I was a
teenager when I discovered Caravaggio.
Beginning in the seventh
grade, when I was twelve years old, I spent a great deal time immersing myself
art, wandering the halls of the Minneapolis Institute, our grand museum, when I
should have been in school. There are none of Caravaggio’s work in the MIA’s permanent
collection, but there was enough from the late renaissance to enable me to be
conversant with those masters who were the precursors of his style.
I did not encounter Caravaggio
there, I encountered him at my neighborhood art-house cinema, the Uptown
Theatre at Hennepin Avenue and Lagoon.
It was the 1986 film by
Derek Jarman, starring Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean that made me
aware of his work and influence.
It was a lovely movie,
somewhat surreal, and it familiarized me with Caravaggio’s great achievements
in the history of painting, the foremost being his mastery of foreshortening,
which allowed his images to leap from the canvass, and in the second place his development
of the chiaroscuro style, the sheer beauty of bringing light from the
darkness which was his signature.
In 1990 I stood in front of
a Carvaggio canvas for the first time. I was at the Chicago Institute of Arts
and I was amazed at the dramatic realism in his work.
From that point forward if
somebody were to ask me who my favorite painter is, I would say Caravaggio,
without hesitation.
The more I learned about
this masterful artist the more this remained true.
The 1986 film captured a
great deal of his story, including the character of his life, its irreverent
nature, which endeared me to him.
It wasn’t until I took an
art history class as an undergraduate student at the University of Saint Thomas,
in 1995, that I discovered what a rebellious spirit he had, and for that spirit
I consider him a man of heroic stature.
As an artist his principle
patron was the Church, and the most common subjects he was commissioned to
paint were scenes of religious devotion.
He was imprisoned for his
depiction of The
Death of the Virgin, because he used
as his model the bloating corpse of a prostitute he had fished from the river,
painting Mary in a state of corruption and decay, which was an act of heresy
because Mary was considered to be inviolate and incorruptible, even in death.
When he was commissioned to
paint the Conversion of
Saint Paul, seventy-five
percent of the canvass he painted was taken up by the ass of the horse Paul
fell from when he was blinded on the road to Damascus.
It was another great joke
Caravaggio played on his patron, for which he is now well loved.
Given First - 2020.07.18
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