Light from Nowhere

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted in a cellar using a single light source — probably a lantern hung high — that raked across his models at a steep angle. The result was figures emerging from absolute darkness, lit as if by a heavenly spotlight. He didn't invent tenebrism, but he pushed it to an extreme nobody had attempted.

His models were people off the streets of Rome — prostitutes, gamblers, and laborers. For Death of the Virgin (1606), tradition holds he based the dead Mary on a real sex worker, and the bloated, bare-legged figure looked too earthly for the church that commissioned it. They refused to hang it. Rubens, who admired the work, urged the Duke of Mantua to buy it instead — and he did.