The First Bohemian

By ROBERT HUGHES

"I heard a zealot of our profession say that the appearance of this man meant a foreboding of ruin and an end to painting," complained Vincenzo Carducho, a Spanish connoisseur. "Did anyone ever paint, and with as much success, as this monster of genius and talent, almost without rules, without theory, without learning or meditation, simply by the power of his genius and the model in front of him which he copied so admirably?" The cause of alarm was an Italian painter named Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio who, in the course of a short, fiery and often pitiable career, changed the face of 17th-century European art. That achievement is the subject of a loan show at the Cleveland Museum, "Caravaggio and his Followers," organized by Art Historian Richard E. Spear.

Knives and Artichokes. No Italian painter less resembled the Renaissance ideal of the gentleman genius than Caravaggio. His luck was as foul as his temper. He was in some ways the first Bohemian artist, and he thrashed about in the dogma-bound and ceremonious society of Counter-Reformation Rome like a beast in a net. In 1604 Caravaggio was haled into court for assaulting a Roman waiter who had brought him a dish of artichokes, six cooked in oil and six in butter. Caravaggio asked which were which. "Taste them," retorted the waiter, "and you will see." Caravaggio jumped to his feet, laid the man's cheek open with the edge of the dish and tried to skewer him with his rapier. Defamation, rent arrears, carrying an unlicensed sword--the lawsuits piled up until in 1606 Caravaggio murdered a man by knifing him in the groin over a game of tennis and was banished from Rome. There ensued four bizarre years of flight and intermittent patron age, as Caravaggio blundered in and out of scrapes in Naples. Malta and Sicily, executing masterpieces on the run. In 1610 he died of malaria in the fishing village of Porto Ercole. while trying to sneak back into Rome. He was 36 years old. His public career, with all its ruinous vicissitudes, had lasted less than 20 years. But he had produced some of the most influential paintings in Europe.

Against Vacuity. Caravaggio looks curiously modern as an artist, though he died 31 centuries ago. His work became a line of cleavage between the "modernists" and conservatives of Rome. For in the 1590s, when Caravaggio first settled there, Roman art had descended into glassy, learned vacuity. Painters were still traumatized by the memory of Michelangelo, a figure of such bulk that there seemed no way past him; at the same time, the Counter Reformation demanded an elevated, moralized tone from its artists. The result had nothing to offer Caravaggio--who was not, in any case, a particularly educated man and was impatient with the intellectual offerings of the Papal court. He was, as one might expect from his life, a man to whom sensation was the main issue. "There is no question," wrote one of his 17th century admirers, "that Caravaggio advanced the art of painting because he came upon the scene at a time when realism was not much in fashion and when figures were made according to convention and satisfied more the taste for gracefulness than for truth."

To 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 of Alexandria, circa 1597, is surrounded by the attributes of her martyrdom, the spiked wheel and sword; her sainthood is conventional, but what the painting seems to be about is her firm, composed human presence. It is a secular portrait.

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 how this drama worked. The light pours over the forms of the young hero's body like a photoflash, stopping the action at its climax. Every lit shape has its rim of darkness, isolating it in deep relief. Caravaggio's best late paintings (none of which could be lent to Cleveland) rely absolutely on this tension between commonplace detail and sublime staging. Caught between the transfiguring light and the gnawing darkness, his figures acquired a mysterious, haunting irrationality. Sometimes the flow of light actually contradicts the muscles and skin that Caravaggio studied with such care. The final effect is not, for this reason, "realist" at all, but the impact remains. It is the violent blackness of Macbeth.

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 Rembrandt took Caravaggio's worn flesh and epiphanies of light and gave them the humanist resonance which Caravaggio himself died too young to attain.

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