Caravaggio A Genius Between Shadows and Lights

Project editor

Valeria Manferto De Fabianis

Editorial assistant

Giorgio Ferrero

Graphic design

Maria Cucchi

CARAVAGGIO

A Genius Between Shadows and Lights

Text by Stefania Macioce

The Fortunes of the Prints

by Michela Gianfranceschi

Ottavio Leoni, Portrait of Caravaggio, 1620-25, Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence

Preface

Caravaggio is a myth of our time; he has no detractors among art historians or art lovers. His overwhelming paintings are immediately recognizable, partly due to the vast diffusion of reproductions of his works in photographs, posters, and gadgets—a true form of “gossip” in art history that is continuously on the rise.

Just like the goddess Minerva, the myth of Caravaggio seems to have appeared as if he had no precedents. He is always recognizable from his unique, incomparable style and his notoriety, and while many non-experts believe they can identify without a doubt the master’s hand, specialists foster critical debates and search avidly for works by Caravaggio that have either disappeared or are unknown, as well as documents related to him.

Caravaggio is intangible, and the disturbing immensity of his genius looms over those who admire his paintings, which are so real and at the same time seem almost to be light-years away. We know that his life was short, barely 39 years—he was born in 1571 in Milan and died at Porto Ercole in 1610—and as his sworn enemy Giovanni Baglione stated: “he died as miserably as he had lived.” He was a restless and cursed genius according to 19th-century interpretations, accused by classicists of ruining the art of painting because he ignored the necessary process of selection. His brief existence is reflected in, and is an integral part of, his oeuvre, which is tinged with the intense melancholy of evil and the burning need for salvation

and redemption. There is a huge amount of documents, biographical details, and testimony concerning him, and we persist in believing that we know the man and the artist so well, while he actually remains shrouded in mystery.

In fact, we know very little of the intimate life, character, and culture of the man, because the only writings we have by him are a few autographs. The court testimony regarding Caravaggio is only indirect, and in his contracts he is mentioned as a “sublime artist.” Yet no private letter or poem of his exists. In reality we know nothing about his love life, and less about his interior life, despite the fact that we seem to understand it with utter clarity. His friends, women, his presumed homosexuality: a profusion of intimations but very little certainty.

Thus, it is his paintings and only his paintings that reveal the basis of his vision and sometimes afford us with hints concerning his life. Solitary and arrogant, but driven by a universal creative impulse, Caravaggio encourages our pietas in the most select meaning of the term.

Despite the fact that at present there are around 4,200 publications on Caravaggio, excluding the historical ones and periodicals, it may still be useful to present in this book the works that have been definitively ascribed to him: that is, the autograph canvases. The commitment to a thorough yet concise selection is an integral part of the structure of this book, the aim being to guide the reader in a linear and uncomplicated fashion, with a stratified reading of extraordinary paintings, in

the challenging attempt to combine the various aspects of the analysis of Caravaggio’s oeuvre.

Caravaggio constantly honed his inventive capability, bending his technical mastery to his poetic needs. He was quick to assimilate the cultural stimuli that arrived from circles that boasted remarkable social and intellectual qualities and satisfied the requests of his principal patrons, such excellent personalities of the time as Cardinal Del Monte, the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani and his brother Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, Ciriaco Mattei, Orazio Costa, Alof de Wignacourt, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and many others. The transgressive ambiguity of the secular paintings is counterbalanced by the nourishment of authentic faith in the religious paintings, in which the trueto-life, hence credible, historical narration elicits popular devotion.

