Caravaggio to Virgil Abloh: Pyrex, Off-White and Westside Gunn's Covers

Pyrex Vision: the Caravaggio on a Rugby flannel

Virgil Abloh studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, graduating in 2003, then took a master's in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In a 2017 conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist for System magazine, he named the moment everything bent: "Then I took an art-history class in my fifth year of engineering. I learned about the Italian Renaissance and Caravaggio, and it rewired my brain. It was with Caravaggio that it clicked. Completely."

What clicked was invention, and he said it the way an engineer would: "It was the idea that within art you could invent, just like you can invent a new way of distributing load in a tall building." He showed up at IIT, on Mies van der Rohe's campus, with almost nothing: "I know nothing about architecture; I just have this book of Caravaggio paintings; and I walk into Crown Hall, and I lose my breath."

Before he had a label of his own, he worked next to Kanye West. They interned together at Fendi in 2009, and Abloh was creative director of West's creative house, DONDA, which produced the art for Watch the Throne. Abloh art-directed that cover, designed by Riccardo Tisci, and shared its Grammy nomination for best recording package.

His first brand came in 2012. He told The Fader how it started, in a 2014 interview that Complex excerpted: "I saw the Rugby store was going to close, and singlehandedly bought all the flannels from across the country. The one that's $40 in the store, I bought it." To System he described what came next: "I took Ralph Lauren and screen-printed over it. Caravaggio on the front, 'Pyrex 23' on the back." They sold for $550, by Defector’s account.

The painting was The Entombment. Complex lists Pyrex hoodies "displaying" it, and Tremaine Emory, whose Denim Tears revived the name in 2022 as Pyrex Tears, told the magazine: "The original Pyrex used the Entombment of Christ."

1. The wide

   Three metres tall, for a family chapel in Rome. Five mourners and a dead man, all pushed toward you over the edge of a stone.

2. The body

   The light lands here first: chest, shroud, knees. Everything else in the picture is ranked by how near it stands to this.

3. The dead hand

   Fingertips a breath above the stone. Every other hand in the picture is working: holding, lifting, wiping, raised.

4. Nicodemus

   He takes the weight of the legs and looks straight out at you. In 2023 the album cover hangs the chain and pendants on him.

5. The raised arms

   Mary of Cleophas throws both hands into the black. The Vatican calls it “a gesture of high dramatic tension.”

6. The slab

   Its corner points out of the frame at your shins. Rubens, copying the picture a decade later, turned the slab flat.

He explained the words too: "'Pyrex 23' is a two-line poem about being in the hood." In the poem the only ways out are basketball or the kitchen. Twenty-three is Michael Jordan's number, and Pyrex, in his words, "is the cookware in which you make crack cocaine." The only doors off the block are a ball or a stove, and he put that on the back of a shirt with a Vatican altarpiece on the front. The film he shot for the launch, A Team With No Sport, came out on 12.12.12, set to Joy Division's "Heart and Soul," and his word for the whole thing was "It's a juxtaposition."

Then he stopped it, fast. "Pyrex was a sensation. I was selling it and I stopped it," he told Obrist, the name "wasn't to my taste," and the project "was only meant for a moment in time." In Complex’s words, "One year later, Pyrex Vision was no more."

In September 2022, less than a year after Abloh died, a small loop closed. For Pyrex Tears, made with Abloh's studio and approved by Shannon Abloh, Emory printed a Resurrection from the Art Institute of Chicago by Cecco del Caravaggio, one of Caravaggio's closest followers. The original Pyrex, Emory said, used the dead Christ, and this one is "the resurrection of Christ a few days later."

Off-White and Caravaggio: the 3 percent approach

Off-White c/o Virgil Abloh launched in 2013 with its design studio in Milan. The brand's own line is that it defines "the grey area between black and white as a color," and Abloh's version, as Hypebeast reported him telling i-D, was "the grey area between two concepts, streetwear and 'proper' fashion."

