When I teach art history, I present a few artists as ‘atom bombs’ for the influence they had. Caravaggio was one of them for the fact that it was perfectly clea

When I teach art history, I present a few artists as ‘atom bombs’ for the influence they had. Caravaggio was one of them for the fact that it was perfectly clear that he painted directly from observation. The same cannot be said of Michelangelo whose work was a synthetic regurgitation of Greek classics. Caravaggio (together with Bruegel from a different direction) brought about realism, which remains a major force in creativity (e.g cinema verite, docudrama, street photography etc).