What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.
Our entire sense of Caravaggio as a modern artist is, according to historians, a fiction. We see what we want to see. It's not even true that Caravaggio was some kind of despised, marginal figure in his lifetime. On the contrary, he was the most famous artist in Rome, the founder of a new kind of sharply illuminated naturalism that influenced every one of Europe's great artists in the 17th century. Caravaggio inspired the early genre paintings of Velazquez in Spain, and the lighting effects of Dutch Golden Age painters. He was recognised as the genius of his age even when he had to flee Rome to escape a murder charge. It was after his death that the critical backlash began; his art was condemned as wild, uncontrolled, gauchely disobedient to the rules of classicism. By the 18th century his influence was downplayed and his low, realist painting was disparaged as an insignificant chapter in the history of art.
Caravaggio looks like our contemporary because his scenes are so mesmerically poised in time, dramatising moments of choice and decision in which we ourselves are implicated. Will you accept the boy's offer of fruit? Will you just stand there watching St Peter being crucified upside down, or will you do something about it? These scenes transfix us as they transfixed their original viewers. And we will always walk away from the Victorious Cupid embarrassed and confused, a little relieved to be back among the nativity scenes and landscapes by other Old Masters, which don't have us blushing and wondering where to put our eyes.
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