Notes on Caravaggio

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1: Caravaggio, in his religious art, reminded people

that these miracles had transpired neither in primary colors, nor in brilliantly hued paintings of sanitized saints and celestial fireworks, but in dusty streets and dark rooms much like the streets and rooms in which they lived.

That’s Francine Prose, author of Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. Caravaggio rejected the received opinion, that paintings should aim for ideal beauty, perfect proportion, and classical decorum. He was a Romantic Modernist born too soon, in the late Italian Renaissance. The romantic urge to transgress is apparent in his life too, not just his art: both ask us to accept

that the angelic and the diabolic, that sex and violence and God, could easily if not tranquilly coexist in the same dramatic scene, the same canvas, the same painter. Caravaggio nearly fulfills every popular cliche about the personality of the artist.

Every Romantic cliche, that is. For three hundred years, “his work was despised or simply ignored.” Only since the 1950s has he been truly appreciated.

2: Caravaggio painted from life. Models would be asked to hold the often strange configurations he wished to paint, while he put brush to canvas. An early biographer complained: Caravaggio

possessed [no] knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken away from his eyes his hand and his imagination remained empty.

Maybe this had teeth in 1600, but in our time of Andy Warhol and “found art” etc this is hollow criticism.

The Calling of Saint Matthew

3: Prose writes,

Caravaggio never tries to make us imagine that the figures we are seeing are biblical or mythological figures. Instead he reminds us that we are looking at models, theatrically lit and posed for long periods of time, often in considerable discomfort.

In The Calling of Saint Matthew, Jesus wears a faint halo. Other than that, he looks like he might mug you in the street. And Saint Matthew looks no more saintly than the others at the table.

But the components of Caravaggio’s aesthetic that Prose emphasizes are a paradox she never addresses. There’s the naturalism: his models were prostitutes and low-lifes; he painted larger-than life-Biblical characters as ordinary people. And there’s the theatricality: the too-black darkness, and the blinding light, as if shone from impossible spotlights just off-stage. The theatricality is unnatural, and the naturalism is untheatrical. How, and why, do these work together?

Penitent Mary Magdalene

4: What Prose says about Penitent Mary Magdalene, will make philosophers scratch their heads:

The most striking thing was the intensity of his compassion and protectiveness toward the remorseful young woman.

True—but how? If an artist paints a portrait of a real person, then the artist’s protectiveness toward that person might manifest, in the work, as inaccuracy, or selective truth. In the painting, certain features will not appear, or will appear altered. But here there is no real person—anyway, not one whose appearance is known personally to Caravaggio—for him to protect. Beyond what we see in the painting itself, there are no further features to hide. In virtue of what, then, is Caravaggio protective toward his painting’s subject?

Similar puzzlement attends the claim that, in The Entombment of Christ, “The mood is one of tenderness and compassion.” Where does this “mood” come from? A tenderness and compassion felt by those in the scene? Or a tenderness and compassion that we are to feel? Those answers make easy sense, but they’re surely too simplistic.

The Entombment of Christ

5: The complaint that Caravaggio’s saints and martyrs don’t look appropriately holy was made especially about Death of the Virgin: “the dead Madonna looked too much like the bloated corpse of a real woman.”

Death of the Virgin

But of course the painting is a masterpiece. Prose writes that it expressed the essence of everything Caravaggio believed about art:

The simultaneously theatrical and naturalistic casting of ordinary human beings in intensely affecting religious dramas and the translation of biblical narrative from storybook fantasy into contemporary reality have an emotional immediacy and an impact on the viewer that the idealized, saccharine, and spiritually ‘uplifting’ work of his contemporaries could never come close to attaining.

When the patrons who’d commissioned this work saw it, they rejected it:

the world had made it clear to Caravaggio that he had captured something so real that no one wanted to see it.