Word: caravaggio
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...unlike many of his later works, which were painted partly by apprentices, it seems to be all from his own hand. Rubens made the picture in 1609, he was 32 and had just returned to Antwerp after a nine-year stay in Italy. The almost theatrical lighting recalls Caravaggio (one of Rubens' chief enthusiasms), and the whole canvas has a studied Italianate air. It cannot match the healthy, wealthy and wise painter's mature masterpieces, but the picture does demonstrate his growing genius. Beyond that, it glows with the animal drive and good spirits that were to make...
...When art experts X-rayed da Caravaggio's The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, they found...
Three months and 96 X-ray pictures later, the experts were able to assemble what looked at first glance like a chaotic triple exposure. Studied closely, the pictures showed that Caravaggio had unmistakably started two earlier versions of his famous painting on the same canvas, and covered them over. The experts isolated parts of ten figures, deduced which of them belonged to each version, and filled them out in painstaking sketches. In a pamphlet published last week, Critic Venturi reported the findings...
...versions are as different in mood and style as they are in composition. In No.1, says Critic Venturi, "everything is realized in the spirit of the characters rather than in the demonstration of the event." But in Nos. 2 and 3, Painter Caravaggio was clearly trying to stress dramatic, physical movement-a concession, says Venturi, to the classicist critics...
...peculiarity of style revealed by the X-ray pictures: Caravaggio never bothered sketching in his figures before painting them; he worked directly with oils. The presence in the early versions of a few headless ears indicates that Caravaggio probably started with an ear when painting heads, using it as a guide in developing the proportions of the rest of the body...