Word: caravaggio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Caravaggio," the Metropolitan Museum of Art's big show this winter, may come to be remembered as a marker in the history of exhibitions. Not even the Met, this time, could get the loan of his greatest work. Owners and curators are getting more conservative, especially in Italy, and the days when uniquely important works of art could be flown around the world like greeting cards, even for scholarly purposes, are fading...
...when the Italian scholar Roberto Longhi mounted the crucial show that brought Caravaggio's turbulent genius out of three centuries of neglect and obloquy, this was not a problem. But 34 years later, thanks to the enthusiasm generated by Longhi, more people probably go to, say, the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome to worship Caravaggio than to worship...
There are splendid things in the Met's show: nobody could say that rooms holding Caravaggio's Uffizi Bacchus or the London Supper at Emmaus or the Thyssen Saint Catherine are underoxygenated. Moreover, the Met has done some good to scholarship by setting Caravaggio against what was painted in Italy, and especially in Rome, when he was alive. Other exhibitions have focused on how the artist influenced 17th century painting all over Europe. This one shows the painting that influenced him when he was growing up--and the visual pedantry he had to contend with. Except for Lotto, Tintoretto...
...Today, Caravaggio almost ranks with Rembrandt and Velasquez as the most popular of all 17th century artists. Mythmaking has something to do with this. We have a proto-Marxist Caravaggio, the painter of common people with dirty feet and ragged sleeves. There is also a homosexual Caravaggio, moved into the spotlight during the '70s by gay liberation: the painter of overripe, peachy bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream. Most of all, there is Caravaggio the avant-gardist...
...late 20th century loves "hot" romantics and geniuses with a curse on them. Caravaggio's short life and shorter temper fit this bill. He died of a fever in 1610 at 39 in Porto Ercole, then a malarial Spanish enclave on the coast north of Rome. The last four years of his life were one long paranoiac flight from police and assassins; on the run, working under pressure, he left magnificently realized, death-haunted altarpieces in Mediterranean seaports from Naples to Valletta to Palermo. He killed one man with a dagger in the groin during a ball game in Rome...