Caravaggio was born in Milan, where his father, Fermo (Fermo Merixio), was a household administrator and architect-decorator to The Marchese of Caravaggio, a town 35 km to the east of Milan and south of Bergamo. In 1576 the family moved to Caravaggio (Caravaggius) to escape a plague that ravaged Milan, and Caravaggio’s father and grandfather both died there on the same day in 1577. It is assumed that the artist grew up in Caravaggio, but his family kept up connections with the Sforzas and the powerful Colonna family, who were allied by marriage with the Sforzas and destined to play a major role later in Caravaggio’s life.
Caravaggio’s mother died in 1584, the same year he began his four-year apprenticeship to the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, described in the contract of apprenticeship as a pupil of Titian. Caravaggio appears to have stayed in the Milan-Caravaggio area after his apprenticeship ended, but it is possible that he visited Venice and saw the works of Giorgione, whom Federico Zuccari later accused him of imitating, and Titian. He would also have become familiar with the art treasures of Milan, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, and with the regional Lombard art, a style that valued simplicity and attention to naturalistic detail and was closer to the naturalism of Germany than to the stylised formality and grandeur of Roman Mannerism.
Following his initial training under Simone Peterzano, in 1592 Caravaggio left Milan for Rome, in flight after “certain quarrels” and the wounding of a police officer. The young artist arrived in Rome “naked and extremely needy… without fixed address and without provision… short of money.” During this period he stayed with the miserly Pandolfo Pucci, known as “monnsignor Insalata”. A few months later he was performing hack-work for the highly successful Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Clement VIII’s favourite artist, “painting flowers and fruit” in his factory-like workshop.
In Rome there was demand for paintings to fill the many huge new churches and palazzi
being built at the time. It was also a period when the Church was searching for a stylistic alternative to Mannerism
in religious art that was tasked to counter the threat of Protestantism.
Caravaggio’s innovation was a radical naturalism that combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even
theatrical, use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism (the shift from light to dark with little intermediate value).
Known works from this period include a small Boy Peeling a Fruit (his earliest known painting), a Boy with a Basket of Fruit,
and the Young Sick Bacchus, supposedly a self-portrait done during convalescence from a serious illness that ended his
employment with Cesari. All three demonstrate the physical particularity for which Caravaggio was to become renowned:
the fruit-basket-boy’s produce has been analysed by a professor of horticulture, who was able to identify individual cultivars
right down to “…a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata).