Caravaggio

By 1600 Caravaggio was the most talked-about painter in Rome, famous for dragging religious pictures down into the street. He lit his saints and martyrs with a hard, raking light out of deep shadow and used real Roman laborers and prostitutes as his models, giving the Virgin dirty feet and apostles the faces of working men. To some clergy it was scandal. To younger painters it was the future.

He was also violent and often armed. On a May day in 1606, after a fight said to involve a wager on a ball game, he ran his sword into a young man named Ranuccio Tommasoni and killed him. A papal court sentenced Caravaggio to death in his absence, a bando that let anyone in the Papal States kill him legally, and he fled Rome for good.

The last four years were a flight south under the protection of powerful friends. He worked at furious speed in Naples, then on Malta, where the ruling knights first honored him and then jailed him after another brawl, then in Sicily, painting some of his darkest, greatest altarpieces as he went. In July 1610, trying to reach Rome on the promise of a pardon, he died of a fever at 38 on the Tuscan coast at Porto Ercole. For about 300 years his name faded, until Italian scholars in the 20th century, led by Roberto Longhi, restored him to the front rank.