Caravaggio's paintings are so dark because he made them dark on purpose. He posed his models in a closed room, under a single light set high above them, and painted only what that light touched.
Everything the light missed he left in black. The method gave his religious scenes the look of real people caught in a dim room, and painters across Europe copied it.
Caravaggio did not work this way from the start. Only half of the method came early. When he arrived in Rome as a young painter, he already painted from living models posed in front of him, at a time when artists learned their trade by copying ancient statues and the great masters.
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Those first Roman pictures have none of the darkness. In The Cardsharps, a young man is cheated at cards by two others in front of a plain wall. In Boy with a Basket of Fruit, from the same years, a youth holds out his fruit against another plain background, and nothing sinks into black.
Then the black arrived, and the story most often told ties it to his life. In 1606, after killing a man in Rome, Caravaggio fled the city, and his painting is supposed to have darkened with his guilt. It is a good story, but the dates do not support it.
The Calling of Saint Matthew and the turn to black
The black first appears in full on the walls of a small chapel in the center of Rome, in two large canvases about a tax collector named Matthew.
What You'll Discover
How a closed room and one high light worked.
What he removed from Saint Paul.
Which altarpieces the clergy turned away.
Who spread the dark manner across Europe.