Italian Journal: The Caravaggio Moment

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Italian Journal volume 20. number iiI. 2010

The Caravaggio Moment

Giacamo Puccini. Courtesy Puccini Foundation.

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“Nel mezzo del cammin’ di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura Che la diretta via era smarrita.

“

Italian.

Get to know civilization’s unmistakably beautiful language of Art Music and Dance Cuisine Fashion Literature History ...and, yes, Amore.

So begins one of the greatest achievements of the human imagination, Dante’s Divine Comedy, “Midway upon the journey of our life,/ I found myself within a forest dark,/ For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” (Inferno I)

Sound civilized.

www.ItalianAcademyFoundation.org

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Italian Journal

IN THIS ISSUE On the cover: CARAVAGGIO. Supper at Emmaus, 1602 (detail). page 23

Editor’s journal contributors NOTABLE italy’s gift to the library of congress Claudia Palmira Acunto Editor Laura Giacalone Contributing Editor AdrianA Sanchez Editorial Assistant Genny di Bert Columnist Mauro benedetti Vito Catalone Suzanne PReparata Photography Printed in the United States.

Stefano ACUNTO Chairman The Italian Academy Foundation, Inc. (IAF), established in 1947, is a non-for profit 501©(3), tax-exempt corporation that pursues a unique form of cultural diplomacy, presenting Italian realities to U.S. audiences. The Italian Academy Foundation, Inc. produces concerts, symposia and special events year-round in the United States and Italy.

Hudson Cliff House 131 Alta Avenue Yonkers, NY 10705 914 966 3180 ext.110 Via Marcantonio Colonna 60 Rome 00193 +39 06 325 05 490 www.italianjournal.it

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The Caravaggio Moment

20 caravaggio assoluto 22 inherent revolution 24 the art of intemperence 27 portraits and portrayals 28 the double fugitive 34 performing the paintings 38 the quoted artist 40 IPSE DIXIT 44 a new eye on caravaggio 46 Reverberations of realism 49 FAShion: Technobohemian Art: speaking of realism Literature: sacred, profane naples Photography: Hidden gem of Rome Social journal Face file: john turturro

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EDITOR’S journal

bad boy beauty

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aravaggio.

The New York Times recently published that this “anithero” artist had superceded Michelangelo in his relevance to contemporary viewers.1 The lines outside of the Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale exhibition certainly seem to prove this.

The unparalleled Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio could earn his idealization solely for the stunning richness of his works, lush with emotional content transcending time and place. But his personal history, rife with combat, broken promises, escapes and an early death provides a lurid backstory. No wonder he fascinates.

In this issue, we present various points of view from around the world – from scholars, to artists, to curators to lifelong students of Caravaggio – along with images of some of his most influential works.

I will always remember how my own affair with the artist began. During a Baroque art history class (taught by one of the authors in this edition), his works were projected on the screen in a darkened classroom. The Death of the Virgin drew me in immediately – the tension between the heavy grief surrounding the bloated corpse and the ethereal swirl of red fabric above the mourners, emerging from the dark in a luminous glow. When I finally glimpsed the real painting in the Louvre a few years ago, it seemed a kind of coming home.

CAravaggio. Death of the Virgin, 1604. Oil on canvas. 369 x 245.

Louvre, Paris France.

Claudia Palmira Rome, Italy

1 Michael Kimmelman, “An Italian Antihero’s Time to Shine.” The New York Times,

March 9, 2010

6 Contributors

contributors Mieke BAL

Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3d edition in press). Mieke Bal is also a video-artist, her experimental documentaries on migration include A Thousand and One Days; Colony and the installation Nothing is Missing. Her work is exhibited internationally. Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. www.miekebal.org www.crazymothermovie.com

Francesco BURANELLI

Co-curator of the recent “Caravaggio” Exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, Francesco Buranelli was the General Director of the Vatican Museums from 2002 to 2007. He is member of numerous Etruscan and archaeological institutes, and has represented the Vatican on a number of scientific exhibition committees. In 2003 he became the coordinator of the Holy See for the Unesco Convention.

Genny DI BERT

A graduate of Art History and professional art critic and journalist, Genny Di Bert is a lecturer on the subject of “The Phenomenology of Contemporary Art and Art History” for the Accademia Belle Arti of Milan, Accademia Belle Arti of Palermo, NABA of Milan, Catholic University of Milan and the RUFA Academy of Rome.

She is also curator of Libera Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome and of the Eleutheria Art Foundation, Prague. She has authored several non-fiction books, among them: Socialistický Realismus Czesckoslovensko 1948-1989; Acqua che cade, Antoine-Jean Gros; Oltre l’Occidente-Nuova iconologia e nuova sensibilità dagli inizi dell’800 alla New Age. She has collaborated with galleries, museums, publishing houses and international institutions. She is a member of the National Association of Journalists (Italy) since 1987. Most recently, she has published articles about art, costume and society in various publications, such as: Next, Follow me, Contemporanea, Arte Service, D’Ars, L’Arca, Titolo, Archeo, L’Indipendente, L’Ora, Il Mediterraneo, Europa, Progetto Repubblica Ceca.

Sybille EBERT-SCHIFFERER

Sybille Ebert-Schifferer is Director at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute of Art History, Rome, since 2001. She studied art history, musicology, and theatre history in Munich and Berlin. After having worked as Head of Exhibitions at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, where she curated, among others, exhibitions on Guido Reni and Guercino, she was appointed as Director of the Hesse State Museum in Darmstadt in 1991 and as General Director of the Saxon State Art Collections in Dresden in 1998. She taught at the universities of Frankfurt, Bonn and Dresden, and was guest curator of the exhibition on trompe-l’oeil, Deceptions and Illusions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, held in 2002/2003. She has recently (2009) been Summer Fellow at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown (Mass.). Among her publications are Still Life: A History (New York, Abrams 1999) and numerous articles on Italian, but also French and German Art of the 16th - 18th century. In September 2009, she published the monograph Caravaggio. Sehen – Staunen – Glauben (C. H. Beck, Munich) which is now in its second edition and has been translated into French (Caravage, Hazan, Paris 2009).

contributors

Contributors Laura GIACALONE

Laura Giacalone is Project Editor for the Italian quarterly publication Filmaker’s magazine, and works as a Contributing Editor and Editorial Consultant for various art magazines and publishing houses. In London she has worked as a writer and Editorial Assistant for Phaidon Press, contributing to the three-volume book Phaidon Design Classics. She has translated into Italian the novel Paper Fish, by Tina De Rosa, and a variety of academic papers, film subtitles, screenplays and feature articles. Her world is made of words, and she loves it.

John KELLY

John Kelly is a performance and visual artist whose work runs the gamut from solo and group mixed media dance theatre works, to vocal concerts, and exhibitions of visual art and video. His work explores the character of creative life as it occurs in the gradations between the ephemeral and the tangible. An online archive can be found at www.johnkellyperformance.org

Keith SCIBERRAS

Keith Sciberras, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Malta. He has published extensively on the subject of Caravaggio, Roman Baroque sculpture and Baroque painting. He is the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Senior Fellowship in the Department of European Paintings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and has been awarded the National [Malta] Book Prize for Research (2006). His publications include: Roman Baroque Sculpture for the Knights of Malta (2004); Caravaggio, Art, Knighthood, and Malta (2006; with David M. Stone); Melchiorre Cafà: Maltese Genius of the Roman Baroque (2006; as editor); Caravaggio and Paintings of Realism in Malta (2007; as co-editor); and several articles in leading international journals, including The Burlington Magazine and Paragone Arte. Dr. Sciberras contributed to numerous international research projects and exhibitions, including the milestone Caravaggio: The Final Years (Naples-London, 2004-2005). He has lectured in major Universities, Museums, and Art Institutions in Europe and USA.

Claudio STRINATI

Claudio Strinati is an art critic, author and art historian. His field of study is particularly concentrated on the 16th and 17th centuries. He has been the curator of many exhibitions and cultural events in Italy and abroad. He was the Superintendent of Rome’s Polo Museale for about 20 years. He is the creator of the recent “Caravaggio” Exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome.

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At the opening of Caravaggio in Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale, a continous crowd in front of the recently-restored masterpiece Adoration of the Shepherds, 1609.

Oil on canvas. 123.6 x 83 inches. Museo Regionale, Messina Italy.

contributors

Contributors John VARRIANO

John Varriano has a special interest in the art and architecture of 17th-century Rome and has published more than three dozen specialized studies in his field. His most recent book is Caravaggio and the Art of Realism. Active in the Mount Holyoke College European Studies Program, Varriano has also served four terms as chair of the College’s Department of Art. He held an endowed chair named after the first woman in America to spend her junior year abroad, and he strongly encouraged his current students to do the same. Varriano taught European art from the 15th through the 18th centuries. His intermediate-level courses included Italian Renaissance Art, Southern Baroque Art and Northern Baroque Art. Recent seminars have included The Sacred and the Profane, The History of the City of Rome, Palladio and Palladianism, Caravaggio and His Followers and Old Master Drawings.

Rosella VODRET

Rossella Vodret is currently the Superintendent of Rome’s Polo Museale, and formerly of the National Gallery of Ancient Art of Barberini Palace in Rome. She is the author and curator of many exhibitions on the 17th century Roman art, among which the recent “Caravaggio” Exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome.

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“La Tebaldi” Celebrated in Lovers’ Castle, Parma

Castello Torrechiara Strada Castello, 10 Langhirano, Italy tel +39 0521355009 www.renatatebaldi.eu

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he Castle of Torrechiara, in Langhirano, Parma, is hosting an exhibition dedicated to the great soprano Renata Tebaldi, renowned for her lyrical voice, her long, international opera career, especially at the Metropolitan Opera, and her performances in La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Otello and Manon Lescaut.

Situated on a perch overlooking the Parma valley in a town in which Tebaldi spent part of her childhood, the Torrechiara Castle was commissioned in 1448 by Pier Maria Rossi of the Visconti family for his mistress Bianca Pellegrini di Arluno.

Its architectural layout centers around the lovers’ chambers and is known for the Camera d’oro (the Golden Room), their elaborately frescoed bedroom.

Entitled “A Castle for a Queen,” the exhibition shows practically the entire collection of the late soprano’s theatre costumes designed by artists such as Nicola Benois, Beni Montresor, Giorgio De Chirico; her concert costumes and evening clothes designed by Valentino and

upper left, The great soprano REnata Tebaldi; Above, costumes and photos from manon lescaut on display in the castle torrechiara, shown left. Below, the exhibition entrance.

others. Tebaldi’s stage and personal jewelry, travel trunks and rare documents. as well as film and audio presentations are included in the tribute. The exhibit will travel to New York in September, 2010.

Accompanying the fenimore Art mUseum’s recent exhibit “America’s Rome” was a keynote address delivered to the new york historical society, entitled “Roma Non Sponte Sequor.”

The discourse describes seven distinct allures of italy, illuminated by the author with examples from ancient history to the romantics to the present day. The speech has been published in book form.

Roma Non Sponte Sequor: The Enduring Allure of Italy

by S. Acunto www.lulu.com

Photos courtesy The Renata Tebaldi Committee

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Photo courtesy Reuters

Notable “Made in Italy...” Really F

Ultraviolet Rays Illuminate Lost Details of Giotto Frescoes W

e have uncovered a secret Giotto,” said Isabella Lapi Ballerini, head of Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a world-renowned art restoration laboratory.

Using ultraviolet light, restorers have been able to glimpse color and detail that has been hidden for centuries. Dating from 1320, the frescoes decorate walls of the Peruzzi Chapel of the Santa Croce church, Florence.

The frescoes include lavishly illustrated depictions of St John the Evangelist ascending to heaven and the head of St John the Baptist being presented to King Herod on a plate by a Roman soldier.

After spending four months mapping the frescoes as preparation for a possible future restoration, researchers stumbled on the ultraviolet technique. They noted that while viewing the paintings under ultra-violet light, they saw extraordinary details invisible to the naked eye.

“The scenes are again three dimensional... we were able to see all the chiaroscuro effects,” said Cecilia Frosinini, coordinator of the project that studied the scenes in the lives of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist. “There were bodies under the garments... they became three-dimensional, you could see the folds of the garments, the expressions of the faces.”

In the 18th century, the frescoes were covered in whitewash before undergoing a rigorous restoration, in which the tools of that period, steel wool scrubbers and solvents, were used to remove the whitewash. This treatment traumatized the works, rendering them scratched and faded.

The fine and rich details that the restorers witnessed must remain hidden. Subjecting the art to constant ultraviolet light would eventually damage them altogether.

“I am fully aware that it is impossible to share the same kind of surprise and emotional feeling that we have when we are here in the dark and all of a sudden these images come back to life,” said Frosinini. “So I just hope we can find enough funds to have a complete ultra-violet mapping of the whole chapel in order to build some kind of virtual software to share all that we have discovered with the general public.”

rom October, items bearing the “Made in Italy” label will have to carry a certificate demonstrating that they adhere to certain standards and are hygienic and safe, according to a new law passed by the Italian Parliament. It is awaiting approval by the European Parliament, where it may influence a similar labeling law affecting all of Europe.

The new Italian regulation aims to raise the standard for textiles, shoes and leather goods by imposing more stringent conditions on the textiles, shoes and other goods that are “Made in Italy.”

Manufacturers must prove that their products were primarily made in Italy and, if any part of the work was carried out elsewhere, an identifiable location must be shown. In addition, all textiles, shoes and leather goods sold in Italy but manufactured outside its territory will have to carry a label showing the country of production.

Flowery Pizza wins Euro Prize P

erhaps unsurprisingly, two Italians snagged the title of “Best European Pizza” in the recent Paris competition “Europain.” Marcello Fotia and colleague Mario Signorile served up the tastiest pizza of the group, according to the French panel of judges.

The special ingredients of the winning pie, named “Julienne,” were fresh violets and primrose. It was a bit of a hassle to obtain them: “There is only one firm in all of Italy that makes the edible ones,” said Fotia. The chefs were able to transport them to France for the competition. Fotia has just received his masters from the Italian School of Pizza of Caorle and owns a Lavinio-based pizzeria named “La Divina Commedia.”

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Photo courtesy i-italy.org

Notable Muti Met Debut Brings Attila to Life R

enowned Italian maestro Riccardo Muti debuted in New York at the Metropolitan Opera House with an extraordinarily enthusiastic reception for his conducting of Verdi’s Attila.

The Naples-born conductor described his choice of Verdi’s lesser-played works for his entry in the New York world of music: “[Attila] is one of Verdi’s most important Risorgimento operas. It is an opera of revolution, and audiences of the time recognized it as such. And yet the music is never brutal. There is always a nobility present, even in Attila’s music.”

The same, perhaps, can be said of Muti’s own style.

The production features the costume designs of Miuccia Prada and prize-winning architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s set designs.