Caravaggio’s adherence to the principle of reality is what prompted him to reject the hierarchy of subjects, such as the selection of ideal beauty. For him, in “authentic nature” everything was equally important, even shadow. The dense, tangible darkness becomes a pictorial space that is lacerated by the violence of light that is both real and supernatural. From the late 1590s to the first decade of the following century, the Lombard master shared glory with great artists, from Carracci to Rubens. But his art was based on different premises that were rooted in the analytical tangibility of Lombard painting. Caravaggio

also paid attention to the heritage of the ancient world and his works have classical references, but they are always absorbed into the natural coherence of his poetic style, which did not idealize. “Authentic nature,” which is central to his pictorial speculation, determines outstanding “snapshots” in which well-crafted and highly modern light— much like present-day spotlights—brings into focus actions that are suspended in moments of absolute eternity. The highly studied details emphasize the precarious, ephemeral nature of human actions, of nature, and of the objects poised between the pictorial space and our space, and those moments of real life are captured and reabsorbed by the perpetual flow of time.

Caravaggio painted more and more rapidly, leaving the priming exposed to view, in order to render the profound sense of his representation. His painting might only seem to be instinctive, but it is really the fruit of a procedure of synthesis that only geniuses can achieve; it conceals great skill and culture and is well ahead of its time. The truth is illustrated through surprising immediacy and elicits universal participation in the viewers.

Probing and exploring genius necessarily limits our critical sense and is therefore not the aim of this book, which is to offer readers an easy-to-read and essential catalog, in its actual historical and cultural context and perspective, a presentation of painting in historical time and yet “timeless.”

Formation and the Early Roman Period

“He began to paint according to his own inclination”

Michelangelo Merisi was born in the parish church of Santo Stefano in Brolo, Milan, on 29 September 1571, the feast day of St. Michael Archangel. His parents, Fermo Merisi and Lucia Aratori, were married in Saints Peter and Paul church in the town of Caravaggio (province of Milan). Among the witnesses was Francesco Sforza, the Marquis of Caravaggio, for whom Fermo worked as a steward, a position requiring a great deal of trust that probably also included administrative tasks. Francesco’s wife Costanza Colonna, the Marquise of Caravaggio, was the person who would later carefully follow the career of Michelangelo Merisi, who up to his last years would enjoy her protection and solicitude.

In the city of Milan, dominated by the figure of its bishop, St. Charles Borromeo, on 6 April 1584, Caravaggio, who was about 13 years old, was apprenticed to the painter Simone Peterzano, also known as Simone “Venetiano.” It was in this atelier that he acquired his first artistic training. In roughly four years, the youngster assimilated Lombard art, from the naturalism of the Campi brothers to the Counter-Reformation rigor of Ambrogio Figino, as well as the fundamental influence of Venetian painting, which was introduced to him by Peterzano himself, who had had direct contact with the art and artists of the lagoon republic. All these influences can be seen in Caravaggio’s early works, including the references to Venetian artists such as Titian himself. The images of the

works that the youngster observed carefully during his many travels in north Italy would reappear in his creations, but they are re-elaborated in a wholly new and original style.

In 1591, Caravaggio was still living in Milan. His father had died when he was still a child, while his mother’s death occurred in 1590, when he was an adult, as is attested in the succession certificate. The fact that his patron, the Marquise of Caravaggio, moved to Rome in 1592 has been interpreted as the crucial factor in his decision to go to the Eternal City. In this regard, the biography of the artist, compiled by the painter Gaspare Celio in 1614, in its brief account of Caravaggio’s Milan period, reports that “having killed one of his friends, he set off for Rome.” We do not know whether this report, which was repeated by later sources, is reliable or is merely the fruit of the notoriety Merisi had earned after the murder that totally disrupted his life in 1606, triggering the dramatic and startling events leading to his premature death.

The chronology of his whereabouts from the time he left Milan after 1592 to his arrival in Rome has not yet been clarified definitively and indeed should be articulated on the basis of certain dates that can be deduced from the archives that would confirm his presence in the papal capital in 1595. Caravaggio’s name appears in some declarations and interrogations of the 1597 Tribunal of the Governor of Rome, and that same year, together with the painter Prospero

Martha and Mary Magdalene

ca. 1598-99

Oil on canvas, 100 x 134.5 cm (391/3 x 53 in.)

The Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, Detroit

In the inventory (1606) of the possessions of Donna Olimpia Aldobrandini, the niece of Pope Clement VIII, there is the following description: “a painting depicting Saints Martha and Mary Magdalene when she [Martha] converts her,” without the name of the artist. Only in 1638, once again in the Aldobrandini papers, does the artist’s name appear together with the description of the canvas, which confirms the identification of the work in Olimpia’s previous inventory. This work belonged to the family until the second half of the following century, after which it changed hands several times until it found its present home in 1973, in the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum collection.

The dialog between the two sister saints is depicted in an intimate, “everyday” fashion: the young sisters are portrayed in half-length seated behind a wooden table during a lively discussion. Martha is making a point, here evinced by her gesture of counting on her fingers, as if unraveling a thought and explaining its logical sequence, while her sister is listening, totally engrossed. Caravaggio here expresses two distinct moments simultaneously. First, the admonishment on the part of the more virtuous sister, as opposed to Magdalene’s attributes of worldly gratification, represented by her elegant garb, generously low neckline, comb, and makeup. This is complemented by the second moment: the conversion of the sinner, a fundamental theme of Post-Tridentine Catholic culture. The saint, an intercessor between humans and God, suggests the way to approach divine grace. The first signs of this interior transformation are the flower held against her chest, the mirror, an emblem of vanity, on which she puts her hand, showing the thin ring on her ring finger, a symbol of faith, just like a newlywed bride, who in this case is a “mystical bride.” The young woman has a fixed look, much like an ecstatic eclipse of her senses, while the narration of her union with God takes place silently right before us.

Cappella Contarelli

The Stories of Saint Matthew

1599-1602

San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

In his Life of Caravaggio (1642), the painter and biographer Giovanni Baglione reports that, thanks to the help of Cardinal Del Monte, in the summer of 1599 the artist obtained the first public commission in his career from the rectors of the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome to execute the two side paintings of the chapel that Mathieu Cointrel (Matteo Contarelli) had purchased about 30 years earlier. When Cointrel died in 1585, his heir Virgilio Crescenzi, and afterwards the latter’s son Giacomo, were charged with coordinating the decoration of the chapel, since it was proceeding extremely slowly. In 1597, at the behest of the pope, the jurisdiction of the church was given to the Fabric of St. Peter’s institution. Caravaggio was involved in the decorative project of the chapel, the ceiling of which had been partly painted by Cavalier d’Arpino; Girolamo Muziano had also been asked to collaborate but accepted another commission.

The iconographic program of the Contarelli Chapel was based on the stories of St. Matthew in honor of the donor, and it was decided that the paintings on the side walls of the chapel were to represent the saint’s calling and martyrdom, perfectly in line with the pastoral policy and the struggle against heresy carried out by Pope Clement VIII Aldobrandini (1592-1605). During his papacy, Clement had carried out a meticulous process of mediation, succeeding in establishing a rapprochement between France and the Church of Rome, which was sanctioned by King Henry IV’s conversion and the consequent reconciliation between France and Spain. In this context, San Luigi dei Francesi, the church representing France in Rome, became an important symbol of the Church’s victory over Protestantism.

The enormous paintings that Caravaggio executed after the example of the Venetian teleri or large canvases, are an excellent and emblematic expression of naturalism at the service of hagiographic narrative: in the scenes the movement is as if rendered by means of a modern photograph. The artist used the light in order to physically mold the images, thus obtaining a strong spiritual quality: the shafts of light break through the darkness of the settings, revealing the disruptive power that divine intervention and grace have in human existence. These were the first public works that brought Caravaggio’s revolutionary and theatrical style to the attention of the art world, a style that marked the prodigious success of the artist vis-à-vis his peers. From this time on, commissions both private and public arrived in rapid succession, and the new “vision” of painting would find more and more astonishing modes and means of expression.