Word: caravaggio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius, which identifies Caravaggio as the first avant-garde artist. Our time, with its craving for rapid and unnerving change in the look of art, was bound to love Caravaggio. He was called an evil genius, an anti-Michelangelo; his work was compared to an overpeppered stew, and it became a favorite pretext for centrist finger wagging in the 17th century...
...critics said one thing, the collectors said another, and this time the collectors were right. Caravaggio found influential patrons almost as soon as he arrived in Rome in 1592-93; they included Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who owned eight of his paintings, and Vincenzo Giustiniani, who had 13. The Caravaggian cave of darkness was not invented yet. His early work tends to be bathed in a crisp, even, impartial light, recalling Lorenzo Lotto and (more distantly) Giorgione. Typical of this manner were The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, which is not in the show, and the Metropolitan...
...other Italian artist of the day had such mastery of gesture. Caravaggio was a minute observer of body language: how people move, slump, sit up, point and shrug; how they writhe in pain; how the dead sprawl. Hence the vividness of Abraham's gesture in The Sacrifice of Isaac, holding his wailing son down on a rock like a man about to gut a fish, even though the landscape behind them is Venetian in its pastoral calm. In The Supper at Emmaus, the characters seem ready to come off the wall, as Christ makes his sacramental gesture over the food...
...like many great aesthetic radicals, Caravaggio had a deep conservative streak. He had come from the northern provinces, in his early 20s, to an art world in recession. Rome in 1592 had a great past but a mincing present. The accepted style was a filleted if showy kind of late mannerism, turned out by the frescoed acre by artists like Caravaggio's early master Giuseppe Cesari, alias the Cavaliere d'Arpino. Limp, garrulous, overconceptualized and feverishly second hand, Roman art in 1590 was in some ways like New York art four centuries later. Against its pedantry--the seicento equivalent, perhaps...
Above all, he brought to it a renewed sense of design. Caravaggio's work moves from clutter toward the irreducible: tracing their signs for energy and pathos in the dark, his bodies acquire a formidable power of structure. Sometimes it is very clear; the figure of David holding up the head of Goliath (the Goliath is a self-portrait, a striking rehabilitation of a "monster" as heroic victim) has the abruptness of an ideogram. Elsewhere it is subtler: the geometry of his Saint Catherine consists of two triangles, one formed by the saint's gleaming upper body and dark skirt...