Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [35]
THE FIRST BOHEMIAN ARTIST
If Caravaggio, as has been said, was the first artist intentionally seeking to shock and offend, he certainly succeeded. His contemporaries called him an “evil genius” and the “anti-Christ of painting,” while the Victorian writer John Ruskin accused him of “perpetual ... feeding upon horror and ugliness and filthiness of sin.”
Caravaggio’s life was as unorthodox as his art. A bohemian and rebel, Caravaggio consorted with the dregs of society. As we know from his lengthy police record, the surly artist was constantly brawling in taverns and streets. After stabbing a mon in the groin over a tennis wager, he fled Rome to escape prosecution for murder. In chronic trouble with the law, Carovaggio wandered from city to city and from one lurid scandal to another.
Caravaggio was also disdainful of artistic convention and a very vocal opponent of tradition. When advised to study Classical models and adhere to Renaissance ideals of beauty, he instead hailed a gypsy off the street, preferring to paint this outcast rather than an idealized Greek goddess. Many thought he went too far when, in “Death of the Virgin,” he used a drowned corpse as model for the Virgin, irreverently representing the Madonna with bare feet and swollen body, surrounded by grieving commoners. Although the painting was refused by the parish that commissioned it, the Duke of Mantua purchased it on the advice of his court painter, Rubens.
Caravaggio always insisted that back alleys, mean streets, and the unsavory folk he found there were the one true source of art, not rules decreed by others. After a stormy life, this radical talent died at the age of 37.
Caravaggio’s use of perspective brings the viewer into the action, and chiaroscuro engages the emotions while intensifying the scene’s impact through dramatic light and dark contrasts. This untraditional, theatrical staging focuses a harsh light from a single source on the subject in the foreground to concentrate the viewer’s attention on the power of the event and the subject’s response. Because of the shadowy background Caravaggio favored, his style was called “il tenebroso” (in a “dark manner”).
Many of Caravaggio’s patrons who commissioned altarpieces refused to accept his renditions, considering them vulgar or profane. However, Caravaggio’s choice of disreputable, lower-class folk as suitable subjects for religious art expressed the Counter Reformation belief that faith was open to all.
To the contemporary French painter Poussin, known for his peaceful scenes, Caravaggio was a subversive betrayer of the art of painting. To the police, he was a fugitive wanted for murder (see sidebar, p. 47). But to major artists like Rubens, Velázquez, and Rembrandt, he was a daring innovator who taught them how to make religious paintings seem both hyperreal and overwhelmingly immediate.
BERNINI: SCULPTURE IN MOTION. Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1610) was more than the greatest sculptor of the Baroque period. He was also an architect, painter, playwright, composer, and theater designer. A brilliant wit and caricaturist, he wrote comedies and operas when not carving marble as easily as clay. More than any other artist, with his public fountains, religious art, and designs for St. Peter’s, he left his mark on the face of Rome.
The son of a sculptor, Bernini carved his remarkable marble “David” when age 25. Unlike Michelangelo’s “David” (see p. 13) where the force was pent-up, Bernini’s captured the moment of maximum torque, as he wound up to hurl the stone. Biting his lips from strain, Bernini’s David conveyed power about to be unleashed, causing any observer standing in front of the statue to almost want to duck. This dynamic, explosive energy epitomized Baroque art and involved the viewer in its motion and emotion by threatening to burst its physical confines.
Bernini, “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa,” 1645-52, Cornaro Chapel, Santa Mario della Vittoria, Rome. Bernini fused sculpture, painting, and architecture in a total