Below from Andrew Graham-Dixon’s biography of Caravaggio, Caravaggio - A Life Sacred and Profane, regarding the artist’s uncouth ‘populist’ discord from the prevailing intellectual and artistic aesthetic:
The very idea of looking back was a profoundly original move. It ran directly contrary to the prevailing aesthetic orthodoxy of late Renaissance thought, as expressed by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists that art should continually evolve and progress, that it was the duty of every artist to increase that forward momentum.
Vasari would have regarded a preference for the old and popular over the new and sophisticated as shockingly absurd and perverse.
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