Italian conductor Riccardo Muti

Illustrations courtesy of Prada

Attila wears Prada

Veronesi to Direct Opera Orchestra of NY C

Miuccia Prada created original costume designs for Pierre Audi’s Metropolitan opera premiere production of Verdi’s Attila. Here are some of Prada’s costume sketches: From left: Attila, Odabella, Foresto and Ezio.

onductor Alberto Veronesi has been appointed Music Director of the Opera Orchestra of New York, succeeding founder Eve Queler, who will become Conductor Laureate once Mr. Veronesi’s five-year tenure begins in 2011.

Born in Milan, Alberto Veronesi is Music Director of the Puccini Festival at Torre del Lago, Artistic Director of the Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, and Music Director of the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, positions which he will continue to hold during his tenure as Music Director of the Opera Orchestra.

The Opera Orchestra of New York was established in 1971 by Eve Queler to present rare and unusual repertory in a concert setting, emphasizing the operatic voice over visual production.

Performances feature internationally acclaimed established artists as well as exceptional young singers in an effort to develop an appreciation of opera among diverse audiences while cultivating a new generation of supporters.

“Mr. Veronesi’s background and experience in development, his artistic ability and vision, and his musical knowledge of the lesser known works of the operatic repertoire make him the ideal music director for the company,” said Normam Ramen, Chairman of the Opera Orchestra.

Mr. Veronesi currently lives in Palermo with his wife and young daughter.

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Notable Hollywood Star for Bocelli

Lily of the Feast shoots on NY, NJ Locations A

Andrea bocelli and Veronica Berti on his Star in Hollywood

FEDERICO CASTELLUCCIO, TONY LO BIANCO and PAUL SORVINO

Brooklyn Law, which he wrote as well.

“This will be the first of many projects together. Mike and Federico are a genuinely gifted and have gone well beyond the usual set up plots and mob types in Lily; Mike has created a mini universe, his native Brooklyn, and created characters who are as unafraid of sweet and soft emotion, ironically, as they are of violence and murder,” said Steve Acunto, President of Capolavori Productions.

The Lily of the Feast marks the first Ricigliano-Acunto-Castelluccio collaboration.

Virtual San Giovanni in Laterano Courtesy San Giovanni in Laterano

Photo by Nikki Nelson for WENN

new short film, Lily of the Feast, starring Paul Sorvino and Tony Lo Bianco, along with The Sopranos’ Federico Castelluccio, is shooting on locations in New York and Jersey City, NJ. Debut screenwriter Michael Ricigliano created the short film drawn from his full-length feature script with the same name. In addition to co-starring, Castelluccio is also the film’s director, collaborating with the film’s Director of Photography, Ken Kelsch (The Bad Lieutenant, Big Night) and producers T.J. Sansone & Tyagi Schwartz.

An attorney by trade, Ricigliano represented clients in the film and stage industry before trying his hand at writing and producing. He has developed several other projects including the feature film

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talian tenor Andrea Bocelli was honoured with the 2402nd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2009, Bocelli’s My Christmas was the best-selling album of holiday songs in the USA, topping the USA Top 200 Chart in second place for six weeks. Incanto sold 1.5 million copies worldwide.

During the Los Angeles ceremony unveiling the newest star, the Adderley School of Performing Arts choir sang for Bocelli, and then the tenor stepped in to accompany a young singer during her solo.

Bocelli joins other opera stars on the Walk of Fame: Beniamino Gigli, Enrico Caruso, Placido Domingo, Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Licia Albanese, Beverly Sills, Ezio Pinza, Geraldine Farrar, Amelita Galli-Curci among others.

online view of the apse of san Giovanni in Laterano, Rome.

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he Vatican has long offered virtual tours of its chapels and museums online. Now the Roman cathedral Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano features a high resolution tour of its entire premises. The online virtual tour allows the user to view the space in 360 degrees.

The virtual visit is a result of a collaboration with Villanova University, Pennsylvania.

San Giovanni in Laterano Virtual Visit www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/san_giovanni/vr_tour/index-it.html

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Notable Italian Government Rescues Advanced Placement Italian Language Study I

talian Ambassador Giulio Terzi has announced that the Government of Italy has authorized the allocation of $500,000.00 in support of maintaining the Advanced Placement Program in Italian Language and Culture. It was made possible through the direct efforts in Italy by the Prime Minister’s Office and by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the support of the Embassy of Italy in Washington. Major Italian American organizations also lent significant support to the effort.

The decision, said Terzi, confirms the priority assigned by the Government of Italy to the Advanced Placement program of the American College Board , which has been identified as indispensable to the diffusion of appropriate level Italian language courses in U.S. schools. A foreign language’s inclusion among the 35 AP subjects is a factor of continuity, diligence, and coherence in curricula from preschool to university. Inclusion in the AP is incentivizing to prospective students and to the high schools themselves.

Terzi said that the Embassy of Italy was “strongly appreciative for and commends the commitment undertaken by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations* through the creation of an ad hoc committee tasked with supporting the Government’s action through both raising additional funds and a campaign aimed at gathering a critical mass of students to enroll in the program.”

In view of the program’s reinstatement, direct contacts at the highest level between the Embassy of Italy in partnership with the Conference of Presidents and the College Board have already been activated.

Harvard Neuroscience Summer ‘Camp’ in Trento T

he Harvard Mind/Brain/ Behavior (MBB) Initiative of Harvard University selected the Center for Mind and Brain (CIMeC) at the University of Trento to launch its first summer proLa fontana del nettuno in the gram in Cognitive center of Trento Neuroscience.

Over the two-month summer school in the Trento university center in Rovereto, both Harvard and Italian students gather in a rigorous scientific atmosphere to deepen their study of of cognitive neuroscience, guided by neuroscientists and cognitive scientists from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Medical School. Thirty students from both countries will be selected to follow this intensive course of study, which will include lectures, seminars in neuroscience, as well as optional Italian language classes.

“For science programs, the centers thus far chosen by Harvard were England, Japan, China and Germany, and now Italy with the University of Trento. This constitutes a source of pride for our university and throughout the territory,” said Alfonso Caramazza. the director of CIMeC. The program also provides outings and weekend trips intended to immerse students in Italian culture and tradition. Trips include hikes in the Italian Alps, boat excursions on the Lago di Garda and day or overnight trips to nearby cities – like Venice, Verona, Mantova and Vicenza.

Italy-America Chamber Elected President P

resident of Mediterranean Shipping Company, Inc., Genoa-born Claudio Bozzi, is the newly-elected President of the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce (IACC).

In 1994 Bozzi started as a clerk with the Mediterranean Shipping Company, which has been member of the IACC since 1966. He worked his way through the company ranks and became president in 2005.

He also serves as the IACC’s representative to the Board of Directors of the European-American Chamber of Commerce in the U.S., Inc. (EACC), an established coalition of the European binational chambers of commerce in the United States, whose purpose is to contribute to the improvement of economic, commercial and financial relations between European countries and the United States.

Bozzi was appointed a Knight of the Italian Republic in 2004 and in 2009 received the Bridge Award from the American University in Rome.

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Notable Italian Court Rules on Seizure of “Getty Bronze” F

requently referrred to as the “Getty Bronze,” an ancient Greek statue has been the center of of a long-running dispute between Italian culture authorities and the J. Paul getty Museum in Los Angeles. Most recently, the court of appeals of Pesaro, Italy ruled the immediate “confiscation” of “The Statue of a Victorious Youth” and its prompt return to Italy.

Judge Lorena Mussoni’s recent decision overturns a 2008 ruling by another Pesaro judge rejecting Italy’s petition to have the statue seized. According to the judge, the statue became Italian property as soon as it was lifted out of the Adriatic Sea near Fano in 1964. Its subsequent sale broke Italian antiquities and art laws.

Unknown, Greek, 300 For Francesco Rutelli, 100 B.C. Bronze. 59 5/8 x former culture minister, 27 9/16 x 11 inches. J. Paul the ruling was a “historic Getty Museum. occasion.” During his term as ministed, Rutelli had worked intensely to reclaim smuggled artworks and artifacts. This “marks the end of the sacking of our archaeological treasures,’’

he said.

The Getty Museum in an official statement declared they will appeal the decision.

“No Italian court has ever found any person guilty of any criminal activity in connection with the export or sale of the statue,” the statement reads. “To the contrary, Italy’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, held more than four decades ago that the possession by the original owners ‘did not constitute a crime.’”

In 2008, another Pesaro judge had ruled that the statue’s purchase came after a Rome court’s dismissal of smuggling charges for lack of evidence. Other trafficking charges have either expired under the statute of limitations or are no longer applicable because of the death of the fishermen who discovered it and the art dealers involved in its sale.

The 4th-century BC statue in dispute is attributed to the Greek sculptor Lysippos. In 1964, the fisherman sold it to Italian dealers for $5,600. In 1877, the Getty bought it for over three million dollars in 1977, and the piece has been contested ever since.

A 2008 agreement on disputed antiquities between Italy and the Getty did not include the Greek statue, though a famous statue of Aphrodite from 4BC was returned. Under that contract, Italy and the Getty agreed to bolster their cultural relations through the loaning of important art works, joint exhibitions, research and conservation projects.

The deal with the Getty was the third between Italy and major US institutions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts also agreed to return key parts of their classical collections in return for loans of equivalent value. Princeton University has since inked a similar deal for the return of eight Etruscan and Greek artefacts.

Film Commission Promoting the Bel Paese D

espite Italy’s natural beauty and diverse landscapes, many filmmakers choose other locations for their next film because most Italian regions lack the necessary resources and structure to make use of their full potential.

However, the Italian Film Commission is taking steps to promote its locations and make them more available as sets for film and television. Members of the film commissions look for filmmakers who appreciate what these spots have to offer. “Our strength comes from our landscapes, from cities filled with art to the smallest, remote villages. We’re

looking for projects that are capable of highlighting these settings,” says Stefania Ippoliti, the Projects Director of the Tuscan Film Commission.

Since its inception in 2001 in Turin, the Italian Film Commission has accomplished a great deal considering its relative newness compared to 40-year old United States Film Commission. The Turin commission has helped create a community among Italians in the film industry: “Right now in Turin, a new generation of film professionals, technicians, actors and cameramen is being born -- in the future they will be able to speak of this

time” said the president of the Turin Film Commission Steve Della Casa. Today, most Italian regions, including Tuscany, Rome and Sicily, have followed Turin’s lead by establishing their own film commissions.

Together they are responsible for sustaining over 350 productions on location in Italy, including some American movies such as Mission Impossible III (2006), Angels and Demons (2009), New Moon (2009), and When in Rome (2010).

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Notable Exhibitions of Particular Note Florence

New York

The Tribue in the Galleria degli Uffizi: Restoration and New Arrangement Through June 30, 2011 Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection Correggio to Tiepolo Through August 15, 2010 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Bronzino: Artista e Poeta September 24, 2010- January 23, 2011 Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Rome after Raphael Through May 9,2010 Palladio and his Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey April 2- August 1, 2010 Morgan Library and Museum, New York

Parma Giorgio di chirico. Natura morte evangelique I, 1926. oil on canvas.

Osaka city museum of modern art.

Il Mito di Renata Tebaldi Through October 30, 2010 Castello di Torrechiara, Parma The Golden Venetian- Carlo Crivelli Through March 28, 2010 The Brera National Art Gallery, Milan

Terracotta Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance Through May 23, 2010 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Paris

Chicago

That’s Life: Vanities from Caravaggio to Damien Hirst Through June 28, 2010 Fondation Dina Vierny—Musée Maillol, Paris

Four Followers of Caravaggio Through May 31, 2010 The Art Institute of Chicago

Milan Rome Caravaggio Through June 13, 2010 Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome La Natura Secondo de Chirico Mimmo Jodice Through July 11, 2010 Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome Carnevale Romano Through April 5, 2010 Palazzo Barschi, Rome Venice and the Century of the Biennale Through May 9, 2010 Museo Carlo Bilotti, Rome L’Eta della Conquista: Il Fascino dell’ Arte Greca a Romana Through September 5, 2010 Musei Capitolini, Rome

Ravenna The Pre-Raphaelites in Italy: from Fra Angelico to Perugino, from Rossetti to Burne-Jones Through June 6, 2010 Museo d’Arte della Città di Ravenna, Ravenna

Boston

The Collection of Motais Narbonne- French and Italian paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries March 24, 2020- June 28, 2010 Musée du Louvre, Paris

Houston Maurizio Cattelan Through August 15, 2010 The Menil Collection, Houston

Grenoble Of Flesh and Mind: Italian Drawings 1450-1770 Through May 30, 2010 Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble

London Michelangelo’s Dream Through May 16, 2010 The Courtauld Gallery, London Italian Renaissance Drawings Exhibition Through July 25, 2010 The British Museum, London Andrea del Sarto. Study for the Head of Julius Caesar, 1520-1521. Medium Red chalk. 8 7/16 x 7 1/4 inches. Collection Mr. and Mrs. David M. Tobey

18 Italy-AMerica diplomacy

Fini presents gift from italy to library of congress Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi receives Michelangelo’s La Dotta a Mano from President of Italian Chamber of Deputies Gianfranco Fini with these remarks During his February visit to the U.S., Gianfranco Fini attended a reception at the Library of Congress hosted by the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, where he presented a rare volume of Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano, as a gift to Congress. Late in the evening, Fini attended a dinner hosted by Italian Ambassador Giulio Terzi.

Today we celebrate a gift from the Italian people to the American people; the remarkable book, Michelangelo: La

as Jefferson’s library…the Guttenberg Bible…the first printing of the Declaration of Independence. It will share shelves with a collection of 112 versions of the Italian constitution, dating back to 1796.

It is appropriate that this Italian book will join a library that has a special emphasis on the history of American people and culture. That is because the history of America and the history of Italy are forever intertwined. Today, there are nearly 20 million Italian Americans who

“It is appropriate that this Italian book will join a library that has a special emphasis on the history of American people and culture.”

Nancy Pelosi Dotta Mano.

The publication of this book has stirred interest around the world. Illuminating the life and art of Michelangelo, this book is art in and of itself. It includes a scale bas-relief in marble of the Madonna della Scala and reproductions of Michelangelo drawings on handmade folios.

With only 33 copies in existence in the entire world, we are privileged that one will be housed here in the Library of Congress.

In the spirit of American and Italian democracy, this book will be accessible to anyone with a Library of Congress reader’s card.

In the Rare Book and Special Collection Division, this book will join Thom-

serve as links between our two nations.

Every wave of immigrants that have come to these shores have made America more American.

I am reminded of the contributions of Italian Americans daily in the beauty of the art that adorns the United States Capitol – it is the work of Constantino Brumidi, the Michelangelo of his time.

Fleeing Italy in 1849 - a time of great repression and unrest in Rome – Brumidi brought his enormous artistic talents and creativity to the United States.

For more than 20 years, he worked to fill the Capitol with his timeless images of the history of our democracy and the hopes of the American people.

Brumidi once said, “My one ambition and my daily prayer is that I may live long

enough to make beautiful the capitol of the one country on earth in which there is liberty.”

