Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [34]
Caravaggio, “The Conversion of St. Paul,” c. 1601, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. Although criticized for portraying holy figures as common people, Caravaggio’s radical style of sharp light and dark contrasts changed European art.
ITALIAN BAROQUE
Artists in Rome pioneered the Baroque style before it spread to the rest of Europe. By this time, art academies had been established to train artists in the techniques developed during the Renaissance. Artists could expertly represent the human body from any angle, portray the most complex perspective, and realistically reproduce almost any appearance. Where Baroque diverged from Renaissance was the emphasis on emotion rather than rationality, dynamism rather than stasis. It was as if Baroque artists took Renaissance figures and set them spinning like tops. Three artists in different media best represent the pinnacle of Italian Baroque: the painter Caravaggio, the sculptor Bernini, and the architect Borromini.
CARAVAGGIO: THE SUPERNATURAL MADE REAL. The most original painter of the seventeenth century, Caravaggio ( 1571-1610) injected new life into Italian painting after the sterile artificiality of Mannerism. He took realism to new lengths, painting bodies in a thoroughly “down and dirty” style, as opposed to pale, Mannerist phantoms. In so doing, Caravaggio secularized religious art, making saints and miracles seem like ordinary people and everyday events.
Although specializing in large religious works, Caravaggio advocated “direct painting” from nature — often, it seemed, directly from the seamy slums. In “The Calling of St. Matthew,” for example, the apostle-to-be sits in a dark pub, surrounded by dandies counting money, when Christ orders him, “Follow Me.” A strong diagonal beam of light illuminates the thunderstruck tax-collector’s expression and gesture of astonishment.
In “Supper at Emmaus,” Caravaggio showed the moment the apostles realized their table companion was the resurrected Christ as an encounter in a wineshop. The disciples, pushing back chairs and throwing open their arms and a bowl of wormy fruit about to topple off the table make the action leap out of the picture frame, enveloping the viewer in the drama. “The Conversion of St. Paul” demonstrates Caravaggio’s ability to see afresh a traditional subject. Other painters depicted the Pharisee Saul converted by a voice from heaven with Christ on the heavenly throne surrounded by throngs of angels. Caravaggio showed St. Paul flat on his back, fallen from his horse, which is portrayed in an explicit rear-end view. The hard focus and blinding spotlight reveal details like veins on the attendant’s legs and rivets on Saul’s armor, while inessential elements disappear in the dark background.
THE FIRST FEMINIST PAINTER
Caravaggio had many followers, called “i tenebrosi” or “the Caravaggisti,” who copied his dark tonaliiy and dramatic lighting in “night pictures.” One of the most successful was the Italian Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), the first woman painter to be widely known and appreciated. A precociously gifted artist who traveled widely and lived an eventful, independent life rare for a woman in that time, Gentileschi depicted feminist subjects in Caravaggio’s style of brilliantly lighted main players against a plain, dark background.
As a 19-year-old art student, Gentileschi was raped by a fellow pupil and then subjected to a painful and humiliating trial in which she was tortured with thumbscrews to get her to recant. After her attacker was acquitted, Gentileschi devoted herself to painting women who wreak violence against men who have wronged them. In “Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes,” Gentileschi painted the Hebrew heroine (in five different pictures) as an explicit self-portrait. Lit by a candle as the single source of light, the painting reeked with menace and terror, as Judith