Keith Christiansen: The Bounty of Caravaggio's Glorious Exile

The Entomement, Vatican Museums

By KEITH CHRISTIANSEN
Published: December 12, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com

How many pictures does it take to make a memorable exhibition? Fifty? A hundred? How about 18? That's the number of paintings by Caravaggio that people are lining up to see in Naples in an exhibition that is something of a landmark event. (There is also a coda, five copies of lost works and five recently proposed attributions, though none are convincing.) The reason for the success of this magnificent show has less to do with numbers than with the quality of the works and the period that they document: the last four years of Caravaggio's life, spent peripatetically outside Rome, where he had made a name for himself before he died at 39 of malaria.

That this exhibition should attract crowds is no surprise: the admiration previous generations lavished on Michelangelo, Rembrandt and El Greco is now directed at Caravaggio, the first and most audacious realist in European art. He would have both savored and dismissed the adulation, for seldom has there been such a conflicted artist. He was the consummate outsider. Indeed, he built his reputation in Rome by staking out polemical positions calculated to enrage the artistic establishment and endear him to sophisticated, largely ecclesiastical collectors.



St Jerome
c. 1606
Oil on canvas, 112 x 157 cm
Galleria Borghese, Rome

In 1576, El Greco was hounded out of town (or so we are told) for suggesting that Michelangelo, though a great sculptor, could not paint. But when Caravaggio arrived 16 years later, he did not simply thumb his nose at the worshippers of Michelangelo; he took on the whole premise of Renaissance painting. His bohemian, quasi-criminal life style - late nights in taverns and frequent brawls - seemed a head-on attack on the social status that artists had fought so hard to gain. And by rejecting the hierarchies that prized figurative painting over landscape and still life, and the beau ideal over naturalism, he called into question the very basis of Renaissance poetics.

Caravaggio insisted on working outside the aesthetic and social boundaries of his time. Yet he was also enormously status conscious. Like every other artist in Rome, he measured success by the social caliber of his patrons and he quickly abandoned still life and genre painting for grand, figurative compositions.

That Caravaggio's Roman paintings exert such a broad appeal today is the result of their sensational use of naturalistic effects: a basket of blemished fruit precariously posed on the edge of a table, a figure screaming as his head is severed, pretty boys flaunting their nudity. In Caravaggio's hands, naturalism - painting directly from a posed model rather than working through the idealizing process of drawing - became a weapon of attack, a means of undermining the critical standards of his day. Michelangelo had astounded the world with his heroic male nudes on the Sistine ceiling, and in his first public commission Caravaggio framed the martyrdom of Saint Matthew with shockingly naturalistic male nudes, two of whom watch the murder with disturbing detachment. (Scholars sometimes explain these figures as neophytes waiting to be baptized, but this seems to me a misunderstanding of the transgressive genius of Caravaggio, whom one contemporary pointedly called "that anti-Michelangelo.")



Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
1608
Oil on canvas, 361 x 520 cm
Saint John Museum, La Valletta


For most admirers, Caravaggio's career pretty much ends in 1606, when he killed a tennis opponent and fled Rome. After spending some time on the estates of the Colonna family, south of Rome, he made his way to Naples, Malta and Sicily, and then back to Naples, where one of his many enemies slashed his face and a rumor circulated that he had been killed. (He made a point of offending people wherever he went.) These years, during which he awaited a papal pardon so that he could return to Rome, were a period of exile, but they were also a liberating experience. In Rome, Caravaggio had necessarily to do battle with the ghosts of Michelangelo and Raphael, as well as the legacy of Greek and Roman art. They were the measures by which art was judged. But in Naples, Malta and Sicily, there was no such dominant tradition. Caravaggio was the biggest act in town, and the finest commissions were offered to him.

I have long thought that Caravaggio's greatest paintings were done during the four years of his Roman exile, and so I attach special importance to the Metropolitan Museum's acquisition seven years ago of one of his last works, a deeply expressive painting that shows a woman accusing Saint Peter of being an apostle of Christ, and Peter denying it. (I made the case for the purchase to the acquisition committee, but they required no convincing.) The half-length composition is stripped of all extraneous narrative detail, color is subordinated to effects of light and dark, and the summary, rapid-fire brushwork aims to capture the psychological conflict of a dramatic moment rather than to describe its physical appearance. We sense the artist moving beyond the polemics of so many of his Roman works, in which naturalism is pitted against idealism, and the goal was to create a sensation. In this and kindred works you have the sense of an artist turning inward to discover the emotional truth behind the biblical narrative.



