The Outlaw Who Revolutionised Art
By: Steven Gambardella
Tags: History, Self, Art, Culture, Painting

Caravaggio’s religious paintings during his association with Del Monte are not spared of erotic undertone. Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (1604) shows the saint having swooned backwards into the arms of a handsome male angel. The saint strongly resembles Del Monte and the angel resembles the boys in the ensemble of paintings Caravaggio produced for the Cardinal. Del Monte kept possession of the painting for the rest of his life, for him it was perhaps the image of a lovers embrace.

What quickly became striking of Caravaggio’s paintings of the time was his use of light and dark to evoke drama (chiaroscuro) and his meticulous realism. Art in the late sixteenth-century prized artifice. People were often depicted looking more like statues, or with elongated limbs or contorted in unusual ways. This style is known as “Mannerism”, which developed out of the later Renaissance styles.

Caravaggio only painted directly from life. He rarely made preparatory drawings to perfect his figures. His angel in Saint Frances of Assisi, just like his Bacchus, is less of an angel than a boy dressed as an angel, wearing a robe and theatre-prop angel wings.

While other artists like the famous Annibale Carracci painted angels as putti and cherubim floating in puffy clouds, Caravaggio’s heavenly bodies are observed from the people around him, you can almost smell them.

There is nothing artificial in Caravaggio’s work of this Roman period. Even the dramatic lighting was a result of his working indoors using lamps, or relying on the shards of sunlight from small windows. It was an unusual way of working that, thanks to changes in Church attitudes, became high fashion.

Riding the Crest of a Cultural Revolution

Madonna di Loreto c.1606 (source: Wikipedia)

As Caravaggio painted these distinctively realistic scenes, the Catholic Church was undergoing a cultural revolution. Protestantism had taken hold in large swathes of northern Europe and the church embarked on a spiritual and cultural counterattack in the form of the Counter-Reformation.

The Church’s Council of Trent (1545–63) decreed that Catholic art needed to be less intellectual and stylised and more immediate in its subject matter. It was important for religious art to appeal to the masses in the war for their souls. Caravaggio’s realism, coming years after the Council’s conclusion, seemed to fit that bill very well. The artist’s career blossomed quickly thanks to the super-rich of Rome at the bosom of the Church. His friendship with Del Monte ensured the commissions for religious paintings came in abundance.

His art, seen through the lens of history, exemplifies the pinnacle of “Baroque realism”: a dramatic style that was realistic to the grimy details. You can still see Caravaggio’s altarpieces in the churches of Rome and you will not fail to be stunned by how incongruous they look among other paintings of the time. His works are shockingly realistic.

The Madonna di Loreto of 1606 (which can be seen in the church of Sant’Agostino) caused an uproar at its unveiling. The Madonna is depicted as a working-class Italian woman, standing barefooted in the dark doorway of a cheap-looking Roman house, holding a naked baby Jesus.

Only the wisp of a halo marks out her divinity in the presence of similarly poor-looking pilgrims. This is Madonna as the girl next door, among the downtrodden and the discriminated.

The irony lost on the painting’s detractors was that this woman was probably very like the Virgin Mary herself, a woman of poverty. Caravaggio bought religion back to earth. His miracles are not accompanied by rays of heavenly light, golden halos or descended clouds.

The serenity of this painting is rare for Caravaggio. His paintings were often brutal and violent, and never less than dramatic.

The Conversion on the Way to Damascus, c.1600–1. (source: Wikipedia)

His paintings of Apostles Peter and Paul from 1601 depict them as ordinary human beings in the most extraordinary circumstances. Peter watches anxiously as the cross he is nailed to is hoisted up in an inverted fashion. Saul (soon to be Paul), also inverted, falls from his horse as a vision of Christ overcomes him. His head hits the floor at our feet.

When Picasso was painting Guernica in 1938, he remarked that he wished he could make his horse “smell of sweat” like the horse Paul has fallen from in Caravaggio’s painting.

Both paintings have an extraordinary lopsidedness compared to others of the era. The word “Baroque”, comes from the Portuguese word “barroco”, a flawed pearl that is not quite spherical.

Whereas Renaissance painting, such as that of Leonardo, prized balance and harmony, Caravaggio and those who followed him created paintings that were unbalanced and discordant.

Figures in these compositions threatened to fall out into the space of the viewer. To the high clergy, this drama made the pictures perfect as urgent reminders of faith at a time when the church’s dominance had been shaken. While playing a part in the Church's divine mission, the artist himself continued to behave like a devil.

The fame and wealth that came with Del Monte’s support did not stop Caravaggio’s criminal antics. The artist is known to have attacked waiters, fight over gambling disputes and, in a particularly nasty act, he slashed the face of a prostitute who refused to sleep with him. Caravaggio was not a good man, he was awful. In 1606 he went too far.