Caravaggio stayed in the graphics. Complex describes "the use of Renaissance paintings as graphics on T-shirts and hoodies" carrying over from Pyrex. nss magazine reported a Spring/Summer 2017 hoodie "decorated with works of iconic Italian painter Caravaggio," and in April 2021 a run of Spring/Summer 2021 sweatshirts that opened with Boy with a Basket of Fruit crossed with the brand's arrows. Highsnobiety covered black sweats carrying "a black & white reproduction of Caravaggio's Saint Jerome Writing." The real Saint Jerome is in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, an old man reaching across a table to dip his pen, with a skull resting on the books at the other end of his arm. Skull and books are two of the classic vanitas symbols, death set beside learning.

The 3 percent rule, in his words

On October 26, 2017, Abloh gave a public lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, "Insert Complicated Title Here." The Harvard Gazette reported a seven-point manifesto he called "Personal Design Language," including speaking to "the tourist and purist simultaneously" and a "3 percent approach." At one point he took off one of his Nike Air Forces to show the room. "Things are intriguing to me when they're slightly edited, like these shoes," he said. "I was only interested in restraining myself, and only editing it 3 percent."

He told System the same thing from another angle: "One major thread that runs through my DNA is that I like using ready-made things. That is a tool to evoke instant emotion. Like with the music, when I play songs that are in the backs of people's heads."

The music part matters, because Abloh DJed from high school on. He told Obrist how he builds a set: "I play 80 percent contemporary music that they think I am going to play. The remaining 20 percent is songs that they forgot they loved, to awaken their minds." This is how he saw his own work: "Off-White™ is me being a black artist in disguise as a fashion brand in disguise as a DJ."

Run the Rugby flannel through that and it lines up: the flannel is the ready-made, the 97 percent, and Caravaggio plus a word and a number are the edit.

The oldest version of the move belongs to a painter. Peter Paul Rubens copied the Entombment about 1612–14, in a panel now in the National Gallery of Canada, following Caravaggio’s altarpiece closely and then drifting, and the art historian Thomas Glen read it as respect for Caravaggio’s idea and an attempt to improve on it: a faithful copy, edited.

Caravaggio · c.1600–04Rubens · c.1612–14

Abloh was named artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear on March 26, 2018, and showed his first collection in the gardens of the Palais-Royal on June 21. In 2019 the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago opened Virgil Abloh: "Figures of Speech," curated by Michael Darling, from June 10 to September 29; it travelled to the High Museum, where the remade Pyrex screens hung. He died on November 28, 2021, at 41, of cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare cancer he had lived with privately since his 2019 diagnosis.

Westside Gunn's album covers: Pray for Paris and the Entombment

In January 2020 Westside Gunn, the Buffalo rapper who founded Griselda Records, flew to Paris as Abloh's guest for the Off-White men's show that month. "When V invited me out to Paris, that was my first time ever leaving the country," he told Interview in 2023. Abloh played one of Gunn's songs at the show without warning him. "I really wasn't going to make music," Gunn later told GRAMMY.com, and he made Pray for Paris anyway.

The Pray for Paris cover

The album came out on April 17, 2020, on Griselda with Empire distribution. Gunn had revealed the cover two weeks earlier, and it was Abloh's. Revolt called the artwork "a riff on 'David with the Head of Goliath' by renaissance painter Caravaggio," and The Ringer noted Gunn's chains photoshopped onto David's neck.

Caravaggio was a Baroque painter, not a Renaissance one, and he painted David with Goliath's head more than once. Laid next to the museum photographs, the cover matches the version in Vienna, unflipped and cropped square: the boy with the sword resting back over his shoulder, the head held out at arm's length, a chain and pendants laid over his chest. The Kunsthistorisches Museum dates that panel to around 1600/01, painted on poplar, which was unusual for him, and describes "a melancholy victor who seems to reflect both on himself and his victim." Other versions hang in the Galleria Borghese in Rome and the Prado in Madrid, and those are different pictures.

Abloh gave Gunn three to pick from. "He even did one of an old picture of me in the Pyrex 23, but with my chains on," he told Complex. "But I wanted to go with David and Goliath. It looks like something you would see in Paris."

That choice tells you how Gunn thinks about covers. He told DJBooth in 2018: "I knew that I wanted my shit to be art, to react to it like when you first see a painting for the first time." The first Hitler Wears Hermes cover, he said, "was a painting," and the FLYGOD name came from the same ambition: "The whole FLYGOD was me saying I was the Messiah to the game."

