Caravaggio
Caravaggio began to paint according to his genius. He not only ignored the most excellent marbles of the ancients and the famous paintings of Raphael, but he despised them, and nature alone became the object of his brush. Thus when the most famous statues of Phidias and Glycon were pointed out to him as models for his painting, he gave no other reply than to extend his hand toward a crowd of men, indicating that nature had provided him sufficiently with teachers. In finding and arranging his figures, whenever it happened that he came upon someone in the town who pleased him, he was fully satisfied with this invention of nature and made no effort to exercise his brain further he painted Penitent Magdalene. The painting portrays a repentant Mary Magdalene, bowed over in penitent sorrow as she leaves behind her dissolute life, its trappings abandoned beside her.
On this occasion, however, there are none of the usual signs of a religious scene such as a halo. A young girl is seen seated on a low stool with her hands in her lap in the act of drying her hair; he portrayed her in a room with a small ointment vessel, jewels, and gems placed on the floor; thus he would have us believe that she is the Magdalene. She holds her face a little to one side, and her cheek, neck, and breast are rendered in pure, facile, and true tones, which are enhanced by the simplicity of the whole composition. She wears a blouse, and her yellow dress is drawn up to her knees over the white underskirt of flowered damask. Caravaggio’s heroine is sobbing silently to herself and a single tear falls down her cheek. She is, as it were, poised between her past life of luxury and the simple life she will embrace as one of Christ’s most faithful followers. It is a sign of the painter’s skill that he makes this inner conflict moving at the same time as he makes its representation delectable. We have described this figure in particular to characterize his naturalistic method and how he imitates real color using only a few tints. Caravaggio (for he was now generally called by the name of his native town) was making himself more and more notable for the color scheme which he was introducing, not soft and sparingly tinted as before, but reinforced throughout with bold shadows and a great deal of black to give relief to the forms. He went so far in this manner of working that he never brought his figures out into the daylight, but placed them in the dark brown atmosphere of a closed room, using a high light that descended vertically over the principal parts of the bodies while leaving the remainder in shadow in order to give force through a strong contrast of light and dark. The painters in Rome were greatly impressed by his novelty, and the younger ones especially gathered around him and praised him as the only true imitator of nature. Looking upon his works as miracles, they outdid each other in following his method, undressing their models and placing their lights high; without paying attention to study and teachings, each found easily in the piazza or the street his teacher or his model for copying nature. This facile manner attracted many, and only the old painters who were accustomed to the old ways were shocked at the new concern for nature, and they did not cease to decry Caravaggio and his manner. They spread it about that he did not know how to come out of the cellar and that, poor in invention and design, lacking in decorum and art, he painted all his figures in one light and on one plane without gradations (Witcombe 1995).
From the above, there is no question that Caravaggio advanced the art of painting because he came upon the scene at a time when realism was not much in fashion and when figures were made according to convention and manner and satisfied more the taste for gracefulness than for truth. Thus by avoiding all prettiness and vanity in his color, Caravaggio strengthened his tones and gave them blood and flesh. In this way, he induced his fellow painters to work from nature. He never introduced clear blue atmosphere into his pictures; on the contrary, he always used black for the ground and depths and also for the flesh tones, limiting the force of the light to a few places. Moreover, he followed his model so slavishly that he did not take credit for even one brush stroke, but said that it was the work of nature. He repudiated every other precept and considered it the highest achievement in art not to be bound to the rules of art. Because of these innovations, he received so much acclaim that some artists of great talent and instructed in the best schools were urged to follow him. With all this, many of the best elements of art were not in him; he possessed neither invention, nor decorum, nor design, nor any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken away from his eyes his hand, and his imagination remained empty. Nevertheless, many artists were fascinated by his manner and accepted it willingly since without study or effort it enabled them to make facile copies after nature and to imitate forms which were vulgar and lacking in beauty. With the majesty of art thus suppressed by Caravaggio, everyone did as he pleased, and soon the value of the beautiful was discounted.
According to Christopher the antique lost all authority, as did Raphael, and because it was so easy to obtain models and paint heads from nature, these pictures abandoned the use of histories which are proper to painters and redirected themselves to half-length figures which were previously very little used. Now began the representation of vile things; some artists started to look enthusiastically for filth and deformity. If they have to paint armor they choose the rustiest; if a vase, they do not make it complete but broken and without a spout. The costumes they paint are stockings, breeches, and big caps and when they paint figures they give all of their attention to the wrinkles, the defects of the skin and the contours, depicting knotted fingers and limbs disfigured by disease. Because of this Caravaggio encountered much displeasure and some of his pictures were taken down from their altars, as we have said to be the case of San Luigi. The same thing has happened to his Death of the Virgin in the Church of the Scala because it imitated too closely the corpse of a woman. Another of his paintings, The Virgin and St. Anne, was taken down from one of the minor altars of the Vatican Basilica because the Virgin and the nude Christ Child were too indecently portrayed (as one can see in the Villa Borghese).
