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Caravaggio

Caravaggio Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (September 28, 1573 – July 18, 1610), named after his hometown Caravaggio near Milan, was an Italian Baroque painter, whose large religious works portrayed saints and other biblical figures as ordinary people. Though his paintings were controversial in the church, the weathly people purchased them for their drama, their spectacular technical accomplishment, their startling originality, and even their brazen homoeroticism. Though his life (1571 -1610) nearly coincides with that of William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), their two worlds were distinctly different.

Biography

Little is known about Caravaggio's artistic origins, or early work. He studied for several years with an obscure painter, Peterzano in Milan, to whom he was apprenticed at age 12 in 1584, but the earliest known work that can be reliably attributed to him dates from almost 10 years later, by which time he had likely been in Rome for several years. His whereabouts in the intervening period are uncertain, and accounts of his life written by near-contemporaries are unreliable on such details.

When Caravaggio finally arrived in Rome, he suffered the vicissitudes of an unattached young man from the provinces, unknown and unwelcomed, in the center of the Catholic world. After a few years working as an understudy in the studios of other painters, his genre paintings of young boys came to the attention of a group of ecclesiastics and businessman who were members of the Roman elite, and passionate collectors of art and artifacts. By day, he moved amongst this community, until his hasty and involuntary departure from Rome a decade later. This small group of patrons bought or paid for nearly all of the images for which Caravaggio is best known.

Amor Victorious

Eros shown prevailing over other human endeavors: war, music, science, government. (1602 - 1603) Oil on canvas, 156 x 113 cm; Staatliche Museen, Berlin.The darkened backgrounds and the incisively real, yet plebeian inhabitants of Caravaggio's canvases were a revolutionary departure from the sunlit frescoes of Michelangelo's Sistine roof or the contemporary Cortona fresco cycles. His canvases, while often muscularly large, are not populated by herculean demigods attended by cherubs; instead, as exemplified by the Madonna di Loreto (painted in 1603-5 and now in S. Agostino in Rome), the depicted shepherds could have been plucked from the populace. The Madonna in the doorway could be any woman emerging from a dark doorway. The entombment of Christ (1602-3) located in the Vatican Pinacoteca is a masterpiece, with subduing emotion as one descends toward the limp Christ.

The high points of Caravaggio's Roman period came in 1600, when the unveiling of his three life-sized paintings narrating the story of St. Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, brought him the acclaim of a continent-wide public, and assured his continuing fame. These paintings are still installed in place.

The Calling of Saint Matthew 1599–1600: in the chiaroscuro of a shaft of light, Jesus' intervention lifts a genre scene to sublime theater.Another set of paintings from the same years are a pair of large canvases about St. Paul, found in the Cerasi chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. In the Conversion on the Way to Damascus, the saint is an epileptic figure, flattened diagonally on the ground after falling from his horse. His horse dominates the canvas center, oblivious to the divine light that has unseated the rider's gravity.

After his exile from Rome in 1606, his works were darker in mood and hastier in execution. Given the tumultous circumstances of his existence, that he continued to do remarkable works is in itself an achievement.

Notorious for his violence and brawling in his private life, even in a time and place when such behavior was commonplace, a transcripts of his police records and trial proceedings fills several pages.

Several violent incidents nearly ended in the death of Caravaggio or his adversaries and he certainly owed his continuing freedom, at least in part, to the protection of his powerful patrons. But even his well-placed friends did not save Caravaggio from the police after a nightime battle between rival gangs led to the death of one of the participants, and in 1606 he left Rome for good. After further misadventures in the south of Italy, and more brilliant painting, he died in 1610 under disputed circumstances before a pardon from the pope could reach him.

His familiarity with the darker side of Roman life frequently appears in Caravaggio's work, and scenes of violence and struggle are common. Caravaggio's difficult and tempestuous nature contrasts with the extreme elegance and control of his work and his ability to charm and ingratiate himself with his aristocratic and clerical supporters, several of whom, most importantly Cardinal Del Monte, lodged him for extended periods in their homes.

The work of Caravaggio itself, represents the culmination of technical innovations begun 200 years earlier in the Renaissance, and towered over the work of his contemporaries in a way that sent shock waves throughout Europe.

The Caravaggisti

"The painters then in Rome were greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles. They outdid each other in imitating his works, undressing their models and raising their lights."

—Giovanni Pietro Bellori, 1672.

The Cardsharps, (Kimbell Art Museum)Caravaggio's innovations had great impact on painters of his generation and the generations that followed — his gritty realism, his choice of models, his theatrical lighting, his "night paintings"; the rich passages of still life; in short, he brought a revolution in art to fruition at a time when art was ripe for renewal.

A short list of artists who owe much to his stylistic breakthroughs includes his companion Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, the Frenchman Georges de La Tour, and the Spaniard Giuseppe Ribera.

Hunting headlice by candlelight, by the Utrecht artist Andries Both (ca.1612-1641), about 1630: candlelit realism and peasant models. The work picks up the homoerotic insinuations of Caravaggio and raises them to the level of savage sarcasm, showing the young man with an inexplicably bared rear, and an old peasant behind him, his hands raised in a parody of prayer.A group of Catholic artists from Utrecht, the "Utrecht Caravaggisti", travelled to Rome as students in the first years of the 17th century and were profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, as Bellori describes. On their return to the north this trend had a short-lived but intense development in the 1620s among painters like Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, Andries Both, and Dirck van Baburen. In the following generation less intense affects of Caravaggio are seen in the work of Rubens (whose time in Rome overlapped that of Caravaggio, and who purchased one of his paintings for the Gonzaga), Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Velazquez, who likely saw his work during his various sojourns in Italy.

Legacy

Many large museums of art, for example those in Detroit, and New York, contain rooms where dozens of paintings by as many artists display the characteristic look of the work of Caravaggio — nightime setting, dramatic lighting, ordinary people used as models, honest description from nature.

In modern times, contemporary painters like the Norwegian Odd Nerdrum and the Romanian Tibor Csernus make no secret of their attempts to emulate and update his work.

Major works

(1594) The Cardsharps [1]
(1601) Supper at Emmaus [2]
(1602) The Taking of Christ [3]
(1603) Amor Victorious [4]
(1607) Flagellation of Christ [5]
(1607) Seven Acts of Mercy [6]
(1609) Adoration of the Shepherds [7]

The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from the existing paintings.h

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