How proud Brumidi would be to see us here today – the democratically elected leaders of the country of his birth and the country he adopted - celebrating the friendship between our nations.

Some will note that this book comes with a guarantee for 500 years. But the friendship between the United States and Italy is guaranteed for even longer.

And that friendship will continue to flourish under the leadership of President Gianfranco Fini.

President Fini is a leader of values and ethics. He has worked on behalf of the inherent worth and dignity of all people, and for human rights and democracy around the world.”

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19

John the Baptist, 1604. Oil on canvas. 70 x 411.4 inches. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USA.

Galileo

On the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death, Italian Journal explores the life, work and legacy of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Caravaggio Assoluto

by Francesco Buranelli and Rosella Vodret, page 22

Inherent Revolution

by Claudio Strinati, page 24

The Art of Intemperence

by Laura Giacalone, page 27

Portraits and Portrayals

by John Varriano, page 26

The Double Fugitive

by Keith Sciberras, page 34

Performing the Paintings

by John Kelly, page 38

The Quoted Artist

by Mieke Bal, page 40

Ipse Dixit, page 44 A New Eye on Caravaggio

by Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, page 46

Reverberations of Realism

by Genny DiBert, page 49

21

22 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

Caravaggio Assoluto Curators of Rome’s landmark exhibit contextualize the artist

by Francesco Buranelli and Rossella Vodret There is also a certain Michelangelo da Caravaggio who is doing extraordinary things in Rome. […] But one must also take the chaff with the grain: thus he does not study his art constantly so that after two weeks of work he will sally forth for two months together with his rapier at his side and his servant-boy after him going from one tennis court to another always ready to argue or fight so that he is impossible to get along with. […]. Yet as for his painting it is very delightful and an exceptionally beautiful style one for our young artists to follow.

K. van Mander, Het Schilderboek, 1603 -1604

O

n the 18th of July 1610, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio – one of the greatest painters in the history of Italy – ended his short turbulent life at the young age of 39, at the Santa Maria Ausiliatrice Hospital of Porto Ercole, in the Southern Coast of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. About him, André Berne-Joffroy stated: “What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.”

The peculiar elements that make Caravaggio different from all the other painters of his time are in the creative process and the techniques he used. At the end of the 16th century, artists used to follow a traditional training in the art workshops, where they spent years drawing ancient sculptures – which were very numerous in Rome – or copying the works realized by great masters of the past – mainly Raffaello – so that, in the end, they were able to portray an idealized representation of Nature. On the contrary,

Caravaggio subverted this academic system completely, and chose to represent reality as it actually was, without any hierarchical order of subjects, or pre-established aesthetic criteria, and no idealization whatsoever. His first characteristic was, therefore, that of making his painting “from real life”, by using models, and drawing inspiration from what he happened to see in Rome’s alleys.

This is how his most renowned early paintings were created, such as The Boy with a Basket of Fruit, The Fortune Teller or The Cardsharps. But that’s not all. The dimension of the subjects portrayed is also “natural:” he painted life-size figures, and put no other subjects on the scene except the ones able to capture the peak of the action, whatever it was. Interestingly, the action always takes place in the foreground in order to have a stronger physical and emotional impact on the viewer. This way, the viewer actually enters the virtual space of the painting, along with the other characters, who are just like him/her, and therefore becomes integral part of the subject portrayed. To enhance the blurring of boundaries between real space and painting, in many works there is an element that seems to reach out to our physical space, as a “bridge” between these two realities: the withered vine leaves hanging from the table in the Young Sick Bacchus, the precarious placement of the Basket of Fruit at the table’s edge, and, even more clearly, the basket of fruit in the Supper at Emmaus (London), the neck of the violin in the foreground of The Musicians and of The Lute Player (St. Petersburg), the tenor recorder in the New York’s version, the dagger of The Cardsharps, and many others, to cite only the early works. This artifice reaches its full potential, along with

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The Caravaggio Moment

Supper at Emmaus, 1602. Oil on canvas. 54.7 x 76.75 inches. National Gallery, London, England.

other ones, in the sorrowful gaze of Nicodemus directed to the viewer in the Entombment of Christ at the Vatican Pinacoteca, and, later on, in the great Beheading of Saint John The Baptist in Malta, where the portrayed scene seems to be the continuation of the Oratory space: the size of the canvas perfectly coincides with the size of the rear wall, and the direction of the light in the painting is consistent with the position of the windows in the real space.

The result is that the border of the wall vanishes completely, and the dark Oratory turns into an evocative theatre, where the viewer participate in the tragic event in the exact moment of its happening, and the Beheading is portrayed with such a realism that, if you look at it in the dim light, it will be hard to believe it is fictional.

Another fundamental element is the light: not the “universal” one, with no precise direction, traditionally used by the artists, but a powerful ray coming from a particular source, which is usually located out of the painting and comes from the top left corner. With few exceptions, the scene represented is usually dark, with the beam of light shining violently on it, creating very bright reflections and dark shadows. Conceived this way, the light is more realistic than the “universal” one, and is only used to enlighten what Caravaggio wanted to point out. He was so disinterested in what was out of the spotlight that – especially in his later works – he often left the dark parts unfinished, or only roughly sketched, as if to say they don’t exist. However, paradoxically, the shadow becomes a protagonist itself, and a crucial part

of the composition, because it is from there that men, things and, above all, strong emotions, emerge.

What was Caravaggio’s painting technique? We know from the sources and diagnostic analysis carried out on his works that, apart from his early works, Caravaggio did not use to make preparatory sketches on the canvas, but only quick “incisions” made in the still-wet undercoat, as reference lines for the composition he was going to paint. From 1600 to 1606, when he fled from Rome, incisions can be found in all his works (such as the Madonna and Child with St. Anne at the Borghese Gallery in Rome), to be reduced progressively in the paintings realized in Naples, Malta and Sicily, showing that he had gained greater confidence and a more refined mastery in the composition of paintings. In the tragic years of his escape, even the palette of colors changed, with a high prevalence of pale shades of brown, and increasingly darker tones, including black (such as in the Seven Works of Mercy, in the Pio Monte della Misericordia Church in Naples). By that time, Caravaggio had completely revolutionized the traditional methods of painting. The different phases of creation were not separated any more, but realized in one go, finding a perfect pictorial unity in which preparation, incisions and overlaying of colors intertwined in a single creative act. The expressive power of Caravaggio’s art lies in this surprising synergy of structural and visual elements, which conveys the strength of Caravaggio’s “Word,” and still fascinates us all.

24 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

inherent revolution Why the artist was the first to make paintings of timeless mass appeal

by Claudio STRINATI

Caravaggio inevitably attracts us because we sense that his life and art are tightly, inextricably connected. At one

time, the explanation for this fact seemed straightforward: He lived a tragic, challenging life, withstanding many difficulties, which manifested itself in the extreme (some say grotesque) power of his art filled with violence, inescapable fate and sadness. Now, however, major studies of his work question this interpretation. In recent years, much information and thinking have emerged that lead us to see beyond the simplistic notion that the aesthetic reflects solely the experiential. Yet, the cause inspiring this examination has not changed; what has changed is only the vantage point of those who seek to explain the phenomenon.

Autobiography deeply fascinates us; it establishes the foundation of literary and philosophical traditions and determinants of our culture. Plato’s Dialogues and Dante’s Divine Comedy are essential works in Western Civilization, as are Homer’s Odyssey and Goethe’s Faust. But for centuries, autobiography manifested in all aspects of art except in painting. It is unthinkable to interpret the works of Giotto, di Massaccio or Piero delle Francesca using an autobiographical lens.

However, some visual autobiographical references seep into the works of the Renaissance masters: almost certainly with Michelangelo Buonarroti; perhaps seen

with Leonardo da Vinci and Raffaello.

But none of these artists consistently declare here “I” am.

In Caravaggio, that which 100 years before was vague, became explicit. Although there may be no proof, what appears plainly evident is that he transposed an existential, personal meaning into his figurative works. The true “revolution” of Caravaggio is here, not just in the magnificent contrast of light and dark, in the bewildering intersection of undisguised hedonism with the banal, in the juxtaposition of stark emptiness with a looming density palpitating with emotion. The “revolution” is the fact that the artist painted himself and of his experi-

rary Shakespeare also did.

The evocative, convincing parallel between Caravaggio and his works with Galileo and the Accademia dei Lincei is not commonly noted. Yet undoubtedly the profound complexity and detail of his paintings recall the responsibility of the artist, similar to that of a scientist’s.

An excellent artist is one who has a sense of responsibility for that which he creates because he ultimately respects the supreme purpose of his art: to represent, or, better, to represent us. Even though it could be said that art is universal, like the practice of democracy, it is accessible to “all” only within its own criteria. No artist in any moment in history, was

he transformed the autobiographical into the universal ence, and questioned the viewer in a way that had never been done before.

In many of his works the figures unabashedly turn themselves toward the viewer, as in Love Conquers All (Staatliche Museum, Berlin), the wonderful Bacchus (Uffizi, Florence), The Musicians (Metropolitan Museum, New York) or the Young Saint John the Baptist (Musei Capitolini, Rome). In Love Conquers All, the boy is even laughing – a rare expression in the iconographic tradition. However, when the artist places his own visage in his paintings, he is opposite the viewer and yet never meets our gaze, for example, in the scene of the Martydom of Saint Matthew, or when he screams with pain as the head of Goliath in David and Goliath (Galleria Borghese, Rome).

Perhaps the essence of our fascination for Caravaggio’s art lies in the idea that he transformed the autobiographical into the universal, as Dante and, in a completely different style, his contempo-

ever able to represent an entire population at once (an unrealistic audience in any case). On the other hand, society as a whole is not solely comprised of indifferent individuals who share nothing in common.

This thesis regarding Caravaggio is really about the contemporary concept of communication. Clearly, art may not reach each individual. Yet, in time the messages contained within certain works that transcend the social-political climate in which they were created, continue to have meaning. Caravaggio first understood that the autobiographical is the device par excellence for an uninhibited, overwhelmingly direct communication with whomever is a witness to the visual.

The aesthetic experience conceived in this way, is thus truly available to everyone. In true democracy (an idea sprung from the restless intellect that scans a chaotic world ever-vacillating from frailty to stability), art can be called the most

caravaggio

25

The Caravaggio Moment

universal, unifying standard of measure.

David with the head of Goliath, 1609-10. oil on canvas. 49.2 x 39.8 inches. Galleria Borghese.

26 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

Bacchus, c.1595. oil on canvas. 37 in x 33 inches. Uffizi, Florence.

caravaggio

27

The Caravaggio Moment

the art of intemperance The history of art, film, music and literature is made up of rebellious talents, bad boys, enfant terribles, who embody the Apollonian and Dionysian nature of art itself

By Laura GIACALONE

W

ith his riotous temperament and troubled life, Caravaggio seems to perfectly embody the myth of the rebellious genius, a quality that he shares with other great talents from the worlds of art, literature, film and music.

In modern and contemporary culture we have plenty of enfant terribles exemplifying this fascinating combination between insanity and genius. Back in 19th-century France, les poètes maudits, such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, were poets whose life and art went against their own society: their lives were often affected by the abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime and violence, while their poetry explored sacred and profane love, melancholy, corruption, and a complex imagery of senses and fragrances.

In narrative, a major example of brilliant long-suffering artist was Fëdor Dostoevskij, one of the most prominent figures in world literature, whose brooding, tortured characters, agonizing over existential themes of spiritual torment, religious awakening, and psychological confusion, were styled on his own life: besides his epileptic seizures, he also suffered from a serious gambling compulsion. Apparently, his masterpiece Crime and Punishment was written in a hurry because he was in need of an advance from his publisher, being left practically penniless after a gambling spree.

In contemporary art, the “bad boy” par excellence is perhaps Jean-Michel Basquiat, the postmodernist, neo-expressionist painter greatly influenced by the master of Cubism Pablo Picasso. Called

“The Radiant Child” by the poet and artist Rene Ricard, he died of a heroine overdose in 1988, at the age of 18. Before him, a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Jackson Pollock, combined fame and notoriety with a troubled life, struggling with alcoholism his entire life until he died in a single-car crash at the age of 44 while driving under the influence of alcohol.

The history of music has also been made by a series of revolutionary rebellious characters, from Robert Schumann to Miles Davis, up to Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, who once said: “I bought a gun and chose drugs instead.”

More than all the other arts, the film industry has drawn from the lives of these “anti-heroes” to consecrate a series of immortal legendary figures: James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Steve McQueen and Marlon Brando. “Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse,” said the protagonist of A Rsebel Without A Cause.

But where does the myth of the “cursed artist” come from? Such an inborn inclination to dissoluteness and intemperance is probably related to the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” nature of art itself, with its dichotomy of light and darkness, harmony and discord. To better understand the great “tragedy” of the artistic temperament we should go back to the ancient Greek myths. It is no coincidence, in fact, that Parnassus – the home of the Muses and therefore of poetry, music and learning – was sacred both to Apollo, the god of the Sun, lightness, music and poetry, and to Dionysus,

Top: Jean-Michel Basquiat. Grillo, 1984. Acrylic, oil, photocopy collage, oil stick, spray paint, and nails on wood. 95 15/16 x 211 1/2 x 18 inches. Below: young Sick Bacchus, c. 1593. oil on canvas 26 x 21 inches. Galleria Borghese, Rome.

the god of wine, ecstasy and intoxication.

The aesthetic usage of these mythological concepts is famously related to Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in his book The Birth of Tragedy, claimed that the summit of artistic creation is based on the fusion of opposite impulses: thinking and feeling, rational and irrational instincts. After all, what is art if not the struggle to make order out of the chaotic experience of everyone’s life?

28 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

Portrait of Fra Antionio Martelli, 1608. Oil on canvas. 46.7 x 37.6 inches. Pitti Palace, Florence Italy.

Portrait of a Courtesan, c. 1597 . Oil on canvas 26 x 21 inches. Destroyed in 1945

Portraits and portrayals

by John VARRIANO

Portraiture is perhaps the most natural challenge to the realist painter.

Alone of the genres, it combines spirit with substance and focuses directly on living individuals. It would seem particularly natural that Caravaggio be moved to paint portraits since he was instinctively drawn to the human figure and the expressive psychology of the mind. Portraiture, moreover,

was renowned among his predecessors and contemporaries in Lombardy and Rome. Painters in the north like Moroni, Lotto, and Cavagna, or Romans like Pulzone or Ottavio Leoni had fashioned highly realistic likenesses that Caravaggio could hardly have failed to notice.1 His principal patrons in Rome were enthusiastic

collectors of portraits and their palaces were full of such pictures.

