Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [251]
Despite the sustained drive to denigrate and marginalize his work, Caravaggio’s paintings were too profound and affecting to be suppressed. Gradually but inexorably, his dramatic sense of composition, his strikingly stark handling of light and dark and his sheer rawness of feeling worked themselves into the DNA of Western art. During the years immediately after his death, hardly a single important painter escaped his influence. Rubens, Velàzquez and Pietro da Cortona all echoed his compositions or copied his devices and traits. Within a generation, entire schools of so-called Caravaggisti established themselves in both Italy and the Netherlands. Partly perhaps because of the location of the French Academy in Rome, at the top of the Spanish Steps, and within easy walking distance of so many of his most important altarpieces, he would have an especially powerful impact on French art. His influence can be detected in the work of such widely differing French painters as Valentin de Boulogne and Georges de La Tour. There was a particularly strong resurgence of interest in his art during the Neoclassical and Romantic periods. In England, Joseph Wright of Derby’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump of 1768 transformed the scientific demonstration of the effects of a vacuum on a living creature into a hushed modern version of a miracle as painted by Caravaggio. In France, the self-appointed painter to the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, painted the dead Marat slumped in his bath as if he were one of Caravaggio’s spotlit martyrs, and in 1819 Theodore Géricault conceived arguably the first great masterpiece of French Romanticism, The Raft of the Medusa, as a modern, secularized version of an altarpiece by Caravaggio.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century Caravaggio’s work did fall somewhat out of fashion. His paintings attracted relatively little attention from those pioneering the still embryonic discipline of art history, whose attentions were biased by the market. (The purpose of much early art historical research was to establish the provenance and therefore the value of pictures coming to auction, but, since nearly all of Caravaggio’s major pictures were immovable altarpieces, very few of his works ever came up for sale.) Neither did his pictures seem especially interesting to painters of the early Modern period, such as Cézanne or, later, the Cubists and Futurists, because it was their stated ambition to flatten, distort and destroy the conventions of post-Renaissance illusionist painting. Caravaggio was too much of an ‘optical’ painter for their taste. They preferred the so-called Italian ‘primitives’, painters such as Giotto and Duccio, whose disregard for conventional perspective seemed closer to a Modernist aesthetic. They might have been interested in Caravaggio’s late Sicilian pictures, which responded to powerful strains of primitivism in Counter-Reformation thought, but those paintings had fallen into neglect and were all but unknown by the early twentieth century. It is symbolic of this one period of genuine neglect that the young Picasso, for all his magpie eclecticism and positively Oedipal obsession with the art of the past, never showed the slightest interest in reworking or pastiching the art of Caravaggio. It was only when Picasso grew older that his attitude changed. In 1937, while working on Guernica, his agonized frieze of suffering inspired by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, he told Salvador Dalí that he wanted the horse at the centre of the painting to have the same presence as the horse in Caravaggio’s Conversion of St Paul: ‘I want it to be so realistic – just like in Caravaggio – that you can smell the sweat.’162
Caravaggio’s reputation was decisively rehabilitated for the twentieth century by the gifted and eloquent Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, who put on an extremely influential retrospective of