Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity

Troy Thomas

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781780236803
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

Now in paperback, an accessible and beautifully illustrated account of Caravaggio as a catalyst for modernity. Undeniably one of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio would develop a radically new kind of psychologically expressive, realistic art and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would lay the foundations for modern painting. His paintings defied tradition to such a degree that the meaning of his works has divided critics and viewers for centuries. In this original study, Troy Thomas examines Caravaggio's life and art in relationship to the profound beginnings of modernity, exploring the many conventions that Caravaggio utterly dismantled with his extraordinary genius.Thomas begins with an in-depth look at Caravaggio's early life and works and examines how he refined his realism, developed his obsession with darkness and light, and began to find the subtle and clever ambiguity of genre and meaning that would become his trademark. Focusing acutely on the inherent tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities within Caravaggio's paintings, Thomas goes on to examine his mature religious works and the ways he created a powerful but stark and enigmatic expressiveness in his protagonists. Lastly, he delves into the artist's final hectic years as a fugitive killer evading papal police and wandering the cities of southern Italy.Richly illustrated in color throughout, Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity will appeal to all of those fascinated by the history of art and the remarkable lives of Renaissance masters.

ONE

Early Life: Milan–Rome, 1571–99

FTER HIS ARRIVAL in Rome Michelangelo Merisi was known as Caravaggio, the name of the town near Milan that was his ancestral home. A document discovered recently shows that he was born not in Caravaggio but in Milan, on 29 September 1571, the feast day of St Michael the Archangel, who became his name saint.¹ Relatively little is known of Caravaggio’s early life, although some suppositions may be drawn on the basis of documents conveniently gathered together by Stefania Macioce.² Among the records – largely legal transactions dealing with his family – a few mention Caravaggio himself. Old biographies give some useful information, even if written by critics hostile to him, such as his contemporary and rival Giovanni Baglione, a painter whose life of Caravaggio appeared in 1642. Others from the period penned his biography, as well, most importantly the writer and art theorist Giovanni Pietro Bellori, in his Vite of 1672.³ Based on the early biography of the artist written in about 1620 by Giulio Mancini, a physician, art dealer and collector, it was previously thought that Caravaggio’s father, Fermo, was architect and major-domo to Francesco I Sforza, the Marchese of Caravaggio.⁴ In fact, documents discovered some years ago corroborate Baglione’s old report that Fermo was actually a stonemason; as such he served the Sforza in both Milan and Caravaggio.⁵ He was able to keep his family in modest comfort, but he was far from wealthy. The father of the artist’s mother, Lucia Aratori, owned a large house in Caravaggio. Although probably not of noble stock, her side of the family was closely allied with the powerful Colonna and Sforza families. Costanza Colonna, the wife of Francesco Sforza, was one of a series of nobles who provided Caravaggio with protection later in life.

Thus the young Caravaggio, whose family had close ties with local nobility, would have had first-hand knowledge of the lifestyle of the wealthy class. Many of his problems in later life, including his scrapes with the law, centred on his pretentions to superior class status and presumed privilege. At the same time, he was painfully aware of his relative poverty, which became even worse when his father died at Caravaggio, probably of the plague. The boy was just six years old, and his mother, left with four small children and a stepdaughter, was obliged to rely on relatives for support; she herself was dead by the time Caravaggio was nineteen.

As a child Caravaggio was quite aware of the lot of the poor, who readily succumbed to the repeated ravages of the plague and who in the 1570s were starving in the streets of Milan. He would have known of the efforts of the Archbishop of Milan, St Carlo Borromeo, to minister to the needy poor. Later, in his religious paintings, Caravaggio revealed a strong sympathy for the lowly, a circumstance that in part may have derived from his childhood memories of their widespread suffering in Milan. He may have recalled positively Borromeo’s spiritual and physical aid to the indigent, but was less influenced by the stern archbishop’s autocratic ways, constant suspicions of sin and efforts to suppress it, zeal in rooting out heretics and draconian efforts to round up the destitute and homeless during an outbreak of plague.

