a town of Lombardy, 15 miles S.S.W. of Bergamo, with about 6000 inhabitants. It is celebrated as being the birthplace of the two painters, Polidoro Caldara and Michael Angelo Amerighi, who received their surname of Caravaggio from this town.

Michael Angelo Amerighi da, a celebrated painter, born in 1569 in the village of Caravaggio, from which he took his name. He adopted a style of strange contrasts of light and shadow of colours, laid on with a sort of fury, emblematic of that fierce temper which led the artist to commit a homicide at Rome. To avoid the consequences of his crime he fled to Naples and to Malta, where he was imprisoned for another attempt to avenge a quarrel. Escaping to Sicily, he was attacked by a party sent in pursuit of him, and severely wounded. Being pardoned, he Caravaggio set out for Rome, where, being arrested by mistake, he expired at a gate of the city in his fortieth year. His best pictures are the Entombment of Christ, now in France; St Sebastian, in the Roman Capitol; and the Supper at Emmaus, in the Borghese Palace. See Painting.

Caravaggio, Polidoro Caldara da, a celebrated painter of fresco and other decorations in the Vatican, whose merits were such, that while a mere mortar-carrier to the artists engaged in that work, he attracted the admiration of Raphael, then employed on his matchless pictures in the Loggie of that palace. Polidoro was born in 1495. His works, as well as those of his master Maturino, have mostly perished, but are well known by the fine etchings of San Bartoli, Alberti, &c. On the sack of Rome by the army of the Constable Bourbon in 1527, Polidoro fled to Naples. Thence he went to Messina, where he was much employed, and gained a considerable fortune, with which he was about to return to Italy, when he was robbed and murdered by his servants in 1543.