Word: caravaggio
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...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...
...Caravaggio's quest for strength and legibility reversed itself. He exaggerated the battle between light and dark to such a pitch that the late work became hard to read; its forms turned anxious and flickering, as though snatched from the very throat of darkness. But by then, this confusion had acquired its own expressive integrity as the handwriting of a painter more and more possessed by death. Caravaggio's sense of mortality was the thing his imitators found hardest to copy. But this did not stop the spread of Caravaggism. Within a decade of his death his followers had diffused...
Scratch almost any great 17th century painter except Poussin, and traces of Caravaggio will appear. The vivid, tragic piety of his work after 1600 was fundamental to baroque painting. Without his sense of humble, ordinary bodies lapped in darkness but transfigured by sacramental light, what would Rembrandt have done? Caravaggio was one of the hinges of art history: there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same. No wonder that he is now the artist that many new painters, in an age without authentic culture heroes, pine...