A DETERMINING MEETING

  The first religious canvas of Caravaggio is San Francisco receiving the stigmas, which some historians, such as Dominique Fernandez, consider the first and most genuine example of Baroque art. Moved by the veracity of the painting, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, ambassador of the Duke of Tuscany at the Holy See. He proposed to the young Lombard "shelter and cubierno" in the Madama palace. It seemed an irresistible proposition and will be a crucial encounter in Caravaggio's biology, but he reluctantly accepted it at Valentin's request, perhaps with the promise that his freedom would be respected.

  Thus between 1595 and 1600 Michelangelo Merisi was under the protection of the high prelate. Turned overnight into a recognized painter thanks to the influences of Cardinal Del Monte, he began for the young master Lombardo his most brilliant and controversial stage in which he committed some of his most important works.

  Caravaggio temporarily abandoned sordid environments and channeled his inner restlessness towards painting. His language gave his paintings "Magdalena Penitente, Santa Marta and Santa Maria Magdalena" an unknown tension until then, in which chiaroscuro played a decisive role.

  These coincidences also reached his profane works "The tahures, Head of Medusa" in which humor and horror appear. The real experiences of the street looked out over the devious, roguish or cheeky faces of their characters. To be true to that truth, as some radiographic analyzes show, such as the one carried out in the second version of "The Good Adventure", Caravaggio dispensed with the previous drawing because he considered that by introducing a preconceived idea into the painting, he falsified its truthfulness. This revolutionary idea scandalized the academicists and also the church. Caravaggio did not limit himself to showing the idealized suffering of the Christian martyrs, but rather exposed the brutality and proximity of the color.

  Caravaggio systematically violates the principle of decorum in the painting sanctioned by the ideologies of the counter-reform, for whom the divine characters should appear with the sacred attributes and not with those who vulgarize them in the eyes of the beholder.

  Despite the good disposition of his protector, Cardinal Del Monte many pictures of Caravaggio were not accepted, which forced him to make new corrected versions of them. Stupor and Scandal caused their Christs, Virgins and Saints represented as close beings, for whom I use models taken from the street and especially those from the unseemly neighborhoods of the city, whose gestures and looks reflected without restraint that point of despair that causes daily struggle for survival in a medium dominated by misery.

  There was the contradictory circumstance that the paintings that the rich bourgeois gave him for the church were rejected by the religious and then bought by art lovers.