I look at his stuff and I'm always moved by the technical perfection. But then there's more; there is a radical dimension to his art... though hard to put into words.
j
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Very nice essay. Caravaggio was very difficult to figure. The mix of his piety and homoeroticism--near pornographic wickness--might be beyond words or even psychological understanding. Some part of the radical effect is to actually have the courage to depict his own desires.
To see that psychological dimension, you have to look at other works which don't belong in church. I had a theory once that I could assemble a show of Caravaggio's work and cause the closure of the show after the first day by public officials--something along the lines of a riot over gay rights.
The two examples I have in mind are Amor (I forgot the rest of the Italian title). It depicts a nude boy on a stool straddling a white sheet holding arrows. He has wings and is presumably Cubid. On the floor around him are musical instruments, sheet music, some art layout tools, some armor. The erotic edge is by design, so your first gaze which is the boy's face with a somewhat leering smile, then moves down along a central shadow line toward the penis. You are carried further along the boy's right leg to the toes The technique is to highlight the open pelvic area where two diagonals converge, nearly at the center of the painting. I have no doubt since Caravaggio used live models, this was his current boyfriend. (Looked up the wiki, Cecco was his nick name.)
What is this painting about? It's a narrative of Caravaggio's sexual impulses of course, but also all the other joys he has savored as fully as he could. Extreme violence, sensual painting, music, literature, basically most moments Christianity was constructed to deny and would (should?) immediately condemn. These were the symbolic elements of Augustine's City of Man. For Caravaggio, the garden of earthly delights do not lead to the inferno, but to garden in full flower.
The other example was a nude teenage John the Baptist with his arm around a wooly ram. The first place you look is the boy's face and ram's horned head next to the boy's head who may have been kissing the ram or nozzling behind the animal's ear. Then the viewer's gaze goes to the knee in deep foreshorting, that leads you to, guess what, the crotch this time in light shadow. This iwas the same boy maybe a little older who was in Amor.
The more I studied the young St. John painting, the deeper it took me into Caravaggio's almost philosophical study of I am not sure what to call it. Anti-christianity?
What makes Caravaggio so alive for me, should be obivous, since the Catholic Church is struggling with the same demons.
Most people don't look at paintings and usually don't know how to respond to the work. So I think I need to substitute much more familiar territory.
A lot of the themes in the Godfather series are adaptations of Caravaggio's realm, including the visual techniques. The exception is homosexuality, where super-macho takes its place. And as the former football coach at Penn State showed, super-macho is very close to the same realm. Caravaggio was both and I have little doubt he was a great sinner and believer at the same time. There is a scene in Godfather III where Al Pacino makes a reluctant confession to a Cardinal in a Vatican garden. Pacino says, I have sinned Father, I have killed and had men killed... This Cardinal will become the Pope, and will be murdered.
Now to technique, which I studied a lot. You achieve a dynamic sense of illustionist space by using extreme contrast and learning how to draw the human body in diagonal positions or use some of the body parts like feet, hands, heads, pelvis and torso in foreshortened positions. All of these focal centers have multiple psychological dimensions that can take the place of narrative. There are related elements in architecture that give scale and dimension to a point of view and provide in some less obvious way narrative of their own. A bank looks different than a supermarket. Banks are holy places, quiet, meditative, worshipful, etc. Supermarkets are profane with gaudy colored packages, etc.
Where Caravaggio got these techniques (or got started with them) and probably some of the narrative suggestions came from Michelangelo, who I just visited the other night. There is a great wiki page on the Sistine ceiling with good reproductions.
The wiki on Caravaggio is not bad, but much understated with too many fill in the blanks. Here's the best of it:
``...it is difficult to accept this grinning urchin as the Roman god Cupid - as difficult as it was to accept Caravaggio's other semi-clad adolescents as the various angels he painted in his canvases, wearing much the same stage-prop wings. The point, however, is the intense yet ambiguous reality of the work: it is simultaneously Cupid and Cecco, as Caravaggio's Virgins were simultaneously the Mother of Christ and the Roman courtesans who modeled for them.''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravaggio
Well, agreed to some extent, and yet who else could Cupid be? According to wiki, Cupid means desire. In my imagination, Eros the Greek name is better, son of Aphrodite
``Eros appears in ancient Greek sources under several different guises. In the earliest sources (the cosmogonies, the earliest philosophers, and the mysteries), he is one of the primordial gods involved in the coming into being of the cosmos.* But in later sources, Eros is represented as the son of Aphrodite whose mischievous interventions in the affairs of gods and mortals cause bonds of love to form, often illicitly. Ultimately, in the later satirical poets, he is represented as a blindfolded child, the precursor to the chubby Renaissance Cupid - whereas in early Greek poetry and art, Eros was depicted as an adult male who embodies sexual power..''
If you erase the virgin part, who else could Mary be, but a young poor girl, knocked up by accident? Isn't it obvious Jesus was illegitmate? He was delivered in a barn, and how much poorer can you get? In my mind, the great mythologies are also sociologies and psychologies and model typical social and family struggles, which are the mirrors of their societies.
Well enough. I could write or wish I could write a book on the art of the Renaissance through the French Revolution. Part of the cultural impulse to deify nature that Robinson wrote about in Philosophy and Mystification was given in the arts and roughly started with the deification or worship of the human body. The basic idea was that in former periods (within feudalism) the body was rendered as a symbolic form. The symbol of the body was retransformed, reinstanciated into a living body, then the glories of living bodies were celebrated. In philosophical terms this movement or theme was called Renaissance Humanism. In more general terms the materialism of the Enlightenment Robinson writes about was well advanced by the time Descartes and Spinoza give it philosophical form.
CG