Word: caravaggio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...