Indeed, more than half of the 600 paintings in the Del Monte Collection were portraits.2 Thus it is not surprising to find that Caravaggio was fairly active as a portraitist. His early biographers attest to the fact, at least for the early years of his career. Sandrart says “he painted many portraits,” Baglione marveled that he “was paid more for [them] than other painters obtained for their history pictures,” and Bellori commented that the artist “painted three heads a day” that he sold for very little.3 In addition, a number of his portraits are documented in early collections. Six of the 15 Caravaggios listed in the 1638 Giustiniani inventory were portraits, and others are cited in 17th-century inventories, guidebooks, and the like.4 Altogether, the existance of more than two dozen portraits by Caravaggio can be inferred from such sources. More than half of these portray prominent individuals: a painter, an architect, a poet, a jurist, several gentlemen, the Grandmaster of the Knights of Malta, a monsignor, two cardinals and a pope. The others are likenesses of people of lesser social or professional achievement: the architect’s wife, an innkeeper, two prostitutes and several figures whose station in life was unspecified.

caravaggio

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The Caravaggio Moment

Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt, 1608. Oil on canvas. 76.8 x 52.3 cm. Louvre, Paris, France

Only three of the documented works can still be traced, and two of these – the portraits of the Grandmaster Wignacourt in the Louvre, and the Knight now identified as Antonio Martelli in Palazzo Pitti – are from his late years in Malta. The third portrait is an early work of a young woman identified in Vincenzo Giustiniani’s inventory as the “Courtesan called Phyllis”.5 In addition to these three documented works, some half a dozen other portraits have at various times been attributed to the artist. Among these are pictures like Monsignor Maffeo Barberini for which both the documentation and the visual evidence is weak, or the portrait of Cardinal Cesare Baronio for which there is no documentation but the visual evidence is strong.6 Intriguing though some of these proposals have been, no other portrait has won universal acceptance as an authentic Caravaggio.

Compared with other subjects painted by the artist, the portraits have had a disproportionately low rate of survival. Fewer than ten percent of the documented works can be traced, a remarkable fact given the importance of some of the sitters and the provenance of the pictures themselves. Where, for example, are the portraits of Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani from the Giustiniani Collection or Melchiore and Virgilio Crescenzi from the Crescenzi Collection?7 The simplest explanation would be that some of the early at-

Maffeo Barberini, C. 1598. Oil on canvas. 49 x 39 cm Private Collection, Florence, Italy.

tributions to Caravaggio were incorrect. Perhaps the uncertainty of knowing what a Caravaggio portrait should look like was as perplexing in the seventeenth century as it is today. Contemporary critics perhaps hinted why this was so when one noted wryly that Caravaggio had difficultly in “making a likeness” in his portraits and another found them “hard and dry.”8 Such weaknesses could explain the ongoing difficulty in identifying his activity in this genre, particularly when contemporary Roman portraitists like Scipione Pulzone and Ottavio Leoni were painting, in the words of the first critic, “ritratti somigliantissimi,” portraits of great resemblance.

Years ago, Federico Zeri defined the achievement of Pulzone as a refined synthesis of the best of European sixteenth-century portraiture. This consisted of a precisely articulated physiognomy, a stately pose and setting, and an expression that captures “the qualities of a humanity that is alive and always changing.”9 An example of Pulzone’s mastery of the medium is his 1586 portrait of Cardinal Michele Bonelli now in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge. Although formally conventional, the sitter makes eye contact with the viewer and subtly conveys a sense of his shrewd and pensive personality. Hermann Voss was the first to point out Caravaggio’s dependence on this idiom, comparing the Courtesan Phyllis with Pulzone’s portraits of female patrons.10 Significantly

30 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment Ottavio Leoni.

Caravaggio, c. 1621. drawing on paper.

Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence.

perhaps, four of Pulzone’s portraits were in the collection of Cardinal del Monte where Caravaggio would have had easy access to them.11 No less proximate if slightly more problematic are the portraits of Ottavio Leoni.12 Leoni devoted his life to the genre and was recognized in his time as the leading portraitist in Rome. In 1614 he was elected Principe of the Accademia di S. Luca, a sign of the esteem with which he was held by fellow artists.

His patrons spanned a wide cross-section of society from high churchmen to “virtuous individuals of every profession,” while his chalk portrait of Caravaggio himself is universally recognized as the truest likeness of the artist to survive.

Baglione praised Leoni as eccellentissimo and noted his skill in making portraits alla macchia, “so called because they are done after having seen the subject only once and rapidly.”13 There is no shortage of portrait drawings in which Leoni practiced the method.14 Like Caravaggio, he frequented the De1 Monte circle and was possibly the unnamed portraitist Del Monte praised very highly in a letter of 1599.15 Leoni’s portrait drawings--of which more than 700 can be accounted for--are relatively easy to identify, especially those made after 1615 when he began to date and number them in sequence. But his painted portraits, whose existance is recorded in several early sources, have proven to be more elusive. His signed canvas of Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Ajaccio is one of only four paintings to which his name remains securely attached.16 Baglione described Leoni’s painted portraits as quanto il vivo (so alive) and similissimo (very accurate), but the naturalism of the Ajaccio picture is unremarkable, particularly if compared with Pulzone’s Cardinal Bonelli, painted some three de-

cades earlier. Like Leoni’s other painted portraits, Scipione appears slightly stiff and psychically inactive, hardly the same ebullient figure captured by Bernini some years Pulzone’s later.17 likeness of Bonelli, by contrast, appears graceful and engaging. The integration of the inner and outer self in Leoni’s portrait is weak, the strict frontality of the cardinal’s face suggesting a disembodied head attached to a pre-existing torso.

The trajectory of Caravaggio’s own career as a portraitist intersects with pictures like these and one can only assume that his works in this genre were conceptually and stylistically unremarkable, even when seen in their own day.

Most of the pictures cited in early sources are no longer tracable, and those that are appear indistinguishable from the work of lesser talents. It is hard to imagine documented paintings by Caravaggio of any other subject disappearing at such a prodigious rate.

Even the three portraits that are universally ascribed to Caravaggio – the Courtesan Phyllis, Alof de Wignacourt and Antonio Martelli (47,68,69) – disclose few signs of genius.

Although the original canvas has been destroyed and Phyllis is known only from a photograph, the image does little to belie Sandrart’s statement that Caravaggio’s portraits were “hard and dry.” The half-length format and frontal pose imply

close spatial and physical proximity but she makes no eye contact with the painter/viewer nor is there any suggestion of psychological, much less sexual, intimacy.

The portrait of Martelli, painted towards the end of his life, is more successful.

Martelli was a member of a prominent Florentine family who resided on the island in 1607-08 and played a prominent role on the governing council of the Maltese Order. Martelli was reportedly a shrewd and politically astute individual who at the time was seventy four and had evidently lost some of his vigor.

John Gash has described the picture with great sensitivity, finding shrewdness and cunning...[in the] infinitely suggestive portrayal. Indeed it is a striking aspect of the painting that it so strongly scrutinizes and evoke the minutiae of individual appearance while simultaneously projecting a symbolic persona. The transformation towards the latter is achieved by the figure’s far-away, introspective gaze, caught between illumination and shadow, the dominating presence of the

caravaggio

31

The Caravaggio Moment Galileo-Gazing Compared with other subjects painted by the artist, the portraits have had a disproportionately low rate of survival.

Fewer than ten percent of the documented works can be traced, a remarkable fact given the importance of some of the sitters and the provenance of the pictures themselves. light-catching cross on his tunic, and the way he emphatically holds both rosary beads and sword--emblematic of the poles of prayer and warfare between which an Hospitaller’s life oscillated...

But when one focuses on the face it is pure existence that asserts itself--with all the complex and contradictory residues of a life lived and a personality at once forged and threatened.18 It takes a sensitive eye to grasp the subtlety of the Martelli portrait. Structurally the picture is not particularly novel and expressively it is quite reserved. The quality of the work lies in the nuances of its psychology, not in its dramatic originality. In truth, Caravaggio still has not advanced the art of portraiture beyond the reach of Titian or Tintoretto. And only now, near the end of his career, did he succeed in endowing a portrait with the humanity that was the hallmark of his best narrative paitings.

Endnotes 1 See, for example, the portraits included among the “Precursors” and “Contemporaries” in the exhibition catalogue The Age of Caravaggio, New York, 1985, pp. 49-87, 80-195, and more recently, Il ritratto in Lombardia da Moroni a Ceruti, ed. by A. Morandotti, Varese, 2002, p. 222.

2 C. Gilbert, Caravaggio and his Two Cardinals, University Park, 1995, p. 114 underscores the point that of the thirteen thematic categories in Del Monte’s collection, “portraits overwhelmingly suggest that there are better grounds for determining Del Monte’s ways of relating to art than have been used.” Del Monte’s collection was first published by C. L. Frommel, “Caravaggios Frühwerk und der Kardinal Francesco Maria del Monte,” Storia dell’Arte 9-10 (1971) pp. 5-52.

3 Hibbard, Caravaggio, p. 356 and 376. Bellori’s comment was made in a marginal note in his copy of Baglione but his own biography of Caravaggio is particularly helpful for in it he names a few of the sitters.

4 See J. T. Spike, Caravaggio, New York and London, 2001, CD-ROM “Catalogue of Paintings” for the most recent and complete survey of the documented, lost, and attributed portraits. Searching this catalogue alphabetically allows one to collect all the portrait entries together. The Giustiniani inventory was first published by L. Salerno, “The Picture Gallery of Vincenzo Giustiniani,” The Burlington Magazine CII (1960) pp. 21-27, 93-104, 135-48.

5 This picture, one of two courtesans listed in Giustiniani’s inventory (the other identified simply as “A Famous Courtesan”) was tragically lost in World War II. 6 Spike, Caravaggio, cats. 36 and 31.

7 Spike, Caravaggio, cats. L. 90 and L.81 and L. 111.

8 The first comment was from Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni sulla pittura, reprinted, Rome, 1956, vol. 1, p. 136; the second from Joachim von Sandrart’s Academie, translated by Hibbard, Caravaggio, p. 376.

9 F. Zeri, Pittura e controriforma, first ed. 1957, 3rd edition, Vicenza, 1997, pp. 12-13.

10 H. Voss, “Caravaggios Frühzeit zur Kritik seiner Werke und seiner Entwicklung,” Jahrbuch der Preussichen Kunstsammlungen XLIV (1923) p. 81; cited by A. Zuccari in The Age of Caravaggio, p. 172.

11 One of the four was a portrait of Del Monte himself (Frommel, “Caravaggios Frühwerk,” p. 32).

12 See H-W. Kruft, “Ottavio Leoni als Porträtmaler,” Storia dell’arte 71-73 (1991) pp. 183-90; C. R. Robbin, “Ottavio Leoni and Early Baroque Portraiture in Rome,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1991; idem, “Ottavio Leoni as a painter,” Storia dell’arte 99 (2000) pp.

84-93; F. Solinas, “La Signora degli Scorpioni. Un inedito di Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630) e qualche ritratto romano del tempo di Caravaggio,” in Caravaggio nel IV centenario della Cappella Contarelli, Atti del Convegno, ed. by Caterina Volpi, Rome, 2002, pp. 243-65; and J. T. Spike, “Ottavio Leoni’s Portraits ‘alla machia,’” in Baroque Portraiture in Italy: Works from North American Collections, pp. 12-19.

13 G. Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti, reprinted 1975, p. 144.

14 According to C. R. Robbin, “Scipione Borghese’s acquisition of paintings and drawings by Ottavio Leoni,” The Burlington Magazine CXXXVIII (1996) p. 457, Leoni is known to have made at least 708 drawings.

15 The letter Del Monte wrote to Ferdinando de’Medici describes a painter “che è un giovane mio allievo quale lavora meglio, più diligente, et più somigliante senza comparatione di quello poveretto di Scipione [Pulzone].” Transcribed in Z. Wazbinski, Il cardinale Francesco Maria del Monte 1549-1626, Florence, 1994, vol. II, p. 518.

16 H-W. Kruft, “Ottavio Leoni,” fig. 5.

17 Bernini’s two busts of Cardinal Scipione Borghese are still in the Villa Borghese, Rome; See R. Wittkower, Gianlorenzo Bernini, London, 1966, cat. 31.

18 Gash, “The identity,” p. 159.

32 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

Crowning with Thorns, 1607.

Oil on canvas. 127 x 65.2 inches.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

Giacamo Puccini. Courtesy Puccini Foundation.

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The Caravaggio Moment

Giacamo Puccini. Courtesy Puccini Foundation.

34 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

the Double fugitive The artist, simultaneously revered and exiled throughout his life

by Keith Sciberras

W

hen on 6 October 1608, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, a Knight of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes, and Malta, escaped from detention in Fort St Angelo on the small Mediterranean Island of Malta, he became Malta’s most wanted fugitive. Ironically, his arrival on the island some 14 months earlier was also that of a disgraced fugitive, of a person who was trying to rebuild his career and social standing through an impressive network of protectors.1 He had escaped from Papal Rome after murdering Ranuccio Tomassoni and after finding refuge in the Colonna estates and in the city of Naples, he sought to try his fortune with the Knights of Malta. In moving out of Rome, surprisingly deciding to go South rather than North, he also shaped the character of South Italian early seicento painting. The artist’s search for new patrons and protectors, his patrons’ desire to have him in their service and the misdemeanors of his lifestyle will impinge on the character and spread of Central Mediterranean Caravaggism.

The story of Late Caravaggio is that of a fugitive who produced some of the most powerful pictures of the entire century. He was constantly on the move and, in many instances, looking over his shoulder. It was precisely this movement from “place to place,” conditioned by the fast-pace lifestyle of Caravaggio, that also brought about the fast spread of Caravaggism in the central Mediterranean, and specifically south of mainland

Italy, on the islands of Sicily and Malta.

After Malta, the man was a ‘double fugitive.’ Bellori brilliantly captured the artist’s complicated context in Sicily and summed it up as follows: Ma la disgrazia di Michele non l’abbandonova e il timore lo schiacava da luogo in luogo.2 The story of Late Caravaggio is also that of powerful patrons who sought to protect him despite knowing very well that he was a fugitive and despite being very well aware that such protection could lead to diplomatic consequences.

This is what happened respectively in Naples, Malta, Syracuse, Messina, Palermo and, once again, Naples. Wherever he went, the artist was honoured and protected. Patrons were more interested in securing his brush rather than handing him over to justice.

Caravaggio’s transfer to Malta and, thereafter, to Sicily is one of the most brilliant chapters in the history of art of both islands. As a fugitive from Papal Rome, the artist first arrived in Malta in mid-July 1607. The powerful current of Realism that had taken Rome and Naples by storm and surprise was now to surprise Malta. Fifteen months later, in a dramatic shift of events that culminated early in October 1608, the artist fled the island as a disgraced fugitive. The Maltese period was a milestone period in the exciting context of Caravaggio’s late years. It was a period when Caravaggio, a fugitive yearning to return to Rome, produced outstanding masterpieces that ironically only a handful of the great artists of the younger generation saw.

Away from the swarming verve and crowded commotion of a sprawling Naples, the compact and fortified city of Valletta, so different and so small in comparison, became a haven for the artist. He was far away from his artistic and personal rivals, and had thus every

opportunity to peacefully reflect on his art and seek important political alliances that would help him achieve his ultimate objective of setting foot once more in the Papal capital.