And Then You Pray for Me: the Entombment comes back

And Then You Pray for Me, the sequel, came out on October 13, 2023, nearly two years after Abloh's death, and Gunn's announcement credited "ARTWORK BY VIRGIL ABLOH." GRAMMY.com describes a cover using "both the Mona Lisa and Caravaggio's The Entombment of Christ." On the cover the Caravaggio fills the frame, cropped square around the central group, and what looks like the same chain and pendants from Pray for Paris hang on Nicodemus, the old man carrying the legs.

"There's only one person that can do this cover," Gunn said. "Once he passed, it changed what I wanted to do with it." GRAMMY.com calls Abloh the art director of both albums. The Entombment is a painting of people carrying someone they loved, and eleven years after Abloh screen-printed it on a dead brand's flannels, it came back after his death to close the Pray for Paris story.

187 and 23

Gunn draws the line from Pyrex to his own merch himself. To Spin in 2023: "Before he started doing Off-White, he was printing on Champion shirts." "When I started doing my merch, I did it on Champion." And: "When I put 187 on my shirt, it was because Virgil put 23 on the back." So Pyrex's two-line poem got its answer in three digits from the California penal code.

Caravaggio's influence: what changed in Rome around 1600

Abloh met Caravaggio in an art-history class, four centuries late. What made him worth meeting happened in Rome around 1600. Michelangelo Merisi, born in Lombardy in 1571, spent his first Roman years on hackwork, in the National Gallery’s account, until his first public commission, the Calling and the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi. They were unveiled in 1600, and the Gallery’s word for the result is "sensation."

What did the damage was who he painted and how he lit them. He painted saints from people he could hire off the street and posed them right in front of him, which, as Keith Christiansen of the Metropolitan Museum puts it, "violated the idealizing premise of Renaissance theory," so people nobody would have let near an altarpiece ended up on the altar as saints. He lit them with one high, hard source against the dark, a method Caravaggio’s paintings, read like films takes apart canvas by canvas.

He lived the way he painted. In 1603 the painter Giovanni Baglione sued Caravaggio and his friends for libel over defamatory poems mocking Baglione's work that had been passed around Rome, and a Sotheby's catalogue notes that Orazio Gentileschi "was thought to have penned some of the defamatory verses," so it was basically a diss track on paper, four centuries early, with a court record attached. In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni and spent the four years left to him on the run.

The Caravaggisti: who carried the light out of Rome

The Caravaggisti, or Caravaggesque painters, were the artists who took up his naturalism, his hard light and a lot of the time his subjects too: card cheats, fortune tellers, drinkers, saints with dirty feet. Before anybody draws a family tree, the National Gallery sets the terms: "Very few Caravaggesque painters knew Caravaggio personally, but most had direct knowledge of his art." It travelled through the paintings themselves.

Orazio Gentileschi knew him well enough to lend him a Capuchin friar’s robe and a pair of wings, by his own testimony at the 1603 trial, and his daughter Artemisia Gentileschi, who "probably only met him as a girl," in the National Gallery’s words, is now the best known of all his followers. Bartolomeo Manfredi turned one man’s style into a method other men could learn, and in 1675 the German biographer Joachim von Sandrart gave it a name, Manfrediana methodus. Jusepe de Ribera carried it to Naples, and three Dutch painters, Gerrit van Honthorst, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Dirck van Baburen, took it home to Utrecht. Honthorst’s candlelit scenes earned him the name Gherardo delle Notti, though, as the National Gallery points out, "Caravaggio never painted a picture with a candle in it": the followers added the visible source their master had left out.

Then it burned out. In the National Gallery's words, "by the middle of the 17th century the international artistic phenomenon known as Caravaggism had waned," and "it would take almost three hundred years for Caravaggio's reputation to be restored." The classicists won the argument for a while, and Nicolas Poussin's verdict, as his biographer André Félibien reported it, was that Caravaggio had come into the world to destroy painting.

Switched back on: Longhi, Pasolini and the screen

The Caravaggio we know now comes down mostly to one man. Roberto Longhi, the Italian art historian, pulled him out of obscurity from the 1920s on, and in 1951 he organised the Mostra del Caravaggio e dei caravaggeschi at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. The Art Newspaper's French edition counts nearly 500,000 visitors and calls it a blockbuster before the word existed.

