Editing Caravaggio (section)

=== Death and rebirth of a reputation ===
[[File:Caravaggio - La Deposizione di Cristo.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|''[[The Entombment of Christ (Caravaggio)|The Entombment of Christ]]'', (1602–1603), [[Pinacoteca Vaticana]], Rome]]

Caravaggio's innovations inspired the Baroque, but the Baroque took the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism.{{dubious|date=November 2022}} While he directly influenced the style of the artists mentioned above, and, at a distance, the Frenchmen [[Georges de La Tour]] and [[Simon Vouet]], and the Spaniard [[Giuseppe Ribera]], within a few decades his works were being ascribed to less scandalous artists, or simply overlooked. The Baroque, to which he contributed so much, had evolved, and fashions had changed, but perhaps more pertinently, Caravaggio never established a workshop as the Carracci did and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical approach to art, the psychological realism that may only be deduced from his surviving work.

Thus his reputation was doubly vulnerable to the unsympathetic critiques of his earliest biographers, [[Giovanni Baglione]], a rival painter with a vendetta, and the influential 17th-century critic [[Gian Pietro Bellori]], who had not known him but was under the influence of the earlier [[Giovanni Battista Agucchi]] and Bellori's friend [[Poussin]], in preferring the "classical-idealistic" tradition of the [[Bolognese school (painting)|Bolognese school]] led by the Carracci.<ref>Wikkkower, p. 266; also see criticism by fellow Italian [[Vincenzo Carducci]] (living in Spain), who calls Caravaggio an "Antichrist" of painting with "monstrous" talents of deception.</ref> Baglione, his first biographer, played a considerable part in creating the legend of Caravaggio's unstable and violent character, as well as his inability to draw.<ref>Ostrow, 608</ref>

In the 1920s, art critic [[Roberto Longhi]] brought Caravaggio's name once more to the foreground and placed him in the European tradition: "[[Jusepe de Ribera|Ribera]], [[Vermeer]], La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of [[Delacroix]], [[Courbet]] and [[Manet]] would have been utterly different".<ref>Roberto Longhi, quoted in Lambert, op. cit., p.15</ref> The influential [[Bernard Berenson]] agreed: "With the exception of [[Michelangelo]], no other Italian painter exercised so great an influence."<ref>Bernard Berenson, in Lambert, op. cit., p.8</ref>