Caravaggio: The first human painter

Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio, is one of those artists who never cease to compel attention for better or worse. Worse came in 1991, when a demented attacker slashed his huge altarpiece depiction of The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (it's been restored). We'll never know whether the painter's evocation of one of the iconic scenes of Western violence touched off a response in kind, but no one reacts to a Caravaggio indifferently, even after four centuries.

I might add that Caravaggio, a notoriously unbridled character, himself killed a man, Ranuccio Tomassoni, and was a fugitive for the last four years of his brief life (1571-1610). Pursued from Rome to Naples to Malta to Sicily and back to Naples, once imprisoned and always on the run, he nonetheless found time (and patronage) to paint the relative handful of pictures that (with those of Rubens) were the greatest of his time.

It was in Malta that he painted his St. John for the Oratorio di San Giovanni. For a painter of his skill, a murder rap was no impediment to a juicy clerical commission in late Renaissance Italy.

Caravaggio hasn't always flourished; during the Victorian era his reputation attracted more attention than his work, and serious scholarly attention has only been paid to him for less than a century. That attention includes the elaborate exhibit, "Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Followers," currently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Destabilizing intensity

Major changes in art styles can rarely be attributed to a single individual. But if anyone can be justly called the father of the Baroque, it is Caravaggio.

Here was a painter who did things with light, atmosphere, composition and psychological portraiture that no one had ever done before. Renaissance art, even in its Mannerist variant, was concerned with due proportion and harmonious effect. But in Caravaggio, even familiar themes took on a dramatic, destabilizing intensity; light no longer came from an identifiable natural source; the angle of attention was no longer reliably centered on the ostensibly principal subject.

And yet these strange pictures cohered: For all their dynamic restlessness, they nonetheless held their place in a rigorous compositional field. Everybody wanted to do something like it.

Light without source

"Only" eight Caravaggios are displayed in the Los Angeles show; "only" eight because gathering that many of Caravaggio's works for a single show is a considerable curatorial feat.

Two of them, both early, are accomplished but not unconventional Late Renaissance paintings, a Martha and Mary Magdalene and a formal portrait of Maffeo Barberini, the later Pope Urban VIII.

A work that's contemporary with these, however— the Wadsworth Atheneum's St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy— already shows new features. The brown-habited saint, depicted beside a stream, is supported by angels who look tenderly at him. The extremity of the saint's condition and the artificial light whose source is nowhere in the scene itself are both novelties.

These innovations are closely and programmatically related. Since we're being invited to witness the physical manifestation of an inner event, it would stand to reason— although no one had ever reasoned this way before— that the light that illuminates it comes likewise from a hidden, interior source.

El Greco had approached this notion, just as St. Theresa of Avila had revived a vogue for religious raptures. But Caravaggio had taken the decisive step of dispensing altogether with a natural referent. Light appeared as it was needed to reveal that which required disclosure.

Sexual fantasies

Another aspect of Caravaggio's work is on display in his St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness, a fully mature work dating from 1604-05. St. John is depicted as a brooding young man with a staff, nude except for a fur-lined red cloak that drapes itself about his loins. This startlingly handsome fellow seems to have less to do with the coming of Christ than with the sexual fantasies of Salome in Caravaggio's Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist (1608-10)— an early example of the painter's own interest in rough trade.

The code expression for homosexuality in Renaissance art was the martyrdom of St. Stephen, with its image of a body riddled by arrows. Caravaggio, however, opens up a far wider range of Christian iconography for such appropriation, not excluding Jesus himself.

Desire is checked by compassion, however, in Ecce Homo (1605), in which Jesus is led forth by a black-clad, gray-bearded Pontius Pilate, whose sharp gaze engages the viewer beyond the picture plane, while an attendant slips a mantle over Jesus's shoulders and speaks encouragingly to him. Jesus, for his part, wears his crown of thorns lightly, and, although his features express pain, his body is unblemished.

Dialogue with hands

There is a deep ambiguity in this scene, a sense that all participants are playing preordained roles and that the viewer, by responding with his own gaze, is entering the circle of complicity. Who is crucifying Christ? the picture seems to ask, while simultaneously offering the answer: Who is not?

Meanwhile, an entire treatise could be written on the positioning and expression of the hands in this canvas, which seem to carry on a dialogue of their own from one figure to another. Beyond all else, it is this sense of human palpability that defines Caravaggio's genius. You cannot look at a work of Caravaggio's prime without being compelled to enter it.

It seems to me that this human quality of Caravaggio's art, rather than technical innovation, led his followers—the Caravaggisti, as they're called— to emulate his style. That, in turn, is what defines the aspiration of the early Baroque, which is nothing less than an attempt to construct a new relationship between an artwork and its spectator.

Kinship to pornography

Art, especially religious art, had of course a didactic purpose; it was intended to edify the viewer. But this was a one-way relationship, and in that sense it excluded the viewer even while beckoning him. (Our modern, consumerist relation to art creates problems of another sort.)

The Baroque painter, in contrast, seeks in Caravaggio's manner to create what I've suggested is a state of complicity. Baudelaire caught this intention in the derisory formulation of his readers' relationship to him: hypocrite, semblable, frère. A scene is laid, dramatic and enticing; the viewer is invited to eavesdrop and soon finds himself pulled in.

Pornography operates in this way, with its shifting equations of pleasure, guilt and shame. There is certainly a tinge of pornography in Baroque art, where nudity begins to give way to nakedness; but its scope is vastly wider and more complex.

Blood on his hands

It's connected, too, to broader developments in Western consciousness. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt spoke of the Renaissance as an age in which personal awareness came to the fore as a quality— "individualism"— to be valued in its own right. This was the case among artists, who began signing their works and, more importantly, sought to develop signature styles in their composition.

Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters confirmed their celebrity status— but again, it was Caravaggio who added the touch of notoriety. Long before the Romantic stereotype of the artist as a dangerous type who lived on the margins of society, he was a man with actual blood on his hands. Surely there was an extra frisson for the spectator or disciple of his art in that.

One of the better-known works derived from Caravaggio is Georges de la Tour's The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame, on view here. This genre scene is also almost a programmatic statement of the artist as the source of his own (and our) light.

Van Gogh's inspiration?

Frenchmen such as Simon Vouet, Spaniards like Ribera and even Velazquez, and of course Dutch and Flemish painters as well as Caravaggio's fellow countrymen, all followed in Caravaggio's footsteps for half a century before his style was more generally absorbed into the high Baroque. His influence is felt not only in style and approach but choice of subject matter, as in the variations on his The Denial of St. Peter (1610), which— with the treatments of the same theme by the Frenchman Nicholas Tournier, the Fleming Gerard Seghers and the Dutchman Gerrit von Honthorst— compellingly illustrate how distinctive visions can be animated by a common source.

Indeed, the Caravaggisti constitute a major school in their own right. But dwarfed as they are by number (the last of the Caravaggios on exhibit, The Tooth-Puller of 1608-09, inspired a whole sub-genre of the grotesque on its own), the master's hand still presides.

Our own time remains fascinated by the personality of another outsider, Vincent Van Gogh. But Caravaggio has had his modern admirers too, including the filmmaker Derek Jarman. You could say fairly that his sensibility was in some ways even more attuned to ours, indeed proto-cinematic. But also very much film noir.♦


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