From Caravaggio's activity, three periods can be established (very approximately, and without any claim to rigor): the youthful one, which runs from his first works to about 1595, in which the coloring is generally intense and lively, the taste linear, undulating and sinuous, the plasticity still soft; the period of maturity which runs until his flight from Rome, 1607, in which he powerfully develops the problems of light and movement, at first in an intricate play of often pleasing elements, then increasingly simplifying his own style toward an essential plastic rendering; a simplification that appears at times even summary in his last brief period, in which the color grows turbid, blackish, and the execution is often hurried; but where nevertheless the intuitions of a pictorial genius among the greatest of humanity rise high. Caravaggio himself enunciated his program, as Bellori reports, disdaining the study of the statuary models of antiquity, and maintaining that nature had provided him sufficiently with living models. And Mancini specifies, in 1620, that it is proper to Caravaggio's school to illuminate with a unified light that descends from above without reflections, as in a room with walls colored black, which come and give relief to the painting, adding that this school, operating in such a way, is very observant of the truth. There is therefore in Caravaggio an explicit revolutionary will, which repudiates the supposedly intangible dogmas of the classicizing, or humanistic, tradition of the sixteenth century. Therefore Caravaggio's ascendancy was immense, and without him a great part of the painting of the following centuries is hardly imaginable. - See Pl. XLVII.
