Word: caravaggio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...artist. There is a marvelous Chardin that Catherine herself commissioned to depict the "Attributes of the Arts." There is an exquisite early Gainsborough that looks ahead to his immense popularity as "face-painter" of the most beautiful women. The most spectacular picture is The Lute Player, painted by Caravaggio circa 1596 when he was only 23. No artist who saw its hard-lined reality, its dramatic lighting, its thrusting composition (the lute's throat almost reaches across the table to the viewer's eye), ever painted quite the same again...
...Arts who is currently serving as the Fogg's acting assistant director. The show features 13 works from the Schools of Bologna and Rome, including two different interpretations of the biblical legend of Joseph and Potiphar's wife (one of the greatest stories ever told) by Roman followers of Caravaggio. One of those two paintings is of special interest because it was done by one of the few women artists of the day, Artemesia Gentileschi. Gentileschi--the victim of a scandalous rape--knew full well that no man is entirely pure, and shows Joseph during a moment of hesitation before...
...modest light and resolving the threats of darkness into rational form, it became a metaphor of human consciousness itself. Indeed, a tradition of the "night piece" runs back to the late 15th century, when Leonardo set down his precepts for painting dramatic firelit groups. Rembrandt in Holland and Caravaggio in Rome produced unforgettable examples of the genre. But the artist whose work is most intimately associated with candlelight was Frenchman: Georges de La Tour...
...shielded flame in order to display, with effortless virtuosity, its linear nature as form. Indeed, La Tour's night pieces look like predictions of Cubism; the background is as active as the figure, voids read as strongly as solids. This quality gives his compositions an immense formal authority - Caravaggio, whose followers La Tour had undoubtedly studied in Rome, never solved problems with La Tour's exactitude...
...Caravaggio's sense of theater furnished a host of imitators with a fresh vocabulary. The Caravaggisti were not a closely knit group or even a specially gifted one-though they included some painters of undeniable power, like Orazio Gentileschi. They assiduously imitated Caravaggio's chiaroscuro. The manner spread to France and The Netherlands. Georges de La Tour's candlelit night pieces, for instance, sprang from it, and Hendrick Terbrugghen used it with distinction. But his influence stimulated no great painters in Rome, for, by then, there were none left to stimulate. The grand vindication came later, when...