// Chiaroscuro // 19.04.12
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a difficult and dangerous man, largely defined by his violence (often stirred by an insecurity about his status), his weird dress sense, his sexual proclivities and an unerring gift for getting himself into trouble. Yet his art was so original and compelling that those who saw it were transfixed by it. They fought to look at it, gathering in their hundreds every time a new altar piece was unveiled, and those who could afford it fought to acquire it.
Caravaggio painted with such force, with such a stunning sense of drama and deep sense of humanity, that prestigious commissions flooded in, but despite his network of rich protectors, he never found a secure place in the hierarchies of power. He painted as if the rich were his enemies and he lived in the same way. The one time in his life he came close to achieving a settled position among men of power and influence - on Malta - he managed to have himself thrown in jail and defrocked almost as soon as he was knighted.
Caravaggio was not only the most disturbed, but also the most unconventional of all the truly great painters of the Italian tradition. Essentially, he taught himself to paint and was unique in how he went about his painting too. He had no studio in anything like the conventional sense. He sometimes had a boy to assist him, but otherwise painted all by himself. He did not draw, or have assistants to paint drapery or landscapes as other artists did. He gathered no circle of pupils and there were no acolytes to spread the word. There were no portfolios of his drawings to pass around, there were only his paintings, and not very many of those as he died so young.
The fact that he was obliged to invent himself may partially explain his deep originality.
Carpaccio
There is very little landscape in Caravaggio, very little feel of the open air. The scenes he depicts are mostly to be imagined taking place in doors. He habitually collapses the immensity of the world to the confines of a room, in which he can control the action and limit the cast of actors. The blank background has been a peculiarity of Caravaggio’s works since the start of his career. It is a hallmark of an artist utterly uninterested in extraneous detail. For Caravaggio, making images is a way of focusing the mind. To paint something is to isolate it for the purpose of contemplation.
Caravaggio was a painter of extraordinary innate talent, a unique virtuoso when it came to conjuring the illusion of three-dimensional reality within the two dimensions of a painting (perspective). Yet his earliest works, while forceful, are relatively gauche and crude. The breakneck pace of Caravaggio subsequent acceleration, from unknown beginnings to full-blown mastery, begs the question of whether is it possible that he taught himself most of what he knew about painting on the job, and spent much of his presumed apprenticeship playing truant. This hypothesis has the virtue of helping to explain Caravaggio's original technique. It is easier, in some way, for a man to reinvent painting if he has almost nothing in the way of conventionally imagined techniques to impede him. His contemporaries described him as a difficult young man who liked to settle disagreements with violence and who was prone to disappear for days on end. There is no reason to suggest he was anything other than a bad student.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a difficult and dangerous man, largely defined by his violence (often stirred by an insecurity about his status), his weird dress sense, his sexual proclivities and an unerring gift for getting himself into trouble. Yet his art was so original and compelling that those who saw it were transfixed by it. They fought to look at it, gathering in their hundreds every time a new altar piece was unveiled, and those who could afford it fought to acquire it.
Caravaggio painted with such force, with such a stunning sense of drama and deep sense of humanity, that prestigious commissions flooded in, but despite his network of rich protectors, he never found a secure place in the hierarchies of power. He painted as if the rich were his enemies and he lived in the same way. The one time in his life he came close to achieving a settled position among men of power and influence - on Malta - he managed to have himself thrown in jail and defrocked almost as soon as he was knighted.
Caravaggio was not only the most disturbed, but also the most unconventional of all the truly great painters of the Italian tradition. Essentially, he taught himself to paint and was unique in how he went about his painting too. He had no studio in anything like the conventional sense. He sometimes had a boy to assist him, but otherwise painted all by himself. He did not draw, or have assistants to paint drapery or landscapes as other artists did. He gathered no circle of pupils and there were no acolytes to spread the word. There were no portfolios of his drawings to pass around, there were only his paintings, and not very many of those as he died so young.
The fact that he was obliged to invent himself may partially explain his deep originality.
Carpaccio
There is very little landscape in Caravaggio, very little feel of the open air. The scenes he depicts are mostly to be imagined taking place in doors. He habitually collapses the immensity of the world to the confines of a room, in which he can control the action and limit the cast of actors. The blank background has been a peculiarity of Caravaggio’s works since the start of his career. It is a hallmark of an artist utterly uninterested in extraneous detail. For Caravaggio, making images is a way of focusing the mind. To paint something is to isolate it for the purpose of contemplation.
Caravaggio was a painter of extraordinary innate talent, a unique virtuoso when it came to conjuring the illusion of three-dimensional reality within the two dimensions of a painting (perspective). Yet his earliest works, while forceful, are relatively gauche and crude. The breakneck pace of Caravaggio subsequent acceleration, from unknown beginnings to full-blown mastery, begs the question of whether is it possible that he taught himself most of what he knew about painting on the job, and spent much of his presumed apprenticeship playing truant. This hypothesis has the virtue of helping to explain Caravaggio's original technique. It is easier, in some way, for a man to reinvent painting if he has almost nothing in the way of conventionally imagined techniques to impede him. His contemporaries described him as a difficult young man who liked to settle disagreements with violence and who was prone to disappear for days on end. There is no reason to suggest he was anything other than a bad student.
