Word: caravaggio
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...modest light and resolving the threats of darkness into rational form, it became a metaphor of human consciousness itself. Indeed, a tradition of the "night piece" runs back to the late 15th century, when Leonardo set down his precepts for painting dramatic firelit groups. Rembrandt in Holland and Caravaggio in Rome produced unforgettable examples of the genre. But the artist whose work is most intimately associated with candlelight was Frenchman: Georges de La Tour...
...shielded flame in order to display, with effortless virtuosity, its linear nature as form. Indeed, La Tour's night pieces look like predictions of Cubism; the background is as active as the figure, voids read as strongly as solids. This quality gives his compositions an immense formal authority - Caravaggio, whose followers La Tour had undoubtedly studied in Rome, never solved problems with La Tour's exactitude...
...capture that "truth," Caravaggio painted directly from the subject, like Courbet 250 years later (there are no known drawings by Caravaggio). The sense of physical presence in his early work is so strong that a painting like The Ecstasy of Saint Francis, circa 1594, with its swooning saint and plump, comforting angel, is almost a homosexual version of the entranced flesh that Bernini was later to carve in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Caravaggio's angels and Bacchuses habitually looked as if they had been picked up in a Trastevere wineshop, which, no doubt, they were. Saint Catherine...
Floodlit Muscles. This preference of the real over the ideal alarmed some of Caravaggio's contemporaries, but what troubled them most was his chief pictorial invention-the dramatic light and darkness that flooded his canvases. The eye cannot travel back into the gloom; it stops; instead, the muscular, straining limbs and backs that Caravaggio delighted in painting burst highlit from the picture surface. Form is almost literally shoved in the viewer's face. David with Head of Goliath, a painting of 1600 (which may, in the view of experts, be the work of a very close imitator), shows...
...Caravaggio's sense of theater furnished a host of imitators with a fresh vocabulary. The Caravaggisti were not a closely knit group or even a specially gifted one-though they included some painters of undeniable power, like Orazio Gentileschi. They assiduously imitated Caravaggio's chiaroscuro. The manner spread to France and The Netherlands. Georges de La Tour's candlelit night pieces, for instance, sprang from it, and Hendrick Terbrugghen used it with distinction. But his influence stimulated no great painters in Rome, for, by then, there were none left to stimulate. The grand vindication came later, when...