Both at Rome and Naples swaggering Caravaggio had enormous success. His heads, we read, brought more than other men’s compositions. He boasted himself the greatest painter of all time, and was often believed. From his swarthy tones his entire school took the name, the Tenebrists. His experiments in interior and artificial lighting were widely imitated, and again ultimately passed into recent Impressionism. His rejection of noble form in favor of what one sees, and of decorative color in favor of natural, was the sharpest possible challenge of the Renaissance style, and outside of Italy where the noble tradition was only incipient did much to arrest its diffusion. From the point of view of modern art there are few more important figures. From the point of view of art broadly he has his serious limitations. Most damaging is his waiver of civilization, he looks at low life not with the eyes of a detached artist but with those of a ruffian. He did not have the intelligence to live up to his own formula. Annibale Carracci was once looking at Caravaggio’s Judith, and, being pressed for an opinion, remarked that it was “too natural.” He spoke as an admirer of the grand style. A modern realist would make the far more radical criticism that Caravaggio is never natural enough. He really makes no close study of the subtleties of natural appearance or of the actual refinements of illumination, but rather substitutes for the old stately formulas a new, more ugly, and less studied formula of his own. Logically he should have gone forward with Ribera and Velasquez to a real investigation of appearances. But his logic was only that of scorn, and it would doubtless have somewhat compensated him for a sordid and premature end, could he have forseen that his biographers would credit him with the ruin of Italian painting.