Caravaggio
by Diebold Essen

"There was art before him [Caravaggio] and art after him, and they were not the same."
                                                          --Robert Hughes

Want to spend a few days in Rome? Not Rome now but Rome 400 years ago? Have we got a time machine for you!

Peter Robb's recent M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio is instant time machine. A full scale 600 page biography, the book is written in a seductive, relaxed English that easily communicates both Robb's deep appreciation for Caravaggio and his wide ranging knowledge Rome and Italy around 1600.

Using slang when necessary (there is talk of Caravaggio's "fuck boys") and art history jargon when necessary ("oniric" sent me to the dictionary--it means dream-like), Robb, on the basis of the very scant documentary information we have about the painter's life, puts the reader vividly on scene. It's a kind of "you are there" approach to biography which more writers would do well to emulate.

Caravaggio (1571-1610) lived a short, violent life in an age of growing repression and extraordinary creativity. The Inquisition was still active in southern Europe (Giardano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 just a few meters from where Caravaggio was living and painting). But a couple of hundred kilometers away, Galileo was reshaping the scientific universe, and a bit farther to the northwest, Shakespeare was reshaping our understanding of ourselves.

As Robert Hughes noted so succinctly in the quotation above, Caravaggio changed Western art completely. And that's the story that Robb tells so brilliantly. Only the true blue-stocking would take offense at the sexual elements in the work, which, in fact, are minor and rather superficial compared to the massive assault Caravaggio made on how we see, how we represent how we see, and how we react to those representations.

When he was done (he died mysteriously at the age of 39 in 1610), the artists of the day knew what he had achieved. Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Vermeer were all strongly influenced by what they saw in his work. But the paintings strangely lapsed into a kind of art history limbo for three and a half centuries. One cannot avoid the suspicion that his overt sexuality had something to do with this. Only in the 20th century have art historians begun to resurrect him and the pictures (some 80 survive, scattered all over Europe and the United States).

The musty (whom we apparently shall always have with us) have not taken kindly to the book, partly because of its breezy, flowing style, but also partly because Robb reads the paintings so carefully.

Of course Caravaggio was homosexual. Only the most repressed among us can look at the paintings and fail to see that. But the repressed have been in charge for a long time, and the current generation of represseds don't like anybody threatening their vested interest. (For a fine example, take a look at a really miffed, prissy review by an art history professor at amazon.com.)

So what.

Robb's book includes only a small number of small color and black and white plates. Readers have complained about this, because Robb goes on at wonderful length and in great detail about each picture.

There are three solutions, the first two of which are not really satisfactory.

1. Buy or get from a library a book of the paintings.

2. Go to the Carol Gerten Fine Art site with its three pages of Caravaggio's. (If you just can't wait, click here to see Amor vincet in a feature we did last year.)

3. Go look at the real thing. (Click here for a bonus map showing the location of the Caravaggio paintings in the United States.)

All art loses in reproduction. Great art loses the most because it is "great"; it has a quality which cannot really be talked about. It can only be talked around. No one has a name for this quality (though I tend to think of it has some kind of magic). Whatever it is, Caravaggio's best work has it in abundance. And, whether you look at a picture in a book or on the Internet, that quality is not there. How about this: It's roughly the difference between looking at a photograph of a beach on Maui and being on the beach.

Read Robb's book. Then go look at the paintings, whichever ones are closest to where you live. They changed people's lives. They can change yours.

END