Michelangelo vs. Caravaggio

According to an art statistician, Caravaggio has now passed Michelangelo as the Renaissance artist who is the subject of the most books, articles, dissertations, exhibits, and so on. Is it just a fad, or is there something else to it:

Caravaggiomania, as Sohm calls it, implies not just that art history doctoral students may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people. His otherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining to emerge from thick blocks of veined marble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime, grounded in Renaissance rhetoric, which, for postwar generations, now belongs with the poetry of Alexander Pope or plays by Corneille as admirable but culturally remote splendors.

Caravaggio, on the other hand, exemplifies the modern antihero, a hyperrealist whose art is instantly accessible. His doe-eyed, tousle-haired boys with puffy lips and bubble buttocks look as if they’ve just tumbled out of bed, not descended from heaven. Coarse not godly, locked into dark, ambiguous spaces by a strict geometry then picked out of deep shadow by an oracular light, his models come straight off the street. Cupid is clearly a hired urchin on whom Caravaggio strapped a pair of fake wings. The angel in his “Annunciation” dangles like Chaplin’s tramp on the high wire in “The Circus,” from what must have been a rope contraption Caravaggio devised.

I have always preferred Caravaggio to Michelangelo as a painter. (At the top, that Michelangelo's Libyan Sibyl on the left and Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul on the right) But then Michelangelo wanted to be a sculptor, where to my mind he has no equal, and resented having to spend so much time on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Caravaggio does have a "life on the street" quality that contrasts with Michelangelo's classical heroism. Caravaggio also has the advantage of his roguish life, which left quite a trail through the criminal records of 16th-century Milan and Rome. Below is Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, famous partly because Goliath's face has long been rumored to be a self portrait.

And this is one of his most famous works, Amor Omnia Vincit. It is because of paintings like this one that people think Caravaggio was gay, although there is no written evidence of that and some, from his police files, of involvement with female prostitutes:

And then The Supper at Emmaus, one of his many Biblical scenes, all of which have this same naturalistic quality, as if they were set in the tavern down the street: