoal, deep olive or ink blue will do more for a Caravaggio print than white plaster, which fights the shadow. Give one large piece a wall to itself and light it from above with a warm picture light. In a dining room the effect after dusk is theatrical. Black or dark bronze frames disappear into the image, while a slim gold moulding pulls it back towards the Baroque.
Every artwork here is an archival print, hand-framed to order and delivered ready to hang — made in India.