When in the early 1580s Caravaggio set himself the goal of becoming an artist, he was apprenticed to the Bergamese painter Simone Peterzano in Milan. Claiming to be a pupil of Titian, Peterzano indirectly made Caravaggio aware of the Venetian style, which the latter evoked in the landscape of his Rest on the Flight into Egypt (see illus. 14). In his Deposition of Christ (illus. 3) in the church of San Fedele, Milan, Peterzano painted his figures boldly in strong light against a shadowy background in a manner that would be echoed clearly in the works of Caravaggio.

The simplicity and clarity of Peterzano’s realism show that he had fallen under the spell of Borromeo, who in his Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae (Instructions on Church Buildings and Furnishings) of 1577 had included a chapter on ‘Sacred Images and Pictures’. Borromeo’s faith was rooted in the visualization of the sacred stories, much like Ignatius Loyola’s in his Spiritual Exercises (1548). Borromeo called for a clear and direct art showing proper decorum that induces the viewer to piety; his teaching inspired Milanese artists to develop a stark, emotional painting devoid of sensual niceties.

This kind of concrete, plain-spoken painting was also partly the result of the strongly continuing influence of Leonardo da Vinci on art in Milan. Leonardo had lived in the city for about 22 years (1482–99/1500; 1508–13), and left an enduring legacy of forthright realism with figures boldly modelled in chiaroscuro. His style was continued by his Milanese pupils, Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and others. The Lombard tradition of dark realism likewise characterizes the works of the Brescian artist Girolamo Savoldo, whose Inspiration of St Matthew (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) is often compared with Caravaggio’s. The popular, pious naturalism found in the painted free-standing groups of the Modenese sculptor Guido Mazzoni and others also had a share in Caravaggio’s formation as a spare, theatrical and visceral realist. In the midto late sixteenth century Antonio Campi, from the Lombard town of Cremona, painted religious scenes with figures set against unlit backgrounds. His brother Vincenzo specialized in pictures of figures with fruit, another genre that strongly influenced the young Caravaggio (illus. 4). A third, older, brother, Giulio, was known for paintings of musicians and gaming, subjects likewise painted by Caravaggio in his youth. These latter trends had nothing in common with the austere religious style promulgated by Borromeo, but nevertheless exercised a strong hold on Caravaggio, revealing another, secular aspect of his developing art. Such approaches to style and subject, sacred and secular alike, would later emerge fused in his religious paintings, a synthesis that revealed the ambiguity, contradiction and complexity for which he would be both praised and damned. In common with the works of other artists, Caravaggio’s paintings did not emerge in a vacuum. But in spite of the formative sources mentioned here, it is his novelty that must be stressed. He was not a passive follower of tradition, but a radical innovator who shaped past art into something entirely new.

3 Simone Peterzano, Deposition of Christ, 1584, oil on canvas.

During the years between his mother’s death and 1592 Caravaggio sold off much of his inheritance, in the form of landholdings, apparently to extricate himself from legal problems. He seems to have had a contentious and troublesome life from the very beginning. According to terse, handwritten notes by Mancini and Bellori, Caravaggio was involved in a murder in Milan, perhaps as an accomplice, precipitating his sale of land and his journey to Rome. In spite of recently found documents suggesting that the artist may have arrived in that city as late as 1595 or early 1596, in fact the long-held supposition that he was there as early as 1592 is probably correct.⁶ For one thing, his surviving pictures, even the earliest ones, seem to have been painted in Rome. An arrival there in 1596 would make it difficult to account for his artistic development, which can be traced clearly in his canvases and which almost certainly was stretched out over a number of years rather than confined to just a few in the late 1590s.