One of Longhi's students in Bologna was Pier Paolo Pasolini, and he dedicated Mamma Roma (1962) to his teacher: "a Roberto Longhi, cui sono debitore della mia 'fulgurazione figurativa'." In English: "To Roberto Longhi, to whom I owe my 'figurative lightning-strike.'"

Around 1974 Pasolini wrote a short text on Caravaggio's light that was never published in his lifetime and was translated in 2023 for The Paris Review. Its case: "He replaced the universal, platonic light of the Renaissance with a quotidian and dramatic one." The people he cares about in it are "individuals who had been marginalized by the cultural ideology of the previous two centuries," the same people Caravaggio put on the altar.

The translators add a correction, that Pasolini "avoided the effects of Tenebrism in his cinema." What he took was the faces, street boys from the Roman outskirts cast like they were saints, so it was the casting that made it into his films, while the dark stayed in the paintings.

Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), Tilda Swinton’s first film, put the painter’s life on screen, and the screen kept borrowing his light. David Hockney, writing with Martin Gayford: “It is a kind of joke, but I really mean it when I say Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting.” Tarsem Singh pitched the place where the angel lands in R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” video as one that “would look like Caravaggio”; Caleb Deschanel said Caravaggio’s faces “probably inspired the casting” of The Passion of the Christ; Michael Mann told American Cinematographer that in Ferrari “the light has its own mind, and people move in and out of it.” Fiction took the court record instead. Steven Zaillian wrote him into Netflix’s Ripley (2024) as “another man who lived in Rome who murdered somebody and then was on the run for it for the rest of his life,” and Michael Ondaatje named the thief in The English Patient David Caravaggio.

Caravaggio and Renaissance art in streetwear: why the Baroque

Caravaggio in streetwear outlived the man who started it. Palace's Winter 2026 collection has a Caravaggio shirt printed with Saint Jerome Writing, which Hypebeast put at the head of an October drop.

It went back up the runway too. In September 2026 Simone Rocha showed her Spring/Summer 2027 collection at the Old Bailey, and the Irish Examiner named the key inspiration: The Taking of Christ, the Caravaggio “famously misidentified and later discovered in Dublin, hanging in a dining room of the Leeson St Jesuit Community in 1990.” In the release she called the season’s blue “Caravaggio blue,” so a painting of an arrest ended up shown in a criminal court.

Some of why it keeps happening is simple. Caravaggio died in 1610 and his paintings are long out of copyright, so there's no estate to call. Some museums, Italy's state museums among them, charge fees for commercial reproductions of works in their care, but nobody has to ask the painter, and the pictures show up already famous.

The better reason is inside the paintings. Streetwear loves putting the elite image on a street object, and Caravaggio had already gone the other way four hundred years earlier, putting street people inside the elite image: the marginalized “individuals” Pasolini wrote about. A Rugby flannel printed with the Entombment folds that back on itself, and the models end up back on the street, wearing the altarpiece.

Then there are the subjects, a corpse on a slab, a severed head held at arm's length, a skull on a scholar's desk, all painted by a man who killed someone. Put chains on David and the picture turns into a trophy shot, the jewels hanging right next to the head.

And then there's sampling. A sample is a few seconds of an old record looped under new drums, and the producer's skill is in the choice and the cut. Abloh's "ready-made things" that "evoke instant emotion," his 80/20 set, his 3 percent, that's a DJ describing sampling and calling it design. Pray for Paris carries production by the Alchemist, DJ Premier, Daringer and Beat Butcha, crate-diggers every one of them, and the cover does with a painting what the beats do with soul records.

Tetra’s Closer To Paradise makes a version of the same move: an angel painted in the old-master manner, halo, red mantle, white robe and open wings, set down in fire and falling debris and looking up out of it. Like the Entombment on a Rugby flannel, the old picture stays recognisable and the world around it changes.

Frequently asked questions

What Caravaggio painting did Virgil Abloh use?

For Pyrex Vision in 2012, The Entombment of Christ (about 1600–1604, Vatican Pinacoteca), printed on the front of Rugby flannels and hoodies. Off-White later used Boy with a Basket of Fruit (Spring/Summer 2021) and Saint Jerome Writing. His cover for Westside Gunn's Pray for Paris (2020) used David with the Head of Goliath, the Vienna version, and the cover of And Then You Pray for Me, credited to him and released in 2023 after his death, went back to the Entombment.

What is Pyrex Vision?

Abloh's first label, 2012. He bought out closing Ralph Lauren Rugby stock, screen-printed it with Caravaggio on the front and "PYREX 23" on the back, and sold the flannels for $550, up from $40 in the store. He shut it down a year later. Off-White followed in 2013. The name returned in 2022 as Pyrex Tears, through Tremaine Emory's Denim Tears.

Who were the Caravaggisti?

Painters who adopted Caravaggio's naturalism and hard light in the decades after 1600: Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, Cecco del Caravaggio, Valentin de Boulogne, Jusepe de Ribera, and the Utrecht Caravaggisti Gerrit van Honthorst, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Dirck van Baburen. Georges de La Tour absorbed the style indirectly. The movement faded by about 1650 and was rediscovered in the twentieth century, above all through Roberto Longhi's 1951 exhibition in Milan.

Was Caravaggio a Renaissance painter?

No. He was born in 1571 and did his major work between 1599 and 1610, which makes him an early Baroque painter. Press coverage of Pyrex and Pray for Paris often calls him "renaissance"; Abloh himself put him alongside the Italian Renaissance when he described his art-history class.

Read next

• Caravaggio's paintings, read like films, the scene-by-scene companion to this piece.
• Chiaroscuro: Caravaggio to The Godfather, the lighting line from the Contarelli Chapel to Gordon Willis.
• Scorsese's red, from Mean Streets to the fight against fading.

References

• Keith Christiansen, "Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (1571–1610) and His Followers," Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003: metmuseum.org
• The National Gallery, London, "Beyond Caravaggio: Exhibition in focus," 2016: nationalgallery.org.uk
• Musei Vaticani, Caravaggio, Deposition, Pinacoteca, Room XII: museivaticani.va
• Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Caravaggio, David with Goliath's Head, GG 125: khm.at
• Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Pasolini on Caravaggio's Artificial Light," trans. Alessandro Giammei and Ara H. Merjian, The Paris Review, 2023: theparisreview.org
• Virgil Abloh in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, System magazine, issue 10: system-magazine.com
• "Harvard welcomes Virgil Abloh for GSD lecture," The Harvard Gazette, November 2017: news.harvard.edu
• High Museum of Art, Virgil Abloh: "Figures of Speech": high.org
• Lei Takanashi, "Virgil Abloh's album covers," Complex, December 2, 2021: complex.com
• Shawn Setaro, "Westside Gunn On How Virgil Abloh & 'Coming To The End' Of His Rap Career Inspired 'And Then You Pray For Me'," GRAMMY.com, October 18, 2023: grammy.com
• Kyle Eustice, "Westside Gunn: Not the Last," Spin, October 26, 2023: spinmagazine.com
• "Hermès-Level Existence: A Conversation With Westside Gunn," DJBooth, June 27, 2018: djbooth.net
• David Hockney and Martin Gayford, “Shady past,” The Spectator, October 20, 2016: spectator.com
• Eric Ducker, “The Making of R.E.M.’s Iconic ‘Losing My Religion’ Video,” Rolling Stone (India edition), March 12, 2016: rollingstoneindia.com
• Caleb Deschanel in conversation with John Bailey and Stephen Pizzello, “Caleb Deschanel talks about The Passion” (from American Cinematographer, March 2004): thewords.com
• Fred Schruers, “Race Opera: Ferrari,” American Cinematographer, January 18, 2024: theasc.com
• Jean Bentley, “Ripley” locations and cinematography, Netflix Tudum, July 17, 2024: netflix.com
• Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (1992), full text via the Internet Archive: archive.org
• Paul McLauchlan, Simone Rocha at London Fashion Week, Irish Examiner, September 21, 2026: irishexaminer.com; Brooke Frischer, The Zoe Report, September 21, 2026: thezoereport.com
• BFI, “Revisiting Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio” (2018): bfi.org.uk