ABSTRACT
Giulio Mancini, attempting to categorize the schools of Roman painting around 1620, distinguished four: that of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, that of the Carracci, that of the Cavalier d'Arpino, and everybody else. In the Crucifixion of St. Peter Caravaggio used a version of Michelangelo's central group while reducing his own composition to its bare and brutal core. The St. John is a version of a nude, even of various nudes, from Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling. The pose of Caravaggio's St. John recalls more specifically the nudes in Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, most precisely one that is inadvertently shown near a ram's head in the neighboring scene of sacrifice. Michelangelo had infinitely complex feelings about himself and the conflicts between his physical desires and his religious beliefs. Michelangelo Buonarroti was the great, one might say the archetypal artist of the Renaissance, apotheosized in his own lifetime, studied, emulated, and plagiarized by some of his successors, criticized or rejected by others, but ignored by no artist in Italy.
