Caravaggio

Caravaggio Read Free

Book: Caravaggio Read Free
Author: Francine Prose
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later artists, such as Poussin, 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, so that the artist could portray a single moment. What Poussin may have meant when he referred to Caravaggio’s mission to destroy painting was, paradoxically, Caravaggio’s determination to make it clear that he was painting.
    Caravaggio speaks to us directly, without any need of translation from a distant century or a foreign culture. His voice is eloquent and strong, resonant with emotion. We feel we understand him, though we can never paraphrase what we intuit he is saying. His work is beautiful by any standard, except perhaps by those of John Ruskin and the other critics who dismissed his work as coarse and vulgar. Yet only lately, since we have learned to accept the idea of art without conventional beauty, art that is rough and strange and disturbing, can we tolerate art that is this honest about the nature of suffering and divinity, about the way in which a painting is created, about human nature, and the nature of art itself.
    It’s not hard to understand why the repressed and prudish Victorians would have been appalled by a painter with such an unflinching view of the way sex and death pull the strings, turning all of us into their marionettes. Or why a critic like Ruskin would have been horrified by an artist with so much to say about the pain that people, given half a chance, obediently or willfully inflict on one another. Or about the grief involved in simply being alive, first in being young, ambitious, ready to conquer the world, and then in growing old, ill, weak, suffering and dying. Even, or perhaps especially, now, we are unaccustomed to seeing such fierce compassion untempered and unmediated by sentimentality.
    Tracking Caravaggio through the course of his meteoric career, studying his paintings in chronological order, you can watch his models age along with him. He repeatedly inserted his own portrait—his dark, craggy, surly features, his increasingly lined forehead—into his work, so that centuries later we can trace every scar and groove etched by time as he appears to us in the face of a witness to the murder of a saint, or in the severed head of the dead Goliath that David holds at arm’s length and as far as possible from his pretty young body.
    The world needed to mature, to evolve past eighteenth-century decorum and Victorian prudery in order to accept the sexuality of Caravaggio’s paintings, a sexuality that is at once bravely unapologetic and furiously private. It’s worth noting that the spike in Caravaggio’s popularity took place during an era in which our sensitivities were being simultaneously sharpened and dulled by artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, whose passion for formal beauty and stillness, and whose own brief dramatic career, made him as emblematic of his time as Caravaggio was of his. In order to love Caravaggio, we ourselves had to learn to accept the premise 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.
    These contradictions partly explain why Caravaggio so nearly fulfills every popular notion—and cliché—about the personality of the artist. The genius, or so we have learned, is a soul in the process of being drawn and quartered, pulled in countless different directions, a psyche struggling to balance the impulse to seduce against the compulsion to offend, weighing the desire for acceptance against the terror of confinement, laboring to calibrate the optimal chemistry of compassion and loathing, despair and transcendence. Several of Caravaggio’s earliest biographers grudgingly admired his art while condemning his bad behavior and

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