The young artist arrived in Rome "naked and extremely needy ... It was also a period when the Church was searching for a stylistic alternative to Mannerism in religious art that was tasked to counter the threat of Protestantism.

Caravaggio's innovation was a radical naturalism that combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism (the shift from light to dark with little intermediate value).

He traveled in 1607 to Malta and on to Sicily, and pursued a papal pardon for his sentence.

In 1609 he returned to Naples, where he was involved in a violent clash; his face was disfigured and rumours of his death circulated.

Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan before moving in his twenties to Rome.

He developed a considerable name as an artist, and as a violent, touchy and provocative man.

Known works from this period include a small Boy Peeling a Fruit (his earliest known painting), a Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and the Young Sick Bacchus, supposedly a self-portrait done during convalescence from a serious illness that ended his employment with Cesari.

All three demonstrate the physical particularity for which Caravaggio was to become renowned: the fruit-basket-boy's produce has been analysed by a professor of horticulture, who was able to identify individual cultivars right down to "...

At this point he forged some extremely important friendships, with the painter Prospero Orsi, the architect Onorio Longhi, and the sixteen-year-old Sicilian artist Mario Minniti.Like The Fortune Teller, it was immensely popular, and over 50 copies survive.More importantly, it attracted the patronage of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, one of the leading connoisseurs in Rome.Reports stated that he died of a fever, but suggestions have been made that he was murdered or that he died of lead poisoning.Caravaggio's innovations inspired Baroque painting, but the Baroque incorporated the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism.