John Nicholas Cassavetes

Long before even the German Expressionists, and I am talking four centuries ahead of the game - there would be  the art world's first true iconoclast and Caravaggio was his name-o! This painter, with his radical medium that hosted vacillating contrasts of shade and light, known as chiaroscuro , is clearly  noir's earliest inspiration. Caravaggio's stark themes, alluded a sense of violence and in his works, in lieu of models, it would be he common working people of 16th century Rome. Ironically these were highly religious themed works, but it would be their extreme and dramatic contrasts, an imposing reality so impactful; that future directors could not resist ,but to in their respective ways replicate it's vision.

This would be only the beginning, for in the 19th century Realist artist Gustave Courbet