Polidoro Caldara, usually known as Polidoro da Caravaggio ( – 1543) was an Italian painter of the Mannerist period, "arguably the most gifted and certainly the least conventional of Raphael's pupils", who was best known for his now-vanished paintings on the facades of Roman houses. He was unrelated to the later painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, usually known just as Caravaggio, but both came from the town of Caravaggio. Life and work Polidoro Caldara was born in Caravaggio, in what is now Lombardy. According to Vasari, whilst working as a labourer carrying the materials for the builders of the Vatican logge he ingratiated himself with the artists, and attracted the admiration of Maturino da Firenze, one of Raphael's main assistants in the ongoing decoration of the Vatican. He then joined Raphael's large workshop, in about 1517, and worked on the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican. He and Maturino then set up as painters of palace facades, usually in sgraffito, with considerable success until the sack of Rome by the army of Charles V under the command of Constable de Bourbon in 1527, in which Maturino was killed. Polidoro fled to Naples, and from there to Messina, where he was very successful. According to tradition, he was about to return from there to the mainland of Italy when he was robbed and murdered by an assistant, Tonno Calabrese, in 1543. In the second half of the sixteenth century his tomb in Messina (inside Carmine Maggiore, with the tomb of Constantine Lascaris) was totally destroyed during the repression of the Counter-Reformation. Polidoro's main paintings include a Crucifixion, painted in Messina, and a Deposition of Christ (1527) and a Christ Carrying the Cross (1530–34) both in the Museo di Capodimonte of Naples, who have the best collection of his work (an oil sketch for the latter is in the National Gallery, London). They are very individual in style, extremely free in technique, and powerful in expression. The Christ bearing the Cross shows considerable Northern influence, probably reflecting the traditionally strong links between Sicily and the Netherlands. His other works, as well as those of his partner, Maturino da Firenze, have mostly perished from exposure, as most were external decorations on the facades of palaces, but are known from many etchings by Pietro Santi Bartoli, Cherubino Alberti and others. One of his pupils is Deodato Guinaccia. They were authors of the facade decoration in