Within the knights’ palaces in Valletta, Caravaggio’s former patrons in Rome were well known and news that Caravaggio was in the city would have spread fast.

Caravaggio’s Italian admirers would have known that he was in Malta and would have been thrilled by the audacity of his unpredictable move. In the austere but cosmopolitan context of Valletta, Caravaggio probably believed that powerful patrons and good fortune would eventually bring him politically closer to the Papal court. Yet, as much as he had this search for greater protection and security in his mind, he probably also dreamt of chivalry and knighthood and of wearing the black habit with the white eightpointed cross over his shoulder; this was the image of him that Giovanni Pietro Bellori would present in his famous portrait print for Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni published in Rome in 1672.

The artist’s Maltese period is largely concerned with his knighthood, that is, his ambition for it, his arming, and disrobing. From the onset, the artist should have known, however, that the statutes of the Order of St John prohibited the reception of those guilty of murder and certainly he would have realized that this was a great obstacle that needed to be overcome. His virtuosity was his only asset; he knew well enough that it was a source of attraction and that he could benefit by astonishing his patrons with the realist and naturalist power of his art.

This was the onset of Caravaggism in the South.3 In Valletta, Caravaggio attracted around him prominent personalities

The Caravaggio Moment

and his circle of protectors grew to include new patrons. Amongst his patrons was the Grand Master himself, Alof de Wignacourt, for whom he painted a fulllength portrait accompanied by a page (Louvre, Paris). The others included Fra Francesco dell’Antella and Fra Ippolito Malaspina, for whom he painted the easel pictures of the Sleeping Cupid (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) and St Jerome (St John’s Museum, Valletta). A further patron – probably rather than securely – was Fra Antonio Martelli, who is likely to be the person painted in the Portrait of a Knight (Palazzo Pitti, Florence). For the Lorraines he executed, probably in Malta in 1608, the altar painting of the Annunciation of the Virgin (Musée des Beaux Arts, Nancy).

Soon the knights of Malta recognized the benefits that they could reap from Caravaggio’s presence and thus offered him a prize that was hard to refuse. This was the prize of knighthood, a bold move which secured an even more intimate connection between artist and patron.

The reception ceremony at which Caravaggio was invested with the habit of a

Top: Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 1608.

Oil on canvas. 24 x 204.75 inches. St. John’s CoCathedral, valetta, Malta Left: Burial of Saint Lucy, 1608. Oil on canvas. 160.6 x 118 cm.

Bellomo Palace Museum, Syracuse, Italy.

knight of magistral obedience was held in St John’s conventual church (now co-cathedral) in Valletta on July 14, 1608.

On that day, the city crowned the most famous artist in the western world and embraced the new Naturalist style. Admiration for Caravaggio’s work was deliberately spelled out at the reception ceremony, as also were the expectations that this Naturalist style was to be a vehicle for the glorification of the

36 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment Barely four weeks after his elevation to knighthood, the artist was involved in a serious brawl

Saint Jerome Writing. 1607. Oil on canvas. 46 x 62 inches.

St. John’s Cathedral, Valletta Malta

knights of Malta. “We wish to gratify the desire of this excellent painter, so that our Island Malta, and our Order may at last glory in this adopted disciple and citizen” (extract from the document of Caravaggio’s investiture).4 Caravaggio became the Knight’s official artist. Young artists were expected to follow his style.

Given the amount of time that Caravaggio spent on the island (July 1607 - October 1608), the corpus of pictures dating from Malta is undeniably small, but they are milestone pictures which perfectly sum up his Maltese temperament. The vastness of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, spread out on an enormous canvas in the Oratory of S. Giovanni Decollato, was a challenge that Caravaggio probably set out himself. It was a scale that was more appropriate to mural painting, a scale that he had never ever previously attempted. He applied his finishing touches to it as a knight of Malta and thus proudly signed his name as Fra Michael Angelo, painted in the blood oozing from St John’s head. This was the most impressive moment of Caravaggio in Malta, a picture made as an expression of virtue.

Barely four weeks after his elevation to knighthood, the artist was involved in a serious brawl in Valletta during which

a senior knight was badly injured.5 This biographical episode was, once more, to have a decisive impact on the eventual spread of Caravaggism. The sudden drama of the brawl in Valletta in August 1608, subsequent detention in September, and his break-out in early October, meant that Caravaggio’s Maltese period was over. He was apprehended and detained in Fort St Angelo, an imposing old fort situated on the other side of the Grand Harbour. Caravaggio’s break-out from this fort, incredible as it still seems, took place in early October. Once again, he was on the run. After Malta, disgraced and still a fugitive but not at all secretive about his whereabouts, the restless Caravaggio was in Sicily moving between Syracuse, Messina and Palermo, spreading out – perhaps unintentionally – the power of his style. Syracuse, Messina and Palermo were to become centres of Regional Caravaggism.

That there was an ‘arrangement’ to help Caravaggio escape is clear but it is difficult to ascertain who helped him. In an island of informers and of rewards for information, it is significant that nothing came of the investigations, except that he used a rope. Escaping from the Convent was, as already noted, a dishonourable deed, and a dangerous one too.

Moreover, everyone in Malta knew that,

in such circumstances, even the fugitive’s accomplices risked a great deal. If who helped Caravaggio were knights, they risked the privatio habitus. If secular – as I believe - they were even in greater trouble, and liable for punishment. From other documented instances, it clearly emerges that the Grand Master wanted fugitives back in Malta.6 This would have been the situation which faced Caravaggio after his escape, and Bellori himself records that Caravaggio feared that the knights were after him. Caravaggio was well aware of how Wignacourt treated those who contravened the Statutes. Moreover, throughout his first weeks in Sicily, the galleys of the Order were sailing off the harbours of that island, in both Siracuse and Messina.

In Sicily, the members of the Senate of Syracuse probably could not even believe their luck and thus moved immediately in order to protect him. One of the most famous and certainly the most talked about artist of their time was in predicament and in their city seeking protection.

At this stage, the Senate’s options were simple. They could either apprehend the fugitive criminal and duly send him back to neighbouring Malta, as it was their obligation to do so, or seek to secure his services for the city. Their choice was the latter. They made no secret about it and stretched one of their largest canvases for Caravaggio to execute an altar painting of none other than St Lucy, the patron saint of the city. So powerful, indeed, was the allure to Caravaggio’s art.

The Knights’ Receivers in Sicily should have certainly been well informed about Caravaggio’s escape, but it is still not clear why they did not manage to move “with secrecy” in order to apprehend him, as they had done in other instances. Perhaps this was because Cara-

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The Caravaggio Moment

vaggio managed to insert himself into and enjoy immediate protection. It is obvious that Caravaggio had moved well and that, for the Order, his apprehension could have become an embarrassing affair and, in such circumstances, it seems that it would have been difficult for the Order to expect official help from the Sicilian cities.

Sleeping Cupid, 1608. Oil on canvas. 28 x 42.5 inches. Pitti Palace, Florence Italy

In painting the dramatic Burial of St Lucy, the Beheading of St John the Baptist was still fresh in his mind and the same personages, painted from memory, returned. The jailer was now the man holding a handkerchief next to his face, whilst the old lady now knelt in grief with her hands on her cheek.

The remaining months of Caravaggio’s career were, geographically and politically, marked by his moves towards the much wanted return to Rome, a return which could only be made possible if his protectors managed to pledged in his favour with Pope Paul V. His story with the Knights of Malta was over by December 1608 when they unceremoniously stripped him of his habit and thus deprived him of his knighthood in abstentia. The artist who only six months earlier was heralded by the knights as their new Apelles, and whose signature as Knight of Malta on the Beheading of St John had barely dried, was rejected and cast away, “just like one casts away a rotten and fetid limb.”7

Endnotes 1 For Caravaggio in Malta see, amongst others, J. Azzopardi, Caravaggio’s admission into the Order: Papal Dispensation for the Crime of Murder, in Caravaggio in Malta, ed. P. Farrugia Randon, Malta, 1989; S. Macioce, Caravaggio a Malta e i suoi referenti: notizie d’archivio, in ‘Storia dell’arte’, LXXXI, 1994, p. 207; K. Sciberras, Riflessioni su Malta al tempo di Caravaggio, in ‘Paragone’, Anno LII N.620 Terza Serie 44, 2002; K. Sciberras: ‘Frater Michael Angelus in tumultu: the cause of Caravaggio’s imprisonment in Malta’, in The Burlington Magazine 144, 2002; K. Sciberras, D.M. Stone, “Caravaggio in black and white: art, knighthood, and the Order of Malta (1607–1608),” in Caravaggio, The Final Years, ed. N. Spinosa, exh. cat. (London: The National Gallery; shown earlier at Naples, Museo di Capodimonte), Naples, 2005; K. Sciberras, D. Stone, Caravaggio: Art, Knighthood and Malta, Midsea Books Ltd, Malta, 2006.

2 G. P. Bellori, Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti, ed. E. Borea. Turin, 1976 (orig. Rome, 1672). See H. Hibbard, Caravaggio, New York, 1983, p. 370.

3 For Caravaggism in Malta see eds C. de Giorgio, K. Sciberras, Caravaggio and Paintings of Realism in Malta, Malta, 2007.

4 For the documents see J. Azzopardi, “Documentary Sources on Caravaggio’s Stay in Malta,” in Farrugia Randon 1989, pp. 32–33.

5 The documents were first published in K. Sciberras: ‘Frater Michael Angelus in tumultu: the cause of Caravaggio’s imprisonment in Malta’, in The Burlington Magazine 144, 2002 6 See, for example, K. Sciberras, Riflessioni su Malta al tempo di Caravaggio, in ‘Paragone’, Anno LII N.620 Terza Serie 44, 2002.

7 See J. Azzopardi, “Documentary Sources on Caravaggio’s Stay in Malta,” in Farrugia Randon 1989, pp. 38–39. See also E. Sammut, “The Trial of Caravaggio,” in The Church of St. John in Valletta 1578–1978, ed. J. Azzopardi, exh. cat., Malta, 1978, pp. 21-27.

38 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

performing the paintings A contemporary artist inhabits the Baroque realist’s paintings in a work entitled “Cara Viaggio”

by John KELLY

I enter the room for model pose three I access the wound, and paint what I see…

I single source light before I begin To draw on the life, to shadow the skin…

I aim to seduce I choose to offend I live to give form And I long to lose control.

From The Escape Artist*

M

y performance work evolved out of a background in dance and visual art, and has remained essentially ephemeral. I’ve retained a long-standing desire to merge these two disciplines into a tangible synthesis. This impulse resulted in a studio practice I recently implemented while a Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Since the early 1980’s I have incorporated projections of film and video into my live performance works as a way to provide narrative option, dramatic emphasis, and textural variety. I have also maintained a visual art practice, which is comprised of self-portraits: drawings paintings and montages of video stills culled from existing videotape documentation of the live performances. While these two disciplines have rarely intersected, they do share a rigorous discipline of both inward and outward self-scrutiny that occurs through their ongoing relationships to: the mirror, an audience, the

lens of a camera, the surface of canvas or paper. Creating within these formats has fostered both a certain sense of the self; manifesting my curiosity of the dramatic life of specific characters has allowed me to essentially become other selves.

While searching for an actual merging of my performance and visual art practices, I decided that video and photographic imagery would be a quite reasonable choice; a camera set up on a tripod camera could function as more as surrogate audience than documenter, and more as rectangular destination than audience.

In my studio at the Academy I embarked on this series of video vignettes from which I would also cull photographic stills; as subject matter I chose a man appropriate to Rome: Caravaggio. I was no stranger to making performance works about the lives of artists; one of my benchmark pieces remains my meditation on the Viennese Expressionist artist Egon Schiele, Pass The Blutwurst, Bitte.

In this piece I dramatized both his life and his work, concocting various ways of theatrically replicating the process of painting and drawing onstage, within a dramatic tracing of his short and turbulent life.

Ripe dramatic fodder as source is a reality both Schiele and Caravaggio inhabit, and my habit has been to dive into the body of such creative souls. But I found myself feeling thwarted as to how, and even why, to dramatize Caravaggio’s life in a performance work. He appears simultaneously quite accessible (through

his paintings) and enigmatically elusive (what little is known of the man). So very little, aside from some obvious and bloated facts: brilliant revolutionary, sexual outsider, impulsive brawler, hunted murderer and haunted man on the run, all leading up to a hyper-dramatic coda and a tragic early demise. Especially in a culture addicted to tantalizing sound bites and scandal, gossip and grovel, these crumbs of info inform this artist’s work too readily and truncate the capacity to fathom it objectively; they muddy his profound shadows with beguiling gradations of Bad Boy menace, irrationality, urgency and desperation.

Managing the blur between lore and fact may be useful as marketing ploy by exhibitor, easy entrée for a novice viewer, or lucky dramatic fodder for a performance maker like me, but they also carry with them the navigational hurdle of obviousness. Their transience compelled me to transcend such limited clues, and feast instead on what actually remains: his paintings. I would dramatize his paintings through video and photography.

Performing Paint I usually work from the perspective of character and search for what is ‘telling:’ I aim to identify what they are doing, and

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The Caravaggio Moment

what they want; I finally decide exactly who they are. I have generally eschewed speech, and focus more on dramatic movement, regarding telling gestures as both visual and dramatic benchmark, loaded with information.

My goal in Rome was to kinetically, visually and dramatically inhabit some of the characters that populate Caravaggio’s paintings, while producing a tangible body of work. A camera on a tripod became my silent partner in these intimate studio improvisations, during which I would delineate the moments leading up to, and/or following the particular frozen moments in time that occur in his paintings. In some cases I aimed for a more historically and visually accurate ‘cover’ (Narcissus; David and Goliath; Magdalen In Ecstasy); other times I altered the period but retain the pallet (Penitent Magdalen; Matthew and The Angel); change gender (Madonna di Loreto; Penitent Magdalen); change props and paraphernalia to the contemporary (Bacchus; St. Jerome); and in still other cases I allowed myself the freedom to instead focus on an essential synthesis of an identifiable general aspect of a series of his paintings (Fruit Boy 1 & 2).

What permeated all these choices was my imperative to maintain a rigor of recognizable kinetic body language, color, value, and compositional, insuring that some clear sense of recognition on the part of the viewer would occur.

The Sessions I began by distilling Caravaggio’s work into its essential elements; I generally focused on my figure as lone protagonist, even if isolated from a group painting (Calling of Matthew; Beheading of John The Baptist). I trusted my capacity to articulate their essential climactic physicality, guided by Caravaggio’s facility to sweep

John Kelly, Cara Viaggio. Clockwise from opposite page: penitent magdalene, matthew and the angel, Narcissus, St. Jerome and beheading of St John the Baptist.

the viewer into the action and immediacy of the heightened moment.

But I was also interested in articulating the unseen history of these figures: what led up to, and occurred after their particular skirmish with fate? The timebased nature of video allowed me to imagine these buttressing moments as well; my improvisational skills provided me with the freedom to jump into the skin of these figures and breathe their kinetic reality.