In Sant’ Agostino, one is presented [with the Madonna of Loreto] with the dirt on the Pilgrim’s feet, and in Naples among the Seven Works of Mercy, there is a man who raises his flask to drink and lets the wine coarsely run into his open mouth. In the Supper at Emmaus, besides the rustic character of the two apostles and of the Lord who is shown young and without a beard, Caravaggio shows the innkeeper who serves with a cap on his head, and on the table, there is a plate of grapes, figs, and pomegranates out of season.
Caravaggio’s way of working corresponded to his physiognomy and appearance. He had a dark complexion and dark eyes, black hair and eyebrows and this, of course, was reflected in his paintings. His first manner, with its sweet and pure color, was his best; in it, he made the most significant achievements and proved himself to be the most excellent Lombard colorist but later, driven by his peculiar temperament, he gave himself up to the dark manner and the expression of his turbulent and contentious nature. Caravaggio’s colors are prized wherever painting is esteemed.
As Wittkower (1982) so aptly says of Caravaggio “…when all is said and done, his types chosen from the common people, his magic realism and light reveal his passionate belief that it was the simple in spirit, the humble and the poor who hold the mysteries of faith fast within their souls.” From Caravaggio’s time and through his influence it does seem that the commonality entered his stage set theatrical art and passed on to inherit places in future paintings in their own right, as worthwhile and exciting subjects of art.
For a while, Caravaggio’s art created a great stir and for a while exerted a significant influence – especially outside Italy. As we have seen his followers, the Tenebrists or the Caravaggisti were located in Italy and northern Europe through to Spain. In France, he inspired Simon Vouet and Georges de la Tour, in Antwerp Theodore Rombouts, in the Netherlands it was Gerrit van Honthorst, Dirk van Baburen, and Hendrik Terbruggen. It was through these latter three that Caravaggio’s influence touched the young Rembrandt whereas the effect on Rubens was a direct process during his Italian sojourn. It was Caravaggio’s dramatic style which made him a pioneer in the century that produced “…the eclectic realism of Rubens, the dignified truth of Velasquez and the poignant naturalism of Rembrandt” (Levey 1974).
Caravaggio’s followers either coarsened or sweetened his style and thus they “…sacrificed either his harshness or his poetry; they could not combine both…” (Kitson 1969). Critical acclaim dates from 1604 with the statement that Caravaggio “…does not execute a single brushstroke without taking it directly from life.” (Mander 1604) where he was “…the most excellent in color…he has abandoned the idea of beauty, intent only on the attainment of likeness.” (Agucchi 1607).
The essence of Caravaggio’s influence on his contemporary imitators or succeeding painters can be admirably summed up by the statement that he was “…one of the most illustrious propagators in Italy of the method that was later to prevail in the Dutch School, which consisted in transforming that which is repulsive into artistic beauty. The nobility of thought was not his aim: his aim was the imitation of anything in nature no matter what it was.” (Selvatico 1856).
Caravaggio focused his attention on dramatic lighting coupled with his “…alliance of intense realism with a masterly simplification of form…” (White, 1995). This was in contrast to the academic eclecticism of the Caracci. Caravaggio resisted the sustained opposition of the fashionable late Mannerists Frederico Zuccaro (1543-1609) and his brother Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-1566). Taddeo was active chiefly in Rome where he worked on frescoes in the Farnese Place. Unlike the Mannerists, Caravaggio concentrated attention on dramatic nearness and involvement of the spectator by close-cropped frames and bringing his figures into the foreground. Caravaggio was thus the only artist in the history of post-antique Italian art who could endow The Head of Medusa (1596), see Figure 16, with real drama and visual impact. However, it has been said that he was the victim of his artistic delusion because “…the closer he came to imitating realistic surfaces in the paint the more the inner significance is lacking.” (Levey, 1974).
SOURCES
Agucchi, G. B. (1607-15). Trattato (MS). See Mahon, D. (1947).
Kitson, M. (1969). Caravaggio. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London.
Levey, M. (1974). A History of Western Art. Thames & Hudson, London.
Mancini, G. (1619-21). Considerazioni sulla pittura. Cited in Kitson (1969).
Mander, K van. (1604). Het Leven der Moderne oft dees-tijtsche door-luchtighe Italienische Shilders. Haarlem.
Selvatico, P. (1856). Storia estetico-critica delle arti del disegno. Cited in Kitson (1969).
Witkower, R. (1982). Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750. Pelican, Harmondsworth.
Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe (1995).Art History Resource.