Caravaggio, Polidoro Caldara da (c. 1495-1543)

Italian painter. An assistant to Raphael, he became famous for his monochrome fresco decoration of Roman history subjects on palace facades. Of these, only his work at the Palazzo Ricci, dating from about 1524, survives. One of his best-known paintings is Christ Bearing the Cross (Naples).

He was born in Caravaggio, northern Italy. First employed by Raphael as a plasterer in the Vatican Loggie, he later participated in painting narrative frescoes there. After Raphael's death, he worked for Giulio Romano in the Vatican and in the Villa Lante. His landscapes with figures in the series Lives of the Magdalen and St Catherine of Siena anticipate later 17th-century developments in landscape. (Examples are in Rome, S Silvestro a Quirinale.) After the sack of Rome he fled to Naples and then to Messina where he amassed a large fortune. He was robbed and murdered at Messina.