Caravaggio painted directly from nature, but for reasons other than the reliable passing of daylight he had little time to doubt his decisions, as troubles dependably stalked him like a follow spot.

Maybe his need to grasp the love he clearly felt for those confluences of fleeting conditions added to the immediacy of his sessions. For me this was the key: the model (me) might get tired, but I could control that. The light, being artificial,

could also be managed. But instead of painting, I was pushing the ‘on’ button or the remote controlling the click of a camera. My equivalent to Caravaggio’s momentous skirmish with changeable light, grousing and fatigued models, or systemic private alarm, would be the harnessing of my inner focus as I entered the aperture frame, the galvanizing of my skill and nerve to replicate—within my conditions--the mood, body language and authenticity of his paintings, and through this experience, to arrive at a synthesis.

His compassionate, objective, and urgent depictions of reality became a calling for me to utilize what was appropriate and available, within my experience. *This line from Cara Viaggio, an original song that is part of a longer performance work called The Escape Artist, a musing on Caravaggio’s work, his process, and life, set in a film dubbing session.

40 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

the quoted artist Contemporary fascination with Caravaggio is, in itself, Baroque

by Mieke Bal a concept of representation, and an aesthetic, all three of which are anchored in the inseparability of mind and body, form and matter, line and colour, image and discourse. Indeed, no baroque oeuvre makes a clearer case for the role of both precursor (or inventor) and product (or result) of this oscillation than that of Caravaggio.

Why Quotation Matters – and How

L

ike any form of representation, art is inevitably engaged with what came before it, and that engagement is an active reworking. It specifies what and how our gaze sees. Hence, the work performed by later images obliterates the older images as they were before that intervention and creates new versions of old images instead. This process is exemplified by an engagement of contemporary culture with the past that has important implications for the ways we conceive of both history and culture in the present.

I would like to put forward the idea that the current interest in the Baroque – and specifically, Caravaggio – acts out what is itself a baroque vision, a vision that can be characterized as a vacillation between the subject and object of that vision and which changes the status of both.

Caravaggio’s paintings put forward a vision that integrates an epistemological view,

The concept of quotation serves to understand this contemporiness of Caravaggio. Quotation is not a unified practice with unified goals. Instead, this practice also redefines and complicates the notion of quotation itself.

“Quotation” stands at the intersection of iconography and intertextuality.

The term intertextuality was introduced by the Soviet philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin. It refers to the readymade quality of – in his case, linguistic – signs, which a writer or image-maker finds available in the earlier works that a culture has produced. Iconography seems to be the examination of precisely this reuse of earlier forms, patterns and figures.

Hence, this dual concept of iconography and/as intertextuality might be a good place to begin integrating visual and linguistic traditions of interpretation.

Three features, all of which are crucial, characterize iconography and intertextuality, even if in art-historical practice and literary source studies the consequences and possibilities offered by these features are not always followed through. In the first place, iconographic

analyses and literary source studies tend to see the historical precedent as the source which more or less dictated to the later artist what forms could be used.

By adopting forms from the work of an earlier artist, the later artist proves to be under the spell of his predecessor’s influence; he implicitly or explicitly declares his allegiance and debt to him. But we can reverse the passivity implied in that perspective, and considering the work of the later artist as an active intervention in the material handed down to him or her.

A second difference between the theory of intertextuality and the practice of source studies and iconography is the place of meaning. Iconographic analysis frequently avoids interpreting the meaning of the borrowed motifs in their new contexts. This is understandable; to borrow a motif is not a priori also to borrow a meaning. In contrast, the concept of intertextuality as deployed more recently implies precisely that: the sign borrowed, because it is a sign, inevitably comes with a meaning. Not that the later artist necessarily endorses that meaning, but he or she will have to deal with it: to reject or reverse it, ironize it, or simply, often unawares, insert it into the new text.

In contrast, the undecidability of the visual is understood to be paradigmatic of the production of meaning in general.

Instead of classifying and closing meaning as if to solve an enigma, this study of what Freud would call Nachträglichkeit will attempt to trace the process of meaning production over time (in both directions: present/past and past/present) as an open, dynamic process, rather than map the results of that process. Instead of establishing a one-to-one relationship between sign or motif and meaning, I emphasize the active participation of visual images in cultural dialogue, the dis-

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The Caravaggio Moment

The concept of quotation serves to understand this contemporaneity of Caravaggio. cussion of ideas. It is in this sense that I claim art “thinks.”

A third difference between theory and practice resides in the textual character of intertextual allusion. Iconography tends to refer visual motifs back to written texts, such as the classical texts of mythology. I would like to try to take the textual nature of precedents seriously as a visual textuality. By recycling forms taken from earlier works, an artist takes along the text from which the borrowed element has broken away, while at the same time constructing a new text with the debris.

The new image-as-”text”--say, a mythography--is “contaminated” by the discourse of the precedent, and thereby fractured so to speak, ready to fall apart again at any time. The fragility of the objectifying, distancing device of mythography is displayed by this taint of “first-person” subjectivity.

Thus, this “textualizing” iconography will consider visual principles of form – such as chiaroscuro, colour, folds, surface texture, and different conceptions of perspective – as positions that entertain interdiscursive relations with other works.

In this sense, Caravaggio is re-envisioned not only in contemporary figurative but also abstract art.

“Quotation,” then, can be seen in a number of distinct ways, each of which illuminate – through their theoretical consequences – one aspect of the art of the present and the art of the past. First, according to classical narrative theory, direct discourse, or the “literal” quotation of the words of characters, is a form that reinforces mimesis. As fragments of “real speech,” they authenticate the fiction.

In narrative, the quotation of character

speech is embedded in the primary discourse of the narrator. In visual art, such embedding structures are less conspicuous and rarely studied, despite the frequent use of the term “quotation.” Such literal quotation is at stake, for example, in works by New York artists Dotty Attie and Ken Aptekar as they interact with Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps, The FortuneTeller, and Judith Beheading Holophernes.

Second, these fragments of reality are the product of a manipulation. Rather than serving reality, they serve a reality effect (Barthes), which is in fact the opposite – a fiction of realism. Thus they function like shifters, allowing the presence of multiple realities within a single image. This conception of quotation is perhaps most emphatically at stake in the way the most deceptively illusionistic works, such as Caravaggio’s Head of Medusa, resurface in Belgian sculptor Ann Véronica Janssens’s Le corps noir or Ana Mendieta’s photographs of installations.

Third, in Bakhtinian dialogism, quotations stand for the utter fragmentation of language itself. They point in the directions from which the words have come, thus thickening, rather than undermining, the work of mimesis. This conception of quotation turns the precise quotation of utterances into the borrowing of

discurs i v e habits. And this interdiscursivity accounts for pluralized meanings – typically, ambiguities – and stipulates that meaning cannot be reduced to the artist’s intention. Examples of this are most challenging when the artist is not “quoting” Caravaggio in any specific, direct sense, as is the case in Amalia Mesa-Bains’s installations or Carrie Mae Weems’s photographs.

Finally, deconstructionism paradoxically harks back to what this same view might repress when it presents the polyphony of discursive mixtures a little too jubilantly. Stipulating the impossibility of reaching the alleged, underlying earlier speech, this view emphasizes what the quoting subject does to its object. Whereas for Bakhtin the word never forgets where it has been before it was quoted, for Derrida it never returns there without the burden of the excursion through the

OPposite: Medusa, C. 1597. Oil on canvas over convex poplar wood shield. 23.6 x 22.6 cm. Uffizi, Florence Italy.

This page: Ann Véronica Janssens. Le Corps Noir, 1994-2000. plexiglass. 60 cm x 28 cm.

42 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

quotation. This conception underlies the relationship between Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist and of abstract paintings

by David Reed.

The first two meanings of the concept of quotation engage the relation between image and reality beyond the question of reference. Their orientation leads from the image to the outside world in which it operates, from the close environment of the work’s own frames in the first, to the world outside those frames in the second. In contrast, the second two meanings of the concept focus on meaning coming from the outside in. Their simultaneous mobilization thus also entails a questioning of the very limit that separates outside from inside. This questioning in turn challenges the notion of intention that is so pervasively predominant in thinking about culture and art.

Can Caravaggio Be Re-Made in Contemporary Abstract Sculpture?

Ann Véronica Janssens’s quotes the form and effect of Caravaggio’s Medusa directly, even though she may not have meant to do so at all. In her sculpture Le corps noir, she addresses the wavering between two- and three-dimensionality that we can see Caravaggio’s work as emblematizing. Le corps noir uses the mythical trope of mirroring as a literal incorporation of space, and explores what combining illusionism and the rotella shape can do.

In this work Janssens also probes the implications of the idea that Caravaggio’s successful rendering of space in two-dimensional painting is based on the inside of a tomb, the absolute darkness of the absolute inside. In a work that could easily be seen as an abstract, mod-

further enhance the spatial ambiguity.

[The Baroque vision] can be characterized as a vacillation between the subject and object of that vision and which changes the status of both. ernist, “pure” object, austere in form and devoid of any baroque curls, folds, waves, and colouristic tricks, Janssens binds baroque matter with sculpture as embodied process.

In Le corps noir, the absence of light makes it impossible to distinguish the bulging object from the hollow one, convexity from concavity, which is the same visual problem of Caravaggio’s Medusa.

Le corps noir experiments with the practice of space. The spatially ambiguous feature of the work becomes the sole focus of this supposedly abstract sculpture, and for that reason alone, I consider it a re-working of the problematic Caravaggio explored in the Medusa.

By leaving out any representational signs, hence, by avoiding painting, Janssens makes the “pure” sculpture the object of reflection, which is impossibly situated at the edge between concave and convex. But by questioning the site of this ambiguity in the closed space of total darkness, she reintroduces light, only to

Here, there is a mobility in a continuum of time and space with which Caravaggio charged the snakes. Le corps noir, then, I would submit, positions the “selfportrait in a convex mirror” – to quote the title of Parmigianino’s famous painting – and hence also Caravaggio’s convex Medusa at the threshold of exteriorized fear and incorporated space. Hence, the sculpture, as the historical painting, is also a self-portrait.

Janssens’s medium is sculpture: a three-dimensional spatial medium whose temporal dimension is, or at least appears to be, still. But this stillness is undermined, in the first place through the relationship to space itself. This is precisely where the sculpture shifts our perception of Caravaggio’s painted monster. To understand the full impact of this wavering, I would like to suggest establishing a complementarity between Janssens’s sculpture and Mona Hatoum’s 1994 video installation Corps étranger currently on exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

This work consists of a small cylindrical space which the viewer must enter in order to see the show. A video image is projected onto the centre of the floor around or over which the viewer can walk. With specialized medical equipment, the artist has recorded the inside of her own body in such claustrophobic detail that visibility is all but obliterated.

This play with scale that probes the limits of the visible resonates with the baroque play I discussed a propos of white in my book on the subject. But here, I wish to point to the flipping of that other limit involved in baroque folds, the flipping between inside and out.

In baroque representation, no depth

caravaggio

43

The Caravaggio Moment

Judith Beheading Holofernes, C. 1598. Oil on canvas. 145 x 195 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome, Italy.

Opposite: David Reed, #449, 1998-1999. Oil and alkyd on linen. 42 x 168 inches. Private Collection, U.S.

can be seen from a point outside of the space of representation. Here, the viewer must penetrate inside a space that represents the body – a foreign body – in order to see the image. Hence, the entire body of the viewer is inside the visual detail of the other body. Some thing, the image, stands to some body, the viewer, for some thing, the body’s inside.

The wavering of space also has a temporal dimension. For the body (image) was “made” before, but only comes to be the signifying practice that it is at the moment the viewer steps inside (it). The time of the tracking camera overlayered by the rhythmic sound of the body’s movement is the inevitably binding time of the viewing. The image tracks from tunnel-like tubes (fig. 8) to the eye itself.

This is a practice of space that Janssens, in a totally different medium and mode, also puts forward. Whereas time in Hatoum’s video, defined as both duration and rhythm, is a “naturally” implicated element and the transgression of the inside/outside boundary is the work’s primary issue, Janssens’s sculpture, when juxtaposed to it, loses its stillness as well as its clean plastic ‘objecthood’ and exteriority.

The complementary relationship between these two works is possible only because each contributes something elementary to the readability of the other, and because they both alert us to an essential aspect of Medusa. Hatoum makes the viewer enter the body at a metaphorical level: the cylindric space is like a body,

the sense of claustrophobia comes from being inside what seems like intrauterine existence, an effect that is reinforced by the loud heartbeat one hears upon entering the cylinder.

But she enforces the metaphor by accompanying the representation with real time and illusionistic imagery, so that space seems just as real. Janssens does the opposite. She creates real space from which the temporality of the process is derived. The cement that binds these two practices is the importance of the index, the privileged type of sign that frames the waverings in question in both Janssens’s and Hatoum’s works. From the vantage point, the essence of Medusa is precisely that: it’s frightening indexicality that reaches out to touch us.

44 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

“What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.”

André Berne-Joffroy “Known as the symbol of genius and insanity, Caravaggio is the most visceral, impetuous, and genial character I have been asked to interpret. He was the real innovator of painting in the 17th century, not only in Italy, but in the whole world. He was not an intellectual innovator, but an innovator of life. He is still so modern because he has never respected the mannerism of the dogmas imposed by the Church. He broke all rules risking his own life. That was a time when people like Giordano Bruno were burnt alive.

And yet he pursued his idea of painting, anticipating things that would be deeply understood only many years later. Against all conventional rules, he used prostitutes as models for his Madonnas, he painted peasants praying the Holy Mary with their dirty nails and grease hair, so that, for the very first time, people could recognize themselves in what they saw. It was a new way of conceiving painting. This is Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio for me.”

Alessio Boni, in the role of Caravaggio in the Rai TV Film directed

by Angelo Longoni (2007)

“Caravaggio [is] the first artist in history whose paintings seem directly concerned with his own life. Ten years before Shakespeare invented Hamlet, Caravaggio painted Saint Francis in solitary dialogue with a skull. Caravaggio introduced soliloquy into painting at the same time that Shakespeare perfected it in drama.”

John T. Spike, Caravaggio “There was art before him and after him, and they were not the same.”

Robert Hughes art critic of Time magazine

“Caravaggio’s rich color palette and subtle contrast of light and dark inspired my latest collection of bags for men. There’s a return of old value. You see all these young gentlemen about. It’s a new classicism. Caravaggio is relevant today because he was conflicted but extremely brave in his choices. I wanted to create a feeling of timelessness, which only great works of art can convey.”

Handbag designer Silvia Venturini Fendi

“If Caravaggio were alive today, he would have loved the cinema; his paintings take a cinematic approach. We filmmakers became aware of his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and he certainly was an influence on us. […]

The best part for us was that in many cases he painted religious subject-matter but the models were obviously people from the streets; he had prostitutes playing saints.

There’s something in Caravaggio that shows a real street knowledge of the sinner; his sacred paintings are profane.”

