Becoming Caravaggio

"Marciari brought me to a very different place: the luxurious, languid heat of late-summer Rome, in one of the final years of the 16th century. There, an ordinary boy has been made to hold a heavy basket of fruit for far longer than he'd like in a hot, airless studio, and a young, unknown painter is on the precipice of greatness."

"Even an Old Master was young once. A Morgan Library exhibition about Caravaggio's "Boy with a Basket of Fruit" is a portrait of an artist as a young man - ambitious, talented, and maybe a little petty. "He's not a perfect artist yet," curator Marciari told me. But this work is the first in a sequence tracing the arc of an unknown provincial painter's transformation into one of the undisputed giants of Western art history."

The Morgan Library & Museum's exhibition centers on Caravaggio's early painting The Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c.1593). The painting depicts an ordinary boy forced to hold a heavy basket of fruit in a hot, airless studio, capturing youthful realism and physical discomfort. The work reveals an ambitious, talented young painter still developing his technique. The exhibition places the painting within late-sixteenth-century Rome, emphasizing a burgeoning gallery system and social context that shaped artistic careers. Curatorial study traces this painting as the first in a sequence showing a provincial artist's evolution into a major figure in Western art history.

Read at Hyperallergic