Caravaggio

In my last post, we saw that Raphael’s perfect moment of resolution was followed by Mannerist rejection of that perfect moment in favor of further exploration. The change may also reflect the tumult of political/religious events: the sack of Rome and the birth of the reformation. This volatile situation gave birth to what was to follow: the first awakenings of the Baroque period of mastery.  Probably the most important and influential artist in defining this new direction was Caravaggio.

The self-portrait as Bacchus, god of wine, is very telling.  Caravaggio was a carouser, somewhat of a ruffian, and eventually had to flee Rome after killing someone in a barroom brawl.  Many of his paintings are set in the seamier side of Roman night life, and the same characters fill his religious works as well.

It was Caravaggio’s religious paintings which made his reputation, both at the time and for later generations.  There was a brief period when the catholic church tried to counter the reformation by becoming more common and accessible, and for this period Caravaggio was the perfect artistic messenger. His “Madonna and Child” is an excellent example: except for her halo, the virgin is an ordinary roman girl with her baby, on a doorstep, being importuned by beggars with dirty feet.  The interpretation of St. Matthew is if anything more demeaning, showing the unlettered Mathew being not so much inspired to write as being dictated to.

The demystification of religious subject matter was only one of Caravaggio’s contributions. He developed artistic devices which totally revolutionized the viewer’s relationship to the painting. In his “Supper at Emmaus” there is no space between the front of the painting and the table at which Christ and his apostles sit.  Thus when the man with his back to us shoves his chair violently back from the table, we need to jump out of the way to avoid being hit.  The drama is heightened immeasurably by the artist’s use of light and dark in an overtly theatrical way.

This is seen again in the other work, “The Conversion of St. Paul”. The story of Paul being thrown from his horse by the power of his revelation was a natural for Caravaggio’s brand of bombast.  Here the horse is so large in the frame that St. Paul MUST fall out of the frame and into our space when he is thrown.  Once again, Caravaggio allows the viewer no contemplative distance from the action.

As powerful as was the device of projecting the action of the painting into the viewer’s space, the use of light and dark (chiaroscuro) had a much more profound impact on later artists.  It became a specialty for artist like Georges de la Tour, who developed his own variant: a light source within the frame, often a candle, shielded from the viewer.  In the work “St. Joseph the Carpenter” we see the father of Jesus at work with his son holding a candle, which renders his fingers translucent.

I am also showing you the young Rembrandt’s interpretation of the “Supper at Emmaus”.  It has drama equal to anything Caravaggio produced, though it stays well within the picture space.  This work foretells a lifetime of using light and dark for his purposes, though in the later work the drama gives way to a contemplative inwardness.

There is no artist in the history of Western art that had a greater impact on the work of succeeding generations than did Caravaggio.  He is another of the many whom one wishes might have lived to develop a late style.

 

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