Director Martin Scorsese from an interview on the Royal Academy Magazine, 2005

“His realism was part of his selfpresentation as an outsider and a rebel, a persona doubtlessly as satisfying to himself as it was calculated to impress or unsettle others.”

John Varriano, The Art of Realism

“The intensely personal eroticism of M’s paintings, combined with the increasingly dark strain of violence and suffering that also runs through them, is what makes his art so immediately gripping”.

Peter Robb, M.: The Man Who Became Caravaggio

caravaggio

45

The Caravaggio Moment Photo by Suzanne Preparata

IPSE DIXIT, compiled by Laura Giacalone

“It could be said that without Caravaggio’s innovations film noir would not have come to exist. So who exactly was this convention-busting painter with a reach that has spanned four centuries?”

Francine Prose, Painter of Miracles “Never before had an artist presented religious drama as contemporary life... Nor had any earlier painter dared to break so dramatically with long established studio traditions, painting his figures from nature, directly onto the canvas, with complex effects of studio lighting. It was the figures having been painted from life that most fascinated Caravaggio’s contemporaries.”

Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life books about caravaggio at the Scuderie del quirinale bookstore, rome.

“He was the first painter of life as experienced by the popolaccio, the people of the back streets, les sans-culottes, the lumpenproletariat, the lower orders… Following Caravaggio up to the present day, other painters - Brower, Ostade, Hogarth, Goya, Gericault, Guttuso - have painted pictures of the same social milieu. But all of them – however great – were genre pictures, painted in order to show others how the less fortunate or the more dangerous lived. With Caravaggio, however, it was not a question of presenting scenes but of seeing itself. He does not depict the underworld for others: his vision is one that he shares with it.”

His deviant sexuality, apparent atheism, and social transgressions fit the romantic image of the rebel artist epitomized in Paul Verlaine’s Les poètes maudits of 1884, just as his work seemed to foreshadow that of Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet”.

John Berger

Genevieve Warwick

Studio International Jan/Feb l983

Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception

“Caravaggio’s revolution was to treat biblical and mythological subjects with realism. He completely eschews idealization. That runs completely counter to the tradition of his day. He is also a very great storyteller. He’s brilliant at digesting the stories and picking the moment that encapsulates the story”.

Dawson Carr curator of Caravaggio Retrospective at the National Gallery, London

46 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

A new Eye on Caravaggio

by Sybille Ebert-Schifferer

W

hat makes Caravaggio so attractive for thousands of admirers today is his combination of emotionally appealing paintings and his violent and – for some – sexually deviant, perhaps even repellent personality. He does not to match our concept of “normal”, i.e. moral coherence of personality, public behavior and work.

This sex-and-crime constellation does not take into account, however, that we are mentally distant from the years around 1600 in Rome, when most people contended with at least two conflicting systems, that of religion and that of social honor. Despite the fact that Church of the Counterreformation tried to eliminate the latter in order to control both moral and legal affairs (their efforts at modernization) were not quite successful. Those who most opposed the delegation of honor and its defense to a centralized State were the old Roman nobility, the most violent group in Roman daily life, though this did not prevent its representatives to be members in charitable religious brotherhoods or participate in public displays of religious observance, for instance, the ritual of washing the chapped feet of pilgrims arriving in the Holy City. An ambitious middle class imitated this behavior. Caravaggio was part of this class: He was socially ambitious like most artists of his time and probably keen on becoming noble like many of his colleagues who had been awarded a knighthood. All his legal records reveal cases involving honor. Those who committed these deeds with, against or independently from him, were advocates, librarians, papal accountants, artists, nobles. Many of them had relations to one or more courtesans, (in Caravaggio’s case we know for sure only of one), and/or with under age young boys –“bardasse” (this is not firmly proven for Caravaggio) – be it before or during matrimony.

There was no such thing as a homosexual identity, and eroticism fluctuated be-

tween male and female, between sacred and profane, as literature of the time reveals. A love madrigal could be read as sacred by changing one or two words and vice-versa, and the same is true for the music accompanying it. Readers and listeners took delight in finding out the subtle lines between ”amor sacro” and “amor profano” (also a much-appreciated subject of painting in the time.

One of the he most appreciated aspect of art was the wonder – “meraviglia” or “stupore” – that it would make one experience. At the time, the way to religious meditation was through sensual perception. This was not questioned by the Church, which required painters to move the spectators in a credible way, i.e. to move their senses like a real event would. Caravaggio’s paintings met all these requirements. In cases in which his works were intended for private connoisseurs, he integrated sophisticated references to art itself, thus adding intellectual pleasure to religious meditation. Most, if not all of his collectors were following a “new” and fashionable religious practice that required practitioners to be aware of the sacred within humble daily activites, and Caravaggio himself was educated in this practice since childhood. His religious paintings show a connection to this. In some of them, his inclusion of a self-portrait as a witness to the holy event is not faithlesslessness. Any attempt to define his psychology must remain purely speculative; the documents do not really tell us much, and even Sigmund Freud could not help to bridge the mental difference between our times and his.

Caravaggio’s paintings were successful in offering what all his artistic peers considered to be the highest achievement of painting: closeness to nature in appearance and emotional credibility. His works provide delightful surprise through unexpected innovation morethan any one of his contemporaries. His success was promoted by literary praise, and his fans

slandered the works of his contemporaries. This was nothing new –Federico Zuccari, for instance, had experienced something similar 20 years earlier, but competition was particularly harsh in Rome around 1600, and the publicity that accompanied Caravaggio’s rise had a weightier quality. The legal proceeding instituted against him and his friends in 1603 by painter Giovanni Baglione represented a struggle for market. It was easily observed that his fresh style contained aspects of Venetian painting, which was much en vogue with collectors of his day, along with use of light extremely diverse for Roman eyes. His techniques were a mystery. Documentary evidence suggests that he did not want his production process to be known – insisting that he studied nothing but nature. He probably did so in a very extensive way, including an observation of optical phenomena as presented by in scientific findings of his time. Coincidentally, they were discussed and eventually experienced in the house of his first important protector, Cardinal Del Monte, whose brother was a well-known mathematician. Soon after Caravaggio’s death, ideas about his methods were written down, since his paintings seemed like tableaux vivants painted directly from life, though this was never proven nor stated directly as fact in sources. Half a century after his death, however, this was taken for granted by Giovan Pietro Bellori: time had changed conspicuously in terms of religious practice and artistic ideals. A painter who simply copied nature – as it was now generally assumed that Caravaggio did – was a minor painter, even one who diminished the real art of painting. Bellori relied on the first printed biography of Caravaggio, which was written by the artist’s enemy, Baglione, long after the artist’s death. Baglione insinuated – but nearly never asserts directly – that Caravaggio’s religious paintings had been rejected; he often distorted events that documents

caravaggio

47

The Caravaggio Moment Amor Victorious, 1602. Oil on canvas.

61.4 x 44.5 inches.

Gemäldegalerie, Berlin Germany.

prove to have occurred otherwise. Bellori added his own reason for the rejection of his works: too much humble daily life pictured within elevated, sacred stories.

Ideas about devotion had clearly changed by that time, and the process of unifying people’s moral identity had shifted too: it was accepted that a bad painter would likely have a bad temperment.

Most people and many art historians still believe in the unity of personality and artistic work. Although this may often be the case, especially since Romanticism, it is a topical construction. Looking at Caravaggio’s paintings, we perceive a highly intelligent artist, carefully respecting the culture of his patrons and dialoguing with them through visual means.

This implies a careful preparation of his compositions. A comparison of figures assumed to be direct portraits of models reveals that in fact he transformed their appearance. Quite a number of his works could not have been made from living arrangements in the studio, for plain technical reasons. Most painters studied living models, and he surely did so, too.

Since he left no drawings, we must admit that we still do not know how he transposed what he had studied. But even today, the results of technological investigations and restoration campaigns are easily interpreted as traces of the production process as Bellori presented it. The same is true for the apparent hastiness of his late paintings, taken as a proof for his sense – and reality – of being hunted for committing murder. In fact, he committed an accidental homicide, in a fight that involved four persons on each side. Since death in this way occurred relatively frequently at the time, he had a good reason for expecting pardon. Nothing proves that he felt especially guilty or that he had been persecuted. His late technique – as one unprejudiced restorer has noted – aims at looking quick and painterly, but in fact required much more time than its appearance suggests.

He was thus a pioneer in a technique which would have a wide effect in 17th century painting, be it as “rauwe manier” in the Netherlands or “fa presto” in Italy, as a proof of virtuosity.

And so, what if (for the sake of art historical methodoloy), for the 400th anniversary of his death, we tried to eliminate everything not directly proved by contemporary documents, instead reading them for their intrinsic value (the testimony of an enemy at court may be a defamation, for instance); what if we tried not to speculate about his personality with our

modern psychology, and tried to overcome what later generations have said about him (and perhaps successfully convinced us). In short, what if we were not pre-conditioned by what centuries have built up about the artist? Some might say we are destroying a myth. Perhaps, but scholarship is no mythology, and revisiting primary sources, we discover something better: a genial and intelligent artist. And forget about his intimate life details – we simply do not know enough about it factually. His works do not tell us about it either, instead they show a sophisticated, unprecedented art.

48 Caravaggio

The Caravaggio Moment

Inspiration of Saint Matthew, 1602. Oil on canvas. 115 x 73.2 inches. Contarelli Chapel, Rome, Italy. opposite left: Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy, 1606 . Oil on canvas. 42 x 36 inches. Private collection, Rome, Italy opposite Right: Jacques-Louis David The death of marat, 1793. oil on canvas 64 in x 50 inches.

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

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The Caravaggio Moment

Reverberations of realism “Caravaggismo” in 17th-,18th- and 19th-century art

by Genny DiBERT Caravaggio’s paintings and at times followed his lead, especially when in his decisive use color and light (both direct and diffused) and in a sense of drama placed in certain wise and studious scenes. Rubens’ triumphant, exuberant scenes bathed in light, in which the physical and the glorious overlap, produce a dynamic tension that Caravaggio would have appreciated. Later artists, such as Jacopo Cerutti studied this technique with great attention. Known as Pitocchetto, he omitted beautiful nature “a priori,” which was typical of his time, to explore humanity and its inherent morality. It must be noted here how chiarascuro and grace, Caravaggio’s trademarks, were also indispensible in the theories of Raffaello Mengs, even if not applied in his artwork.

F

rom 1600 until the present, Caravaggio’s work has influenced many trends in art, including that of Cezanne. Caravaggio’s breakthrough was his sharp realism: Saints shown as average people and religious experiences as ordinary human drama – expressed through emotions, theatre and allegory. He depicted idealized concepts as manifested in the visible world. Though an extraordinary colorist, he was selective in his compositions – each detail of his paintings corresponds to reality and the models he used.

Caravaggio affected many artists, both his contemporaries and those who followed. His direct influence can be traced in Guido Reni, Giovanni Lanfranco and Mattia Preti. An affinity for his style is seen in the works of Josep de Ribera and Georges du Mesnil de La Tour, who also painted tavern scenes with card players, musicians and fortune-tellers. Mythical and revered figures are replaced by toothless hags, young women of dubious moral character, rough soldiers in scenes more profane than sacred.

Even Pieter Paul Rubens showed a kind of dedication and attention towards the Baroque realist. He observed the realism of

Among the 19th-century artists that can be linked to Caravaggio, one in particular stands out for his use of realism: Gustave Courbet.

Both artists also used ordinary people as models for their paintings, those who represented the everyday, actual world, which both studied with curiosity. They captured the psychological aspect of those who sat for their portraits. Before Courbet, there was Jacques-Louis David who avidly studied Caravaggio during his residence in Rome in 1775, during which time he made a copy of the Cena di Valentin.

And the Caravaggio-esque influence in David is rediscovered in several of his painted narratives, as in his Death of Marat, which shows a classically-styled, highly-illuminated model depicted in a way that makes the scene palpably realistic. In a remarkably personal manner and with his own brilliant treatment, Géricault manifested Caravaggio-esque passion in his works, especially in his fresh approach to spirituality in smoothly-rendered paintings.

The impressionists cannot be left out. Light, the protagonist in the works of Caravaggio, was fundamental to this group of 19thcentury artists. The difference is that Caravaggio played with light inside his studio, while the Impressionists worked in the open daylight, studying the effects of natural light on their subjects.

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contemporary art

53

Speaking of realism

A show of Czechoslovakian Realism 1948-1989 looks to debut in New York. An interview with director Francesco Augusto Razetto

by Genny DI BERT

R

this way the paintings of the second peealism in Socialist Czechoslovakia riod of socialist realism (from 1960 on), was shown at the Gallery Mánes, an is no longer the pivoting element on the musuem of modern art in Prague which to build the new socialist society, in December 2009. The exhibition but is instead engulfed and obliterated comprised over 70 works revisting the by the very same production techniques period of Czech realism through a sethat should have fostered his freedom. lection of paintings, sculpture, graphThe socialist simply becomes a gear in ics and photography, many previously the machine, which in art is representunpublished or unseen. The curator of ed by factory assembly lines. It is easy to architecture of the Prague Foundation interpret this as symbolizing the whole Eluetheria, Francesco Augusto Razetto, of society in which man no longer feels along with the show’s other curators, a participant. He is a mannequin, as including his brother Ottaviano Maria FRANCESCO AUGUSTO RAZETTO near a in the recent works of Duane Hanson, Razetto, are working on bringing the exhisculpture of the artist filled with a desparate emptiness and frusbition to Italy and New York.

Alois Čihal. tration.

The architect Ottaviano Maria Razetto, who organized the show in Prague, in view Do you think that the american public could of a Czech-American initiative said, “I believe that it would be appreciate a show of czech realism ? very interesting to make a comparison between socialist realism The American public traditionally very open to the new and cutand that of America. Realism is not just a phenomenon that inting edge in the field of art. In the case of Czech realism, we are volves only totalitarian regimes but also represents all people durtalking about an artistic phenomenon that for years remained ing profound socio-political changes.” He continues, “ In Ameriunknown to the Western world. It is crying for an uncovering not ca, the end of the 19th century saw the advent of realism. It’s not just for this, but even more because of it’s freshness in absolute a planned or imposed event, as it occurs in socialist society, but terms. I think the rediscovery of Socialist Realism could repreis a natural response that artists had in modern American socisent a vital link, which could inspire the rewriting of a historical ety. [American] artists have a kind of natural tendency to express critique of realism in general. I believe America, open and immuthemselves thru realism, as when witnessing major historical monite to political conditioning, is the country that could lead this ments in war or during social revolutions.” fascinating journey.

President razetto, what are the parallels You are working on a New york exhibition... between czech and american realism ?

