Art: Master of the Gesture

“The Age of Caravaggio,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s big show this winter, may come to be remembered as a marker in the history of exhibitions. Not even the Met, this time, could get the loan of his greatest work. Owners and curators are getting more conservative, especially in Italy, and the days when uniquely important works of art could be flown around the world like greeting cards, even for scholarly purposes, are fading.

In 1951, when the Italian scholar Roberto Longhi mounted the crucial show that brought Caravaggio’s turbulent genius out of three centuries of neglect and obloquy, this was not a problem. But 34 years later, thanks to the enthusiasm generated by Longhi, more people probably go to, say, the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome to worship Caravaggio than to worship God.

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 and Bassano, and some beautiful works by Annibale Carracci, Adam Elsheimer and Guido Reni, most of this is deadwood and of interest mainly to specialists. Moreover, the climactic efforts of Caravaggio’s career, like the Beheading of St. John the Baptist in Malta (which must be the most sublimely concrete work of the tragic imagination painted between the death of Michelangelo and the maturity of Rembrandt), are not here. So it is best to treat the Met’s show as a preparation for pilgrimage and to ignore the blatant copies, pastiches and restored wrecks, such as The Magdalen in Ecstasy, The Toothpuller and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula, with which its closing rooms are unfortunately padded.

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.

The 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 in 1606, and wounded several others, including a guard at Castel Sant’Angelo and a waiter whose face he cut open in a squabble about artichokes. He was sued for libel in Rome and mutilated in a tavern brawl in Naples. He was saturnine, coarse and queer. He thrashed about in the etiquette of early seicento cultivation like a shark in a net. So where is the mini-series? When will some art-collecting shlockmeister of Beverly Hills produce The Shadows and the Sodomy, the 1980s’ answer to The Agony and the Ecstasy?

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.

But if 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’s Musicians and the Uffizi Bacchus, which are. The Bacchus is detached, down to the last dirty fingernail on his pudgy hand: not a god, but a pouting, weary-eyed model in costume, his crown of vine leaves rendered with sparkling exuberance, his flesh slack and tallowy, and half the fruit bruised or rotten.

No other Italian artist of the day had such mastery of gesture. Caravaggio was a minute observer of body language: how people move, slump, sit up, point and shrug; how they writhe in pain; how the dead sprawl. Hence the vividness of Abraham’s gesture in The Sacrifice of Isaac, holding his wailing son down on a rock like a man about to gut a fish, even though the landscape behind them is Venetian in its pastoral calm. In The Supper at Emmaus, the characters seem ready to come off the wall, as Christ makes his sacramental gesture over the food. This insistence, this feeling of a world trying to burst from the canvas, is epitomized in one detail of the Supper–the basket of fruit, perched on the very brink of the painted table and ready to spill its contents at one’s feet. Later, Caravaggio would learn how to combine poses seen in real life with those sanctified by tradition: hence the contrast achieved in the Louvre’s Death of the Virgin between the onlookers, as grave and classical as any quoted from a sarcophagus, and the dead Mary, sprawled like a real corpse. He learned to run variations on the idea of decorum; to achieve effects of the utmost stateliness and play them off against the “merely” documentary. His enemies thought this showed a taste for the banal. Today it suggests how little, in art, can be more radical than a hunger for the real.

Yet like many great aesthetic radicals, Caravaggio had a deep conservative streak. He had come from the northern provinces, in his early 20s, to an art world in recession. Rome in 1592 had a great past but a mincing present. The accepted style was a filleted if showy kind of late mannerism, turned out by the frescoed acre by artists like Caravaggio’s early master Giuseppe Cesari, alias the Cavaliere d’Arpino. Limp, garrulous, overconceptualized and feverishly second hand, Roman art in 1590 was in some ways like New York art four centuries later. Against its pedantry–the seicento equivalent, perhaps, of our “postmodern” cult of irony–Caravaggio’s work proposed a return to the concrete, the tangible, the vernacular and the sincere. For all the theater and guignol in his work, Caravaggio had far more in common with the great solidifiers of the Renaissance, from Masaccio to Michelangelo, than with the euphuistic wreathings of late mannerism. He reclaimed the human figure, moving in deep space in all its pathos and grandeur, as the basic unit of art–the one that provokes the strongest plastic feelings by mobilizing our sense of our own bodies. He freed it from the musty envelope of allegory by % putting it in common dress and lighting it “realistically,” from outside the picture.

Above all, he brought to it a renewed sense of design. Caravaggio’s work moves from clutter toward the irreducible: tracing their signs for energy and pathos in the dark, his bodies acquire a formidable power of structure. Sometimes it is very clear; the figure of David holding up the head of Goliath (the Goliath is a self-portrait, a striking rehabilitation of a “monster” as heroic victim) has the abruptness of an ideogram. Elsewhere it is subtler: the geometry of his Saint Catherine consists of two triangles, one formed by the saint’s gleaming upper body and dark skirt, the other by the attributes of her martyrdom: the sword tipped with a red reflection from the cushion, meeting the palm frond at an angle subtended by the arc of the broken wheel.

In one way Caravaggio’s quest for strength and legibility reversed itself. He exaggerated the battle between light and dark to such a pitch that the late work became hard to read; its forms turned anxious and flickering, as though snatched from the very throat of darkness. But by then, this confusion had acquired its own expressive integrity as the handwriting of a painter more and more possessed by death. Caravaggio’s sense of mortality was the thing his imitators found hardest to copy. But this did not stop the spread of Caravaggism. Within a decade of his death his followers had diffused his message all over Europe: Caracciolo and Ribera in Naples, Georges de La Tour and Valentin de Boulogne in France, Seghers and Honthorst in The Netherlands, and dozens of others inside and outside Italy.

Scratch almost any great 17th century painter except Poussin, and traces of Caravaggio will appear. The vivid, tragic piety of his work after 1600 was fundamental to baroque painting. Without his sense of humble, ordinary bodies lapped in darkness but transfigured by sacramental light, what would Rembrandt have done? Caravaggio was one of the hinges of art history: there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same. No wonder that he is now the artist that many new painters, in an age without authentic culture heroes, pine to be.