Word: caravaggio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...never set up a proper studio with assistants in Naples; he took no pupils, held no salon and had little talent as a courtier. Yet by word of mouth, force of reputation and the example of four or five paintings he executed there, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio completely changed the face of Neapolitan painting at the start of the 17th century. A few months after his second arrival in the city, this paranoid, violent homosexual genius was dead at 37, leaving two generations of painters from Naples to Brussels with a legacy to pick over...
...extraordinary exhibition of 113 paintings that opened last month at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and will run there until May 1 and then travel to Paris' Grand Palais. It will not be seen anywhere else in the U.S. "Painting in Naples 1607-1705: From Caravaggio to Giordano" is a smaller, edited version of the exhibition that was seen in 1982 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It contains many loans of the first importance, from Caravaggio's altarpiece of The Seven Acts of Mercy to groups of work by Mattia Preti...
...connoisseurs of enigma, there is A Dead Soldier by an unknown Neapolitan hand (all attributions having failed so far), which inspired Manet's Dead Toreador. The painting is a link between Caravaggio's shadow-theater and, through Salvator Rosa, the world of 19th century romanticism. It shows a young man in half-armor lying stiff and composed on the floor of a cave (some mountain charnel-house, perhaps) surrounded by rainy twilight and the glimmer of bones, with a curl of smoke still issuing from an extinguished votive lamp. A vanitas? A more personal lamentation? Impossible...
...black question mark hangs over this show. Old art cannot go anywhere by boat or train (too much jarring); to travel at all, it must fly, and nothing survives a plane crash. To take the nightmare by the ears, suppose the Caravaggio Deposition ends up distributed, in a thousand charred shreds, across a Midwestern wheat field. What then? It would put an end to international loans of major works of art, and the exhibition programs of all museums (though not necessarily art scholarship itself) would be halted or hobbled for a generation...
Nobody seeks to abolish the exchanges for serious surveys, definitive retrospectives and similar events. How one would like to see the Deposition as the climax of a Caravaggio retrospective, or the Apollo Belvedere as the focus of a show that intelligently explored the workings of the neoclassical ideal! But it is time for the international museum community to give a lot more thought to which journeys are really necessary, which shows justify great loans, and which ones are merely totemic...