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And in this great social shift, this time induced by an economic Of course, clearly not just because of the MoMA’s importance but revolution and not one of war, inspired many artists of the time also because, I believe, of the extraordinary nature of the project. to describe the country and it crisis. A second American realism I think that only an established art institution has the means and was born, that of Charles Demuth, Charles Scheeler and, above knowledge necessary to address a show of this caliber. Beyond all, Edward Hopper. Hopper’s paintings depict a lost, neurotic that, the MoMA focuses on that which is contemporary, that society in which the American man remains alone, lost unto himwhich is being explored and discovered. Walking through the galself, unable to communicate. In this sense, a similar emptiness is leries of this incredible museum, one reads the story of modern perceived in Socialist Realism. As in the works of Hopper, these art, perceives its various themes, and experiences the artists’ lives. works capture the failure of a society capable only of creating In short, the MoMA is indeed “truly perfect.” lonely individuals, set against an anonymous urban landscape. In

54 literature

Sacred, Profane Naples In her collection of short stories, Italian novelist Valeria Parrella catches the intrinsically Baroque side of Naples and its inhabitants

valeria Parrella

by Laura Giacalone

W

ith its colourful carnival of clothes and bed sheets hanging from the windows, its maze of narrow streets and secret corners, its roaring chaos of motorbikes and shouting vendors, its inebriating mixture of coffee aromas and pizza flavours, Naples is by its nature a Baroque city.

If the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art was meant to impress visitors through a triumphant abundance of details and display of opulence, no city better than Naples expresses such a baroque-like attitude to life, being able to enchant and bewilder whoever happens to be overwhelmed by the ordered anarchy of the city.

Home to Caravaggio while he was outlawed, and an inspiration to his Madonna of the Rosary and The Seven Acts of Mercy (1607), Naples has continued to inspire a whole generation of internationally renowned artists up till today, from the actor and film director Massimo Troisi to the writer and journalist Roberto Saviano, who have been able to capture the double-sided nature of the city, with its inseparable blend of sacred and profane, richness and misery, tragedy and laughter.

A recent discovery for the American

book industry, Valeria Parrella belongs to this new generation of artists, being one of the most talented novelists in Italy, as well as a passionate storyteller of Naples’ marvels. Born in 1974 in Torre del Greco, in the Province of Naples, she published the volume of short stories Mosquito and Whale in 2003, and was awarded with the Campiello Literary Prize in 2004 for the best debut. She is also author of the novels The Verdict (2007) and The White Space (2008), which has recently become a film, directed by Francesca Comencini and screened at the last edition of the Venice Film Festival.

The New York based-publisher Europa Editions has recently decided to introduce Valeria Parrella to the Englishlanguage audience, by publishing the short story collection For Received Grace, originally published in Italy by Minimum fax in 2005 and awarded with important literary prizes.

The title comes from a common religious expression, which can be found on most “ex-votos” and other religious collectables under the initials “P.G.R.” (in Italian: Per grazia ricevuta), as a sign of gratitude or devotion. The sense of religiousness pervading Valeria Parrella’s book is however very atypical and profane, and allows the author to consecrate the humblest and most neglected humanity to the highest levels of purity and dignity.

There is the woman left with a child and a job in the drug trade after the death of her partner; the young man who gives up his passion for guitar to start working for an illegal print shop; the married museum curator dealing with the “imaginary friend” of her daughter and her equally imaginary alternative love life; the lonely woman renovating her house while dreaming of passionate happy-end-

ings that don’t materialize. And on the background there is Naples, the city of the thousands faces and districts, where the areas devastated by a permanent state of urban guerrilla strife coexist alongside well-off residential neighborhoods.

If Caravaggio found the perfect features for his sacred portraits in the streetlife scenes, Valeria Parrella finds the solitary heroes of the contemporary fight for survival in the forgotten slums and suburbs of Naples. The women depicted in this collage of stories are strong in their vulnerability and never ask for compassion or forgiveness: they look ahead, over their sense of abandon and despair, and always seem to know what to do, even if it means taking responsibility for their own or others’ faults. There is a beauty in this sort of failure that all the characters have in common: all of them have to give up something in order to go on in life, all of them have to fail in order to survive. Their decay coincides with their most triumphant magnificence, which is the paradoxical nature of the city itself.

With its contradictions and conflicts, lights and shadows – said the author in an interview – Naples “shapes its inhabitants, carving and chiselling them in its likeness.”

To portray this urban circus of variegated humanity, Valeria Parrella uses a language that reproduces the faults and accents of the spoken words, with their dialectal inflections, their broken structure and peculiar drawled rhythm.

These stylistic features and the strong iconographic power of the language make the scenes and characters portrayed extraordinarily vivid and allow the readers to visualize every single situation, and hear every single voice, as in a film or in a real-life scene, where no boundaries are left between representation and reality.

photography

55

Hidden gem of Rome

photography by Mauro Benedetti

Trastevere Meandering down the ancient cobblestones of Via del Moro, a pasticerria (sweet shop), plump chocolate eggs – and their Signora – preside during the Lenten weeks. Outside a nearby tavern, some men take in the street scene, using a motorino as a stoop.

56 advertisement

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We promote the highest ideals of scholarship, sportsmanship, moral development, and citizenship, providing our students a priceless and unparalleled education that will last a lifetime. As a private school we aim for all of our graduates to attend the finest colleges, universities, and vocational schools.

The Montfort Academy 99 Valley Road Katonah, NY 10536 (914) 767-0325

Social journal

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Social Journal Saint Valentine’s Eve, Carnegie Hall “Love Conquers All” conquered a packed audience of Italian Academy Foundation’s friends and members on February 13th, 2010 at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. The evening was considered by many to be the best concert ever created by the Italian Academy Foundation.

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1 Violinist Sandy Cameron accompanied by Renee Guerrero in Tangos of Astor Piazzola. 2 Baritone Larry Harris held the evening with his renditions Francesco Paolo Tosti’s works. 3 Pianist Sandro Russo held the house rapt with Franz Liszt’s Après une Lecture du Dante. 4 The full house audience included many dignitaries, Ambassadors and friends of the Italian Academy Foundation. 5 A highlight of the evening was the presentation of the IAF’s Brava! Award to public television’s Laura Savini (center) who appears with Consul General Francesco Maria Talò, Dr. Bilha Chesner Fish, member of the IAF Board, Chairman Stefano Acunto and IAF board member Dott.sa. Angelique Tiberi. 6 Brilliant soprano Rosa D’Imperio sang Wagner’s beautiful Du bist der Lenz… 7 Later at the reception, Ms. Savini poses with IAF chairman Acunto and leaders of the Montfort Academy: Prof. and Mrs. John Pilsner, and Sister Marie Pappas member of the school’s advisory board. 8 The Headmistress of La Scuola, d’Italia Dott.sa Anna Fiore, and Mr. & Mrs. Peter Falzone, members of the Board of Directors, joined in the evening’s events. 9 Nationally famous intellectual Herb London (left) with Dr. Bilha Chesner Fish. Mr. London is a regular at IAF concerts.

all Social Journal photos by Vito Catalano unless otherwise noted

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Social Journal Gianfranco Fini Received in D.C. ...

A whirlwind tour of Washington and New York was a great success for President of the Chamber of Deputies, Hon. Gianfranco Fini. His trip is recorded in these photos.

1 Together with Ambassador Giulio Terzi di Sant’ Agata and Dott. Aniello Musella, On. Fini toasts the “Wine 2010” display and program; 2 With Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, he displays a gift given to the Library of Congress from the Italian publicsee story page 18; 3 At a private dinner held at the Ambassador’s residence, several leaders of the Italian and Italian-American communities in New York, joined with Supreme Court Justices Alito and Scalia, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and other dignitaries, in a toast to Gianfranco Fini; 4 Reception in New York, included: former Mayor David Dinkins, Ms. Silvana Mangione and Mico Delianova Licastro; 5 Rare moment: former Governor Mario Cuomo and former Senator Alfonse D’Amato at the reception; 6 Ambassador Terzi, On.Fini, and old friend, Italian Academy Foundation Chairman, Steve Acunto; 7 Cav. Enzo Centofanti of Philadelphia, On. Fini and Lucio Caputo co-chairman of the event honoring Fini; 8 Left to right: Consul General Francesco Talo, Hon. Alfonse D’Amato, former Governor Cuomo, On. Fini, and Mayor David Dinkins; 9 Congressman Frank Guarini, Ms. Vivian Cardia, and Matilda Raffa Cuomo.

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Social journal

Social Journal ... and New York More than 1,200 attended the Gala Dinner in favor of Gianfranco Fini, co-chaired by Hon. Dominic Massaro, Lucio Caputo and Stefano Acunto.. The dinner was an enormous success with an overwhelming outpouring of Italian and Italian American leaders.

1 1 Fini with …Sal Salibello; 2 With …Senator Amato Berardi and Lawrence Aurianna;

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3 4 3 …With Rabbi Schneir, leader of the Jewish community; 4 ….Addressing the 1,200 assembled at the Grand Hyatt; 5 …..Receiving an award from Hon. Justice Massaro and Lucio Caputo;

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6 Warm introduction by HE Ambassador Giulio Terzi di Sant’ Agata; 7 Senator Amato Berardi with dinner cochairman Stefano Acunto; 8 Ornella Talo, Vivian Cardia, Carole Haarmann Acunto, and Antonella Cinque.

La Scuola d’Italia held its Gala at Cipriani’s in New York honoring Ambassador Daniel Bondini. More than 500 attended, including honored guest, Ambassador Giulio Terzi di Sant’ Agata in photo together with Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General to the UN, and Anna Fiore, head mistress of La Scuola d’Italia.

Amb. Terzi, Amb. Cesare Ragaglini, sec’y general Ban Ki Moon, Dottsa. Fiore, M.C. Laura Savini; at rear: Steve Madsen, chairman of La Scuola and Consul General Francesco Talo.

Baritone Gerald Finley Feted.

Amb. McNee of Canada, Amb. Claudia Blum of Columbia, Mr. Stefano Acunto and Gerald Finley at the Canadian Embassy to mark Finley’s Met Opera performance.

Finley photo by Ted Schafer Photogrpahy

La Scuola Gala 2010

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Social Journal Marcello Giordani’s Return Celebrated

A gala reception was held in favor of renowned tenor Marcello Giordani at Hudson Cliff House, home of Hon. Stefano Acunto, chairman of the Italian Academy Foundation, as Giordani made his return to the Metropolitan Opera. Many consider Giordani the world’s greatest living tenor, a sentiment articulated by many of the 60 guests joining in the reception.

1 2 3 1 Wilma Giordani, Mrs. Carole Haarmann Acunto,Dottsa. Claire Gagnon. 2 Eve Queler, founder of the Opera Orchestra of New York, and Mr. & Mrs. Giordani. 3 Gerald Rupp (right) speaking with pianist Sandro Russo.

Mr. Rupp is chairman of the VIDDA Foundation.

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4 dressed for the cold night, Barrymore and Michelle Scherer make their entrance.

Mr. Scherer, author of History of American Classical Music is Wall Street Journal music critic.

5 Mr. & Mrs. Herbert deCastro of Greenwich joined in the group.

Mr. de Castro is past chairman of the Wagner Society of America. 6 A special prize given to Giordani to commemorate the occasion was presented by the IAF – a limited print of Enrico Caruso’s caricature of himself (Caruso) singing the role of Riccardo in Un Ballo un Maschera. Left to Right: Consul General Talò, Mr. Acunto, Mr. Giordani and Justice Dominic Massaro, chairman of the ASILM. 7 Ms. Giordani, Dr. Bilha Chesner Fish, Dr. Karen Burke Calandros.

8 Mr. Acunto and Mr. Giordani shared a light moment remembering caruso.

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9 Maestro Giordani speaks with Enzo Pizzimenti of Westchester, head of the Harrison Opera. 10 Mr. & Mrs. Stefano Vaccara, editor of America Oggi’s Sunday edition, flanked the Giordani’s.

11 11 Michael Riedel, popular critic of the New York Post, and Mrs. Acunto share a moment discussing the TONY Awards.

12 Giordani sings….beautifully.

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Social journal

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Social Journal Pianist Stefano Greco premieres in NY’s Bechstein Hall Pianist Stefano Greco, author of an upcoming, ground breaking book about Johann Sebastian Bach, held an audience of 75 friends of the Italian Academy Foundation spellbound as he performed Bach’s Goldberg’s Variations, at the Bechstein Hall in New York.

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1 Stefano Greco and Daniele Danieli, Mrs. Francesco (Ornella) Talo, Mrs. Theodore (Lila) Prounis.

2 Antonio Ciappina of America Oggi and his companion, Cindy. 3. IAF Chairman Acunto with Mr. Christopher Bolton. 4 Dr. Gabriella Bolton, Mr. Carl Morelli, chairman of the American Savoy Orders, Mrs. Carole Haarmann Acunto. 5 Mr. & Mrs. Richard Haas, Mr. Hass is chairman of the National Academy Museum in New York. 6 Consul General Talo with the members of the Vinca Quartet who will play next year for the IAF. 7 Actress Linda Phebus, Dr. Bilha Chesner Fish, Mr. Acunto, Mr. Stephen Phebus of Opera Index.

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Face File

John Turturro

by Adriana SANCHEZ

Actor John Turturro recently returned to his Italian origins while playing the innkeeper in Italian Folktales, a show dedicated to one of Italy’s most ancient traditions: storytelling. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s popular compilation of folktales and by two 16th-century artists, Giambattista Basile and Giuseppe Pitre, the production concluded a successful tour of Turin, Naples and Milan in early 2010. The idea for the show originated when Turturro received a copy of Calvino’s legendary work from his wife Katherine, almost 30 years ago.

Top to bottom: John Turturro in Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales. With danny devito in spike lee’s Do the right thing.

With george clooney in O brother where art thou?

This show is just one of the many accomplishments in Italy for the actor. His first was the 1986 film The Sicilian, after studying Italian for only three months. “I was completely lost,” he admits about his first time in Sicily. Since then he has completed others, like when he was cast as the lead in Francesco Rosi’s La Trecia (The Truce, 1997). Also, in 2005 he presented a translated version of De Filippo’s comedy Questi Fantasmi (Souls of Naples) to New York and Naples.

The off-Broadway veteran says he hopes to bring his latest Italian production to a New York theater and “to present this aspect of Italy that isn’t seen very often.”

The actor has been spending so much time in Italy lately that he might as well be Italian. Soon, it could very well be the case: “Next time I could come back to Italy as a real Italian, since I am about to obtain my dual citizenship from the Italian Consulate in New York.”

Turturro has had a very notable and rich career. He made his first film debut playing a “man at a table” in Martin Scorsese’s The Raging Bull (1980) at the age of 23. Since then he has marked himself as one of the most talented and versatile actors of today, proving it over and over with performances such as Do the Right Thing (1989), Barton Fink (1991), The Big Lebowski (1998) and O Brother, Where Art Thou?

(2000). He more recently displayed his broad range of performance by earning a nomination for The Bronx is Burning (2007) for outstanding performance by a male actor in a miniseries or television movie as well as pursuing his passion as director in Romance and Cigarettes (2006).

About Italy, Turturro says: “Artistically I’m proud of it all. I love the music, the neo-realistic cinema, art, literature.”

And Italy for sure can be proud of John Turturro.

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