 |
| Possibly Self Portrait |
That's one way to approach him. But look at his life. He seems to have thrown himself into risk and danger – in palaces and slums, with influential patrons at the top of society and the worst sorts at the bottom, driven by rage, anger, diversion, sexuality and a passion for work – until he was murdered before the age of 40 on a beach north of Rome, in a no-man's land. Such a life of lust, revolt, escapism and struggle - the outsider rebel hero par excellence.
He shifts our perspective to well known events in the history of Christianity. In Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, we are looking not at the long side of the loaded table – as conventional composition would dictate – but at the narrow end. The question now is not how the figures position themselves; what matters here is how they relate to one another. What they want from each other. And how much wine they've drunk. Are they arguing or pleading with Jesus? What do they want from him? He's supposed to be dead but they don't seem particularly surprised.
It is not hard to imagine why Cardinal Del Monte supposedly broke down in tears before Caravaggio's "Basket of Fruit, " before a picture that shows fruit in various stages of putrefaction, threatened by decay, insects, destruction. Until then death was the other. A merciless certainty, but not a part of life. Caravaggio paints time, and in so doing he shows, perhaps for the first time, death not as the end of the subject but as a part of it. We live and as we live, we decay and die.
.jpg)
To the frustration of generations of art students, Caravaggio is not interested in showing off his knowledge of anatomy. His bodies do not seek the heroic pose, nor do they follow any kind of scientific clarity. They writhe in all their ambiguity, turn to their opposite, to the viewer, but at the same time in on themselves. And if something does not interest Caravaggio he does not paint it either. He does not fill out his paintings. His windows are empty light sources, his backgrounds boundaries. The world is everything that touches the subject and nothing else.
.jpg)
Caravaggio's life during the 17th century is certainly among the most adventurous ever led by the world's great creators. His life story takes place between shadow and light: a man of a passionate nature, he ran the gamut from provocation to murder. A reward was offered for his capture, sending him into perpetual flight and hiding. Given his love of the low and the lowly, it's a miracle that he portrayed the sacred and timeless among the filth and suffering. His Christ has dirty feet.
The works he produced were so deeply mystical and essential, testifying to such a true sense of the sacred and, above all, such a heartfelt comprehension of the message of Christianity, that the Roman people were ready to forgive Caravaggio all. Happily forgiven his last transgression, the artist set off for Naples without remembering to officially declare himself a passenger. In other words, he became a stowaway, and, in order to ensure his fare, was obliged to hand over his possessions as security. This was something he was not prepared to do. His reaction toward being questioned or asked to do anything he didn't want to (and there were many things he didn't want to do) was rage. he attacked one of the sailors (after all what was one sailor - he'd already murdered three people. The crew were not pleased and threw him off the ship . Wounded, he left the ship at Porto Ercole where, furious and desperate, he ran up and down the beach under a scorching sun, trying to pinpoint on the vast sea the vessel sailing off with his belongings. By noon, fever forced him to lie down and there, after three days, without the least human assistance, he died alone. The day was July 8, 1610. He was 38.
But he cast a long shadow. By the next generation, Caravaggio's once-shocking realism (see the filthy bare feet of the saint in Claude Vignon's "Martyrdom of St. Matthew") and dramatic film-noir spotlighting had spread over all Western Europe—notably to Holland, France and Spain—and were being used for vivid secular paintings of prostitutes, pickpockets, gamblers, gourmands, smokers and drinkers. His bi-sexual denizens of the underworld became a popular subject.
Following Caravaggio's bisexual path, artists working alongside or after him painted recumbent, spot-lit male nudes pretending to be St. Sebastian or the naked man saved by the Good Samaritan. (Orazio Riminaldi's "Daedalus and Icarus" is as homoerotic as any important 17th-century Italian painting I've seen. I give high marks to painters who did justice to aging, wrinkled, thin-limbed subjects, like Simone Vouet's St. Jerome and Jusepe de Ribera's St. Mary of Egypt.
While most other Italian artists of his time slavishly followed the elegant balletic conventions of late Mannerist painting, Caravaggio painted the stories of the Bible as visceral and often bloody dramas. He staged the events of the distant sacred past as if they were taking place in the present day, often working from live models whom he depicted in starkly modern dress. He accentuated the poverty and common humanity of Christ and his followers, the Apostles, saints, and martyrs, by emphasizing their ragged clothing and dirty feet. He also developed a highly original form of chiaroscuro, using extreme contrasts of light and dark to emphasize details of gesture or facial expression: an outflung arm, a look of despair or longing. His influence on the course of Western art has been immense and has not been limited to the field of paintingalone. Caravaggio’s work shaped that of many later artists, ranging from Rembrandt in Holland and Diego Velázquez in Spain to Théodore Géricault in France. His dramatic sense of staging and innovative treatment of light and shade have also directly inspired many leading figures in the medium of cinema, including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Martin Scorsese.
