Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was the most original and controversial painter of his generation, whose dramatic use of chiaroscuro and unflinching realism revolutionized European painting. His career in Rome was meteoric and violent: he brawled constantly, killed a man in a street fight in 1606, and spent the last four years of his life as a fugitive. His sacred paintings showed saints as peasants with dirty feet and muscular laborers as biblical heroes. He died at 38, possibly of lead poisoning from his own paints, on a beach in Porto Ercole.
