Word: caravaggio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...much success, as this monster of genius and talent, almost without rules, without theory, without learning or meditation, simply by the power of his genius and the model in front of him which he copied so admirably?" The cause of alarm was an Italian painter named Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio who, in the course of a short, fiery and often pitiable career, changed the face of 17th-century European art. That achievement is the subject of a loan show at the Cleveland Museum, "Caravaggio and his Followers," organized by Art Historian Richard E. Spear...
Knives and Artichokes. No Italian painter less resembled the Renaissance ideal of the gentleman genius than Caravaggio. His luck was as foul as his temper. He was in some ways the first Bohemian artist, and he thrashed about in the dogma-bound and ceremonious society of Counter-Reformation Rome like a beast in a net. In 1604 Caravaggio was haled into court for assaulting a Roman waiter who had brought him a dish of artichokes, six cooked in oil and six in butter. Caravaggio asked which were which. "Taste them," retorted the waiter, "and you will see." Caravaggio jumped...
Against Vacuity. Caravaggio looks curiously modern as an artist, though he died 31 centuries ago. His work became a line of cleavage between the "modernists" and conservatives of Rome. For in the 1590s, when Caravaggio first settled there, Roman art had descended into glassy, learned vacuity. Painters were still traumatized by the memory of Michelangelo, a figure of such bulk that there seemed no way past him; at the same time, the Counter Reformation demanded an elevated, moralized tone from its artists. The result had nothing to offer Caravaggio-who was not, in any case, a particularly educated...
...capture that "truth," Caravaggio painted directly from the subject, like Courbet 250 years later (there are no known drawings by Caravaggio). The sense of physical presence in his early work is so strong that a painting like The Ecstasy of Saint Francis, circa 1594, with its swooning saint and plump, comforting angel, is almost a homosexual version of the entranced flesh that Bernini was later to carve in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Caravaggio's angels and Bacchuses habitually looked as if they had been picked up in a Trastevere wineshop, which, no doubt, they were. Saint Catherine...
Floodlit Muscles. This preference of the real over the ideal alarmed some of Caravaggio's contemporaries, but what troubled them most was his chief pictorial invention-the dramatic light and darkness that flooded his canvases. The eye cannot travel back into the gloom; it stops; instead, the muscular, straining limbs and backs that Caravaggio delighted in painting burst highlit from the picture surface. Form is almost literally shoved in the viewer's face. David with Head of Goliath, a painting of 1600 (which may, in the view of experts, be the work of a very close imitator), shows...