The Life of Caravaggio
(Michelangelo Merisi)
Michelangelo Merisi
da Caravaggio (September 28, 1573 – July
18, 1610), usually called simply Caravaggio after
his hometown near Milan, was an Italian
Baroque painter, whose large religious
works portrayed saints and other biblical
figures as ordinary people. Though these
paintings were controversial in the church,
the wealthy 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), it is hard to
imagine two artists whose worlds were more
distinct.
Biography
Little is known about Caravaggio's
artistic origins, or early work. He studied
for several years with the obscure painter
Peterzano in Milan, to whom he was apprenticed
at age 12 in 1584, but the earliest known
work which 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 none of the several
accounts of his life written by near-contemporaries
are reliable on such details.
When Caravaggio finally
arrived in Rome, he suffered the vicissitudes
of an unattached young man from the provinces,
unknown and un-welcomed, in the very 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 of every kind. This
became the community he moved amongst (at
least by day) until his hasty and involuntary
departure from Rome a decade later, and it
was this small group of patrons who bought
or paid for nearly all of the pictures for
which Caravaggio is best known.
The high point 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 church of
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, and remain
a must-see for any artistic pilgrimage to
Rome.
The works done during the
next period of Caravaggio's life, after his
exile from Rome in 1606, are much darker
in mood and hastier in execution. Given the
tumultuous circumstances of his existence,
that he continued to do remarkable works
is in itself an achievement.
In his private life, Caravaggio
was notorious for his violence and brawling
even in a time and place where such behavior
was commonplace. A full transcript of his
police records and trial proceedings would
fill several pages, and it is difficult to
take a sympathetic view of the artist based
on the picture which emerges from this material.
Several of these violent
incidents nearly ended in the death of the
painter or his adversary, and certainly Caravaggio
owed his continuing freedom at least in part
to the protection of his powerful patrons.
But even his well-placed friends could not
save Caravaggio from the police after a nighttime
battle between rival gangs led to the death
of one of the participants, and in 1606 the
artist was forced to quit 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 informs
Caravaggio's work, and scenes of violence
and struggle are common. However, it is still
a challenge to reconcile what we know of
Caravaggio's difficult and tempestuous nature
with the extreme elegance and control of
his work. Still more difficult to understand
is 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.
What continues to hold our
attention is the work itself, which in its
time represented the culmination of technical
innovations begun 200 years earlier in the
Renaissance. The art of representation has
never surpassed the best of Caravaggio's
work, and it towered over the work of his
contemporaries in a way that sent shock waves
throughout Europe, waves that are felt to
this day.
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.
It would be hard to overestimate
the impact that Caravaggio's innovations
had upon 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, the revolution
he brought to fruition at a time when art
was ripe for renewal.
A short list of artists
who owe much to his stylistic breakthroughs
would include his companion Orazio Gentileschi
and his daughter Artemisia, the Frenchman
Georges de La Tour, and the Spaniard Guiseppe
Ribera.
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
(illustration, right), and Dirck
van Baburen. In the following generation
less intense affects of Caravaggio can be
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.
It is easy to judge for
oneself the pervasiveness of Caravaggio's
influence. 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
his work - 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 Hungarian Tibor Csernus make no secret
of their attempts to emulate and update his
work. Perhaps no single artist in the entire
Western canon, outside of Giotto and Massacio,
had so much influence beyond his time.
|
|