4 Vincenzo Campi, Fruitseller, c. 1580, oil on canvas.

Charles Dickens’s characterization of the eve of the French Revolution, that it was the best and worst of times, may be applied aptly to the Rome of Caravaggio’s day, where the divide by wealth and poverty was enormous. Those fortunate enough to belong to the nobility or to be attached to it in the upper echelons of service enjoyed affluence and a renewal of culture and comforts following the austerities of the Counter-Reformation. The nobles not only luxuriated in their palaces but supplied the Church with its ruling elite, the cardinals, bishops and others, who often were not immune to earthly gratification. Meanwhile the many thousands at the bottom of the social ladder endured hard lives, living a hand-to-mouth existence often only days from starvation. Late sixteenth-century popes wavered in their treatment of the poor, including prostitutes, gypsies and cheats, sometimes providing them with food and shelter and at others expelling them from Rome. In the 1580s and ’90s a major building programme had begun in the city, under which fountains, churches, palazzi and new, straight streets were constructed in surprising numbers. Caravaggio’s arrival coincided with the beginning of the papacy of Clement VIII, whose reign was marked by a delicate balance between political expediency and Counter-Reformation fervour. He was less hostile than previous popes to the intellectuals, poets and artists who investigated antique culture; on the other hand, he could be merciless in stamping out heresy and dissent. At times, Clement was austere and proscriptive, like his predecessors. Caravaggio himself may have been a victim of papal disfavour, for he received no Vatican commissions until Clement’s successor, Paul V Borghese, became pope in 1605.

One of the outstanding men of Rome in the later sixteenth century was St Filippo Neri, the head of the Oratorians, who devoted himself to the poor, led a simple life, possessed a playful wit and gave informal sermons of great popularity. By the time of his death in 1595 he had achieved a huge following, and it is likely that Caravaggio was affected by his dedication to the poor. We see in Caravaggio’s religious paintings a sympathetic treatment of the low and humble, and later, under Cardinal Cesare Baronio, head of the Roman Oratory after Neri’s death, he received from Girolamo Vittrici a commission for an Entombment of Christ (see illus. 47) for Santa Maria in Vallicella, the impressive, recently built church of the Oratorians.

Few distinguished painters worked in Rome in the late sixteenth century, apart from Annibale Carracci, the creator of a new classical style in Baroque painting. He and his brother Agostino were called to Rome in 1595 to fresco the gallery ceiling in the Palazzo Farnese (their cousin Ludovico, also an artist, remained in Bologna). By Caravaggio’s time Federico Zuccaro had retired, leaving as the most prominent painters Giuseppe Cesari (Caviliere d’Arpino), Cristoforo Roncalli and Scipione Pulzone. Cesari was a Mannerist whose accessible, graceful style was so widely admired that he was in constant demand for new commissions. He painted both frescoes and small pictures in oil, sometimes creating dramatic contrasts in lighting but more often working his colours delicately (see illus. 52). He used Caravaggio as an assistant for a short while. Roncalli, also a Mannerist specializing in fresco, made animated, elegant and sometimes dramatic works that were much admired by Cardinal Baronio. Pulzone was a ‘counter-maniera’ painter whose simple, unembellished naturalism answered the call for an accessible, devotional style by churchmen such as Borromeo and Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti in his Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images) of 1582. Pulzone’s approach seemed an appropriate response to the Church’s stress on the need in painting for piety and naturalness (illus. 5). Since he probably noticed that there was room in this conventional artistic environment for innovation, Caravaggio determined to make a name for himself by dint of ambition and novelty.

5 Scipione Pulzone, Crucifixion with Saints, c. 1588–90, oil on canvas.

When Caravaggio arrived in Rome he was poor but not entirely without connections. Costanza Colonna, the wife of the Marchese of Caravaggio and daughter of the famous Marcantonio Colonna, who had led the papal fleet to victory over the Turks at Lepanto, may have introduced the young painter to those members of her powerful family who lived in Rome. Shortly after his arrival, Caravaggio lodged in the house of Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci, steward to Camilla Peretti, the sister of Pope Sixtus V, who had close ties with the Colonna family. After a little while the young artist found living with Pucci unsatisfactory, since the latter offered him only salad to eat, resulting in the painter’s famous, acerbic name for his host, ‘Monsignor Insalata’. As a young painter who was not particularly precocious, he found himself unnoticed, hardly ...