Unleash.

Leoni, Caravaggio, 1621

VULTURE on how Caravaggio destroyed (and saved) painting ...

Even then, everyone knew something shocking had happened. Painters were “looking upon his works as miracles,” it was written. Rivals groused that “this monster of genius” had wrought the “end of painting.” Artists had spent the previous 50 years revering Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, so much that ersatz Renaissance paintings had become a cottage industry among worshipful painters and princes wanting to show they had the same taste as popes and potentates — much like current monkey-see-monkey-do collectors of contemporary art. Yet there were brilliant Mannerists like Pontormo and Bronzino, who were estranged from this type of classicizing but found ways around it by wildly exaggerating certain aspects of Renaissance paintings: elongating necks, fingers, and torsos till bodies became paranormal apparitions to express strained emotions in ethereal spaces. In one fell swoop, Caravaggio shattered Renaissance wholeness, clarity, recessional space, and unity, along with Mannerism’s aristocratic affectations, anxious self-consciousness, and abstruse optical effects. (I adore Mannerism for all of this.) Caravaggio’s work seems to unleash new human forces into art; whirling, corkscrewing space; shafts of light and shadow; theatricality; and, above all, a new, colossal unideal naturalism of painting from life. He creates an almost modern psychological interiority that leads directly to geniuses like Rembrandt and Velázquez (who dispense with theatrics for miracles of sensual inwardness), Vermeer and Bernini, and, in English literature, to John Milton’s lines like “Blood, death, and deathful deeds are in that noise, Ruin, destruction at the utmost point.” All this is why Caravaggio’s follower Nicolas Poussin praised him for coming “into the world to destroy painting.