“What in effect Caravaggio is doing systematically and deliberately, for the first time in the history of art, is destroying the space between the event in the painting and the people looking at it…”
“Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (1571-1610) achieved one of the most important revolutions in the history of painting. He inherited a world where the classical idealism of Michelangelo was still normative, especially in the depiction of the human body, and where the eccentricities of his successors, who did not paint from life at all, distorted the popular notion of what the eye actually sees. He rejected both utterly. He painted with an intensity of realism never before equalled, and his impact was so immediate, profound and lasting that it affected all the great painters of the first half of the seventeenth century. The genius of each transmuted the new realism in a variety of ways, making it both the climax and the golden age of European art.”
Carravaggio. Well. Call it portrait of the artist as a bad lot.He was irreverent. He never scrupled to break the laws of man or god. Yet, and the paradox would have pleased him: his works are among the great masterpieces of religious art.
Caravaggio’s home town Porto Ercole, unlike most other towns in Tuscany, never had anything to do with art. It was just a poor unmarked fishing village, its inland ground was mainly malarial, the sardines ran but once a year, and the farmers grubbed a subsistence living from the olives and vines terraced along the slopes, and that was all. Porto Ercole entered the history of art only once, and only briefly. On July 18, 1610, one of the greatest of all Italian painters, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio , died there.
He did not go out with much dignity. A fugitive on the run from hired thugs who were trying to kill him, weakened from knife wounds, and trying to sneak back into Rome, from which a papal edict had banished him three years earlier, he had been deposited on the beach of Porto Ercole by a passing boat. The Spanairds, officious and inquisitive, mistook him for a criminal and clapped him in a small jail that once stood on the Feniglia. It took them two days to conclude that this stinking, blaspheming gamecock was not their legal concern.
But when the prisoner emerged from his cell, shaking with malaria, the felucca he had come in was hull down on the horizon. In it, he thought, were all his possessions, his clothes, his pictures, and his much used sword. Cursing and stumbling in the fine white sand, he ran down the beach after the boat. And so he died, a black knot of fever under the crushing July sun. He was buried a pauper, not quite thirty-nine years old.
Casravaggio’s death, no less than his life, germinated a legend. Roger Hinks: ” we are invited to choose between caravaggio the pioneer of social realism, and Caravaggio the hero of the resistance against the totalitarian imagery of the counter-reformation, and half a dozen other Caravaggio’s, all of them plausible, none of them quite convincing.” He fit the myth on which our present era nourishes its popular fiction of the creative life; at least until the 1970’s , when the modern artist such as a Peter Max or Warhol was looked at as a paradigm of success rather than failure.
According to the myth, the painter is a misunderstood rebel, predicting the future from a point outside society’s entanglements like a boar in a net. So Caravaggio, along with Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Modigliani and Van Gogh, was drafted into a platoon of marginals; that legion of nobly gifted and self-destructive men whose haughty critique of the world was their refusal to accept it on its own terms. And a distinguished addition he was: a figure of extraordinary and international influence, not only on his seventeenth-century Italian followers like Mattia Preti, Carlo Saraceni, and the Gentileschis, but on the Spaniard Rubera and the great Frenchman Georges de La Tour; and, more remotely, on Velazquez and even Rembrandt, whose glittering nodes of light, held in an immense parenthesis of gloom, find their distant precedent in Caravaggio’s dark “tenebroso”.
Yet the picture of Caravaggio as a genius rejected by his time because he was too advanced for it, may be an easy out, but on investigation does not really survive a comprehensive inspection. Certainly, he had his critics, and made enemies easily and with great frequency. He was arrogant, spiteful and cocksure, and his virtuosity was such as to terrify the older generation of Roman artists whose Mannerism was already under attack when Caravaggio arrived in Rome in the early 1590’s. The flutterings and grumblings in their dovecote are nicely suggested by the aloof and peevish remarks of a conservative Florentine named Vicencio Carducho, who was three years Caravaggio’s junior:
“His Diálogos de la Pintura of 1633 championed Michelangelo and the Italian classical tradition while defending painting as a noble pursuit. The artist, wrote Carducho, is a learned humanist, not just a craftsman; painters should uplift people morally. In attacking Caravaggio’s new dramatic realism and its “external copying of nature,” Carducho called him a “monster of genius and talent,” “Anti-Michelangelo” and “Anti-Christ.”….
Carducho’s whose theory of art was published in 1633, was based on the major Italian theorists such as Zuccaro and Lomazzo, and most probably reflected the debate raging all over Europe when he called Caravaggio ”the evil genius, who worked naturally, almost without rules, without doctrine, without study, but only with the strength of his talent, and nothing but nature before him, which he simply copied.” ; this describes the masters of “colorito” of which Caravaggio had become the leading example.
Baglione (1642) wrote that ‘Some people consider him to have been the very ruination of painting, because many young artists, following his example, simply copy heads from life without studying the fundamentals of drawing and the profundity of art…and are…incapable of putting two figures together or of composing a story because they do not understand the high value of the noble art of painting.’ In 1672 Bellori wrote that ‘There is no doubt Caravaggio advanced the art of painting, because he came upon the scene when realism was not much in fashion and when figures were made according to convention and satisfied more the taste for gracefulness than for truth’; however, Bellori also thought that he had ‘debased the majesty of art’, and that because of him ‘everyone did as he pleased, and soon the value of the beautiful was discounted. The antique lost all authority, as did Raphael…some artists began to revel in filth and deformity.’
It has to be remembered that allegorical personifications of painting, as a liberal art in the figure of a woman, are not known before the sixteenth-century. In the Platonic world of antiquity, painting was only an imperfect imitation of reality, and Christianity, for its part, reinforced the rejection with its fear of the power of images to excite worship. Hence, painting was regarded as a mechanical art, not being included with the liberal arts until after Michelangelo’s project of 1505 for the tomb of Julius II. Only after Michelangelo’s death in 1564 would painting be considered as a liberal profession and not a craft.
However, none of this, not the method of working directly from a model without a preliminary drawing, not the extreme and “indecorous” realism, not even the rejection of mannerist norms and conceits, would have troubled Carducho, or anyone else, except for one threat: Caravaggio’s work was both popular and influential. He never lacked patrons in Rome. And the men who supported him were among the richest and most discerning “modernist” collectors of the day. Sometimes, though not very often, Caravaggio had trouble with his ecclesiastical commissions: the the reverent “Death of the Virgin” the last work he finished before he fled from Rome, was rejected by the Carmelites of Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere because it lacked “decorum”. The model for the virgin, it was rumored, was a drowned and bloated whore who had been fished out of the Tiber. But then it went on exhibition in Rome amid great public notoriety, and painters flocked to see it. One of them was Rubens, who persuaded the Duke of Mantua that he should buy it for three hundred and fifty gold ducats, a handsome price for the time.
Caravaggio’s problem was not failure; it was a stubborn incapacity to behave like the success that he was. The accounts and rumors of his life, written, it is true, by such enemies as Giovanni Baglione, who imitated his work but sued him in court for libel; converge on a randy desperado, whose hand, when not on the brush, was on the sword-hilt or groping in plackets and codpieces. Who, in the end, had managed to offend nearly everyone who “mattered” and to bugger of knife not a few of those who did not. Yet the paintings of Caravaggio made from 1600 onward reveal one of the grandest visionary painters of the seventeenth or any other century, a man obsessed by the dense reality of objects in the world, and by the piercing epiphanies of a faith that could transfigure their coarse, sublunary existence.