When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio came to Rome at the end of the 16th century, the artistic representation of the nude body had become one of the central interests of contemporary painters. According to the prevailing theory of art, however, the nude was not to be depicted as it appeared in reality, but as it should be ideally. What was required was not a copy of the imperfect appearance of a human being, but the reproduction of his God-given perfection, which had to manifest itself in the ideality of the body. Caravaggio's nude design is diametrically opposed to this postulate. His nudes do not embody an ideal typification, but a seemingly real individualization, which the artist varies according to the message of the respective picture. Contemporary art critics branded this new conception of the body as "naturalistic" and accused Caravaggio of dependence on the model. Neither the art critics of the 17th century nor those of the two following centuries recognized that the lifelike design of the nudes did not faithfully reproduce the image of a model, but was the intended product of the artist's imagination. The appropriate appreciation of his nudes failed to materialize even in the 20th century, when the disdain for Caravaggio that had prevailed until then was turned into its opposite and the artist, who had long been characterized as a record of the natural, was now seen as the forerunner of modernism. Despite the abundance of literature on Caravaggio, the bibliography on his work comprises well over 1000 titles, yet no monograph on his nudes has appeared to date. The present work aims to contribute to remedying this research gap. Its aim is to present Caravaggio as a painter of well-imagined and carefully composed nudes and thus to refute the image of a model-dependent naturalist with which the artist has been characterized for centuries.