Caravaggio: Tortured Artist of the Renaissance
Caravaggio, was an Italian painter active in Rome during the Renaissance and for most of his artistic life. During his final four years, he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily.
His paintings combined a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.
Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He made the technique a dominant stylistic element, transfixing subjects in bright shafts of light and darkening shadows.
Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes, often featuring violent struggles, torture, and death. He worked rapidly with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and work instead directly onto the canvas. His inspiring effect on the new Baroque style that emerged from Mannerism was profound.
His influence can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Peter Paul Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Velázquez and Rembrandt.
Born Michele Angelo Merigi in 1571 Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan before moving to Rome when he was in his twenties. He developed a name not only as an artist but as a violent, touchy and provocative man. He killed someone in a brawl, which led to a death sentence for murder and forced him to flee to Naples. There he again established himself as one of the most prominent Italian painters of his generation.
He travelled to Malta and on to Sicily in 1607 and pursued a papal pardon for his sentence. In 1609, he returned to Naples, where he was involved in a violent clash; his face was disfigured, and rumours of his death circulated.
Questions about his mental state arose from his erratic and bizarre behavior. He died in 1610 aged just 39 under uncertain circumstances while on his way from Naples to Rome. Reports stated that he died of a fever, but suggestions have been made that he was murdered.
Caravaggio’s most famous work is The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist Measuring 3.7 m by 5.2 m, it depicts the execution of John the Baptist. It is located in the Oratory of St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, in Malta.
According to Andrea Pomella in Caravaggio: An Artist through Images (2005), the work is widely considered to be Caravaggio’s masterpiece as well as “one of the most important works in Western painting.Another critic Jonathan Jones described The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist as one of the ten greatest works of art of all time: “Death and human cruelty are laid bare by this masterpiece, as its scale and shadow daunt and possess the mind.”, he said
The image depicts the execution of John the Baptist while nearby a servant girl stands with a golden platter to receive his head. Another woman stands by in shock while a jailer issues instructions and the executioner draws his dagger to finish the beheading. The scene, popular with Italian artists in general and with Caravaggio himself, is not directly inspired by the Bible, but rather by the tale as related in the Golden Legend.
It is the only work by Caravaggio to bear the artist’s signature, which he placed in red blood spilling from the Baptist’s cut throat. There is considerable empty space in the image, but because the canvas is quite large the figures are approximately life-sized.
Completed in 1608 in Malta, the painting had been commissioned by the Knights of Malta as an altarpiece; it was the largest altarpiece which Caravaggio would ever paint. It still hangs in St. John’s Co-Cathedral, for which it was commissioned and where Caravaggio himself was inducted and briefly served as a knight.
Caravaggio’s service to the Order was brief and troubled, however, as he was soon a fugitive from justice, having escaped while imprisoned for an unrecorded crime.Caravaggio was defrocked in absentia as a “foul and rotten member” by the Order about six months after his induction,
Caravaggio did several pieces depicting the moments after the beheading One of these is on display in London’s National Gallery; the other, in the Royal Palace of Madrid.
Another of Caravaggio’s works, The Burial of Santa Lucia Is hanging in the Church of Santa Lucia alla Badia in Syracuse in Sicily. Santa Lucia is the much loved and celebrated patron saint of Syracuse on account of miracles apparently carried out during a great famine in the 17th century. After many prayers to Santa Lucia by Syracuse citizens ,a ship laden with grain mysteriously arrived in the harbour.
Caravaggio’s painting is indicative of much of his work which featured violence torture, or in this case death.
Caravaggio fell out of favour. In the 20th century, interest in his work revived, and his importance to the development of Western art was reevaluated.
Art scholars and historians have debated the inferences of homoeroticism in Caravaggio’s works as a way to better understand the man. Caravaggio never married and had no known children, and there was an absence of erotic female figures in his work .He did not paint a single female nude but other pieces are replete ,according to one critic ,with “full-lipped, languorous boys … who seem to solicit the onlooker with their offers of fruit, wine, flowers—and themselves” suggesting an erotic interest in the male form.
