Christian Art and Iconography Guide: Caravaggio

Michelangelo da Caravaggio, one of the most popular of all the great painters, had an amazingly colorful and adventurous career, full of dramatic contrasts. He was a religious artist who used prostitutes and castrati as his models, a mystic with a police record, the favorite of cardinals, and the Pope's portrait painter, who committed murder; an outlaw from the Roman hills, lionized in Naples; a Knight of Malta imprisoned in a Maltese dungeon, hunted by hired assassins in a vendetta with an unknown enemy and horribly disfigured by sword cuts in a Neapolitan brothel. Ironically, he died at an early age on a lonely Tuscan beach, after receiving a pardon that would have allowed him to become an even greater painter. Based on the latest research, and written like an adventure story, the book concentrates on the man without neglecting the artist, vividly recreating his life in early Baroque Italy and as a 'monk of war" in Malta.

Caravaggio's unconventional, not to say violent, behavior forced him to flee from Rome after he killed a man in a trifling argument. Journeys to Naples, Malta, and Sicily were also rife with bizarre occurrences, yet they yielded major commissions for portraits and altarpieces, which were rendered with great creative energy. Characteristically, he died miserably on a trip back to Rome. Professor Moir's vivid text deals not only with Caravaggio but also with his influence on European painting, the social and political events of the times, his fellow artists, and the powerful patrons who housed and supported this troublesome genius. An outstanding Caravaggio specialist who has written extensively about this painter and his circle, Alfred Moir is Professor of Art History at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

This exhibition at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art (February-May 1999) takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the style, subject matter, and functions of religious art in Italy between 1580-1680. The conceptual centerpiece of the exhibition is Caravaggio's recently rediscovered The Taking of Christ. The catalogue reproduces in color all of the paintings in the exhibition and includes a collection of essays that analyze how some of the period's most important artistic, religious, and social concerns are encapsulated within the various images. Contributors include Franco Mormando (Exhibition Organizer and Catalogue Editor), Gauvin Bailey, Noel Barber, Sergio Benedetti, Pamela Jones, John W. O'Malley, John Varriano, Josephine von Henneberg, and Thomas Worcester.

Emotionally and formally Caravaggio's art is shot through with the ignoble. Unlike Renaissance art, it is not elevating. In noticing this the seventeenth-century critics were right, although they seem to us to have drawn the wrong conclusions from it. They accused Caravaggio of neglecting ideal beauty, respect for which they considered the foundation of good painting. To us this characteristic of his seems, if not a positive virtue, a distinguishing mark. Caravaggio shows us a side of the subject he is depicting that had not been represented in art before,a side that appears to us nearer to the truth. His art has no heroes,no idealised Christs or saints, and sacred events are shown taking place in squalid surroundings (works that are partial exceptions to this rule, such as "The Entombment" or "The Madonna of the Rosary" seem for this very reason anachronistic, although they were once much praised). Caravaggio was perhaps the first artist in history to disregard the notion, invented in the fifteenth century, that the object of a work of art was to be beautiful.

Hibbard has answered a serious need...with remarkable thoroughness, critical balance...with an offering of original insights, and with an enviable clarity and ease in presentation. The book is well illustrated and indexed, and contains transcriptions and translations of early biographies of Caravaggio and a section of notes on the illustrations that could almost be called a catalogue raisonne. Everyone interested in Caravaggio, at any level, will prize it. Highly recommended.