The Annunciation
1608-09
Oil on canvas, 285 x 205 cm
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nancy


At the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, the Metropolitan's canvas takes it place alongside some of Caravaggio's most memorable paintings, including virtually all of his late altarpieces: the "Crucifixion of Saint Andrew" from Cleveland; the "Seven Acts of Mercy" and the "Flagellation" from Naples; "Raising of Lazarus" and "Adoration of the Shepherds" from Messina, Italy; the "Burial of Saint Lucy" from Syracuse, Italy; and the badly damaged but haunting "Annunciation" (Caravaggio's least studied masterpiece) from Nancy, France. Only the great "Beheading of Saint John the Baptist" from Malta is missing. (It is simply too large to travel.) These works will probably never again be brought together, and the fact that they can be seen alongside pictures like the Metropolitan's "Denial of Saint Peter," and the "David With the Head of Goliath" and "Saint Jerome" from the Borghese Gallery in Rome only adds to the overwhelming effect.

The exhibition is scheduled to travel to the National Gallery, London. The Metropolitan was supposed to be a third stop, but it proved impossible to secure the needed loans for all three museums. In any case, Naples is the place to see it, not only because the exhibition in London will lack one or two key works, but also because in Naples the paintings resonate as nowhere else. The Capodimonte has transformed itself into what may be the most beautifully installed museum in Italy. On one floor it offers the celebrated Farnese collection, with its wealth of paintings by, among others, Titian, Raphael, Bellini, Correggio, Parmigianino and Annibale Carracci. Another floor has a panorama of painting in Naples, from its origins in the 13th century through the 19th century. The Caravaggio show is installed so that the visitor comes upon the artist at precisely the right chronological place in that history, and when you leave the exhibition galleries, you pick up the threads of that narrative again with those artists whose careers were transformed by Caravaggio's presence in the city: Ribera, Caracciolo, Artemisia Gentileschi and many others. This has the effect of at once situating Caravaggio within his historical context and demonstrating just how much he transcended his times. If Velázquez can be claimed as the precursor of 19th-century realism, in these works Caravaggio lays his claim to being the first modern painter: one who looked beyond appearances to uncover the turbulent and conflicted passions that give life its tragic dimension. Darkness in Caravaggio's Roman paintings was primarily a pictorial device. Here, it acquires a profoundly psychological dimension.



Caravaggio. The Flagellation of Christ. 1607. Oil on canvas. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy.

Perhaps the most memorable room is the one in which Caravaggio's three great Sicilian altarpieces are hung, one to a wall. Facing each other are two works created virtually contemporaneously, which probe the opposite poles of human existence. On one side is Caravaggio's most tender painting: an "Adoration of the Shepherds." Exceptionally for the artist, the scene is staged in a carefully described space, with shepherds, their heads aligned along a descending diagonal, gathered in mute reverence at the miracle of Jesus' birth. A humble still life of Joseph's carpenter's tools in the foreground and a donkey and an ox at the back of the stable complete the aura of sacred poverty and set off the touching figure of the Virgin reclining against the wooden manger, protectively cuddling her newborn child. A quality of vulnerability pervades the picture. Opposite this extraordinary work is the dramatically charged "Raising of Lazarus," in which the dead Lazarus is summoned - violently and, it seems, painfully, perhaps even reluctantly - back to life, to the astonishment of the onlookers and the impassioned but disturbingly noiseless cries of his sisters. Here the space is a shallow shelf, with the figures pressed into a narrow foreground area. A raking light plays across them and its life-giving powers are contrasted with the oppressive darkness of the upper half of the composition. Caravaggio has discovered the tragic eloquence of emptiness - the silent void.

At the heart of Western painting is the romantic notion of the isolated genius confronting his own mortality and the enigma of human existence. This myth little accords with the popular image we have of Caravaggio, but it is the one that occurred to me over and over at this unforgettable exhibition.

Keith Christiansen is a curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.