BORN 450 years ago, on September 29 1571, Caravaggio lived and worked in Rome at a time which saw the emergence of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, which brought with it the dawn of the modern, capitalist era.

Renaissance, literally “rebirth,” was the dominant artistic style of the period and it expressed the new elite’s political and economic confidence, while Reformation was its expression in matters of religion.

The new class needed to legitimise its claim to political power at all levels of society.

Hence Protestantism replaced the previously dominant and strongly hierarchical Catholic church, the bedrock of feudalism and riddled with corruption.

Although forced to retreat in many parts of Europe, Catholicism nowhere, outside of Britain, did the successful bourgeois revolution consolidate its growing economic power or eliminate feudalism entirely.

Instead, a transitional feudal absolutism emerged where nobility remained the ruling class, albeit increasingly engaging with capitalist forms of production that began to shape economic life.

The Catholic church, however, reorganised and hit back between 1555 and 1648 with the Counter-Reformation, aiming to reverse the conditions created by the reformers in mainland Europe. Its shock troopers were the Jesuits.

Gradually, the Counter-Reformation led to the resurgence of Catholicism and to significant shifts in political power in Europe, with the reclamation of Austria, Bohemia and Poland for Catholicism.

This ideological clawback was greatly aided by the new style in the arts — promoted by the Catholic church — of Baroque, particularly in architecture. Baroque celebrated the wealth and opulence of the Catholic church.

The disparate character of this age and an unprecedented class-based differentiation developed in the arts.

In addition to the ruling culture of the aristocracy and nobility, democratic bourgeois cultural expressions evolved, with strong realist works particularly in painting.

Its best exponent was Michelangelo Merisi, who took the name Caravaggio after his birthplace in Lombardy, northern Italy.

His sense of reality, his this-worldly sensuality, re-established and further developed the realism of the early Renaissance.

Caravaggio’s 1602 painting St Matthew and the Angel was originally intended for the main altar of the Cappella (chapel) Contarelli in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.

It is a picture that famously existed in two versions — the first was destroyed in a fire in Berlin at the end of WWII.

In one, Saint Matthew is dressed in short workman’s clothes, leaving his arms and legs bare.

His legs are crossed and his left foot almost breaks through the painting at the point where a priest would hold up the host at Mass.

To make matters worse, Matthew is flat-footed with dirt under his toenails. He seems to have difficulty writing, his hands unused to holding the quill, as he peers on to the pages; even his writing appears too big. The angel helps him to write the Gospel.

The viewer looks down on the “seated” scene as if from a standing position.

The clergy rejected Caravaggio’s interpretation of the saint as an illiterate peasant and objected to the intimate relationship between the apostle and the angel holding the apostle’s hand. Caravaggio had to paint a second version.

This time St Matthew emerges Biblically attired in a damask linen robe and towers above the viewer. The angel hovers over him, there is no physical contact and Matthew appears highly literate. But still has a rugged face and is barefoot.

Caravaggio’s real-life models came from among ordinary people. These were the people that mattered, that life was all about, as far as Caravaggio was concerned.

Roman Catholic church leaders were his clients and consequently, most of his works are on religious themes, yet they remain profoundly humanist.

He had rejected the highly ornamental, empty and often triumphalist Baroque style favoured by Catholic officialdom.

He committed to canvas everyday reality, the ordinary people he encountered daily on the streets of Rome and other cities, including the most deprived — beggars, prostitutes, criminals.

Even his religious paintings are always linked to the violence and deprivation Caravaggio saw all around him.

He was unwilling to look the other way. This is the life we encounter on Caravaggio’s canvases, this is his time that he could not escape from.

Life around him was full pain, and Caravaggio’s insistence on realism highlights this.

And for that reason he does not fit into the Baroque mould. The realists of the following centuries could justifiably refer to him.

After killing a man in a quarrel in 1606 he was forced to flee Rome and spent the last four years of his life on the run with spells in Naples, Malta, Messina and Palermo — leaving behind masterpieces that lastingly influenced 17th-century European art.

He died soon after arriving in the picturesque Porto Ercole (Port Hercules) in southern Tuscany, on July 18 or 19 1610, aged only 38.

He was buried in an unmarked grave but his remains were identified in 2014 and placed in a modernist funerary ark in the town’s cemetery.