“Do you like Caravaggio?” Early in the current Netflix drama based on Patricia Highsmith’s acclaimed thriller, wealthy Dickie Greenleaf asks this question about his enigmatic new friend Tom Ripley: The Talented Mr. Ripley. A query is a type of test and is more than a simple class. It is intended as a measure of character and soul. For Greenleaf, the playboy son of an American shipping magnate on a permanent holiday on the Amalfi Coast, the answer may serve as a key to unlock a world of shared culture and tastes.
While the National Gallery opens its doors with an exhibition examining the last work of the artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, exhibited in Britain for the first time in 20 years, questions about Caravaggio are also being asked in London. His 1610 masterpiece, Martyrdom of St. UrsulaIt is on loan from a gallery in Naples and is a large, shadowy study of violence and religious fervor.
In preparation for the show, British art critics used their most sophisticated vocabularies to once again salute the great star of baroque ‘n’ roll art. “This is hypnotic,” he wrote GuardianJonathan Jones last week invited theatergoers to watch the static drama for free rather than paying for West End tickets. They can also look at Caravaggio standing to one side of the saintly figure in his last self-portrait, painted months before he died at age 38. Bring intensity and identifiable humanity to the work of representing biblical stories.
“It is very difficult for us now to understand how different his work was from his predecessors,” says National Gallery curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, explaining how Caravaggio rejected the artistic tradition of creating beautiful objects above all else. “He is the opposite. Even when we encounter these images without the level of religious knowledge of that time, they can communicate. One of his innovations was realism; you see real people with goiters and wrinkles. He even painted pictures of famous city prostitutes.”
What motivated this sharp new vision? Whitlum-Cooper speculates that the artist spent his childhood in Milan, devastated by the plague and ruled by the idiosyncratic Cardinal Borromeo: “There is a sense of the need to feel; for everything to be real, even acts of self-repentance. So busy.”
He suspects that the artist’s artistic freedom also stemmed from his lack of any formal training as an apprentice in an artist’s studio. “He hadn’t even learned to fresco when he enrolled. And there is no evidence of drawing underneath the paint. It looks like he applied the paint directly with real courage.
This ‘cinematic’ lighting made Caravaggio a superstar in the screen age
Jonathan Jones, Guardian
Caravaggio’s recurring appearance in new movie ripley The scenes set in Naples and later Rome are not just a geographical coincidence. As Jones comments Saint Ursula: “This ‘cinematic’ lighting made Caravaggio a superstar in the screen age.” The artist’s famous chiaroscuro has fascinated photographers and filmmakers for decades: in fact, it started almost from the first moment when it became possible to play with real light with electric bulbs and projectors instead of paint.
“There’s something about how he crops and frames the image. “We now see it as a cinematic language,” adds Whitlum-Cooper. “The size of the canvas also means that the viewer almost completes the image; Almost agrees.”
Andrew Graham-Dixon, author of the 2010 book Caravaggio: A Sacred and Profane Life, considers Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini to be the first to emulate the look on screen. “Then of course Martin Scorsese. while he was doing side streets He would go to the Met to study Caravaggio. He designed the film around his framework by starting a scene in the middle of the action; usually when someone is doing something terrible, like torturing someone.” Scorsese said he was instantly moved by the work, saying: “I initially related to them because of the moment he chose to illuminate the story. Conversion of St. Paul, Judith beheads Holofernes: He was choosing a moment that was not the absolute moment of the beginning of the action… He would have been a great director, there is no doubt about that.”
According to Graham-Dixon, what still inspires directors is not just light and shadow, but also intimacy. “Perspective had become incredibly boring for artists. This meant the loss of any sense of what you were supposed to be looking at, just like a school photo. Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro sabotaged the perspective and allowed him to highlight a detail. If he thought, ‘I want to show the tears on his face by reflecting light,’ chiaroscuro allowed him to do that. “This is his lightning strike on the art world.”
And his cinematic legacy goes beyond camerawork. The artist’s life was also transferred to the big screen. 1986 film by Derek Jarman. CaravaggioDuring the 2022 Italian artwork biography, he portrayed his transgressions, Caravaggio’s Shadow, focused on the censorship of his art. He adds that Graham-Dixon’s own book was recently acquired by an American film company.
The exhibition at the National also includes the gallery’s own late Caravaggio. Salome Accepted the Head of John the Baptist. Beheadings were a favorite theme. towards the end ripley A museum guide at the Galleria Borghese is heard describing an equally bloodthirsty picture: David with the Head of Goliath. “Caravaggio creates a connection between the murderer and the victim by depicting David as compassionate in his gaze at the severed head,” the tourists listening to Ripley, now a murderer herself, are told.
Steven Zaillian’s fascinating black-and-white adaptation largely chronicles the extraordinary life of a painter on the run from murder, as does Highsmith’s “gifted” anti-hero, played by Andrew Scott. In a 350-year flashback in the final episode, Zaillian actually evokes the ghost of the artist; He imagines her hiding from the Knights of St. John, tracking him down, just as Ripley runs from the police. “I thought that little parallel was interesting,” the director said.
In Naples, Ripley is also taken in one episode to see a Caravaggio that has hung in the Pio Monte della Misericordia for more than four centuries. Seven MerciesIt takes its name from the painting. In the background of this work, two men can be seen preparing a body for burial. Ripley learns that the painting was painted a year after the artist was accused of murder in Rome. Possibly reviled for his homosexuality, later abandoned by his bosses and struggling to pay his bills, Caravaggio began a downward spiral that soon accelerated when his face was disfigured in a knife attack outside a Naples inn. In 1606, he was sentenced to death for repeatedly murdering Ranuccio Tomassoni following a tennis match. While the outlaw flees to Naples, Ripley sets off for Rome with a false identity. Once there, the killer visits San Luigi dei Francesi, home to three Caravaggios; one of them depicts a sword-brandishing assassin.
Ripley and the rebellious Caravaggio have a grim appeal, an uncomfortable truth for Whitlum-Cooper: “The way we fetishize violence is problematic. This is not felt for women or Black men who may have committed crimes. “We tried to balance this in the series by emphasizing the story of St. Ursula.”
Relating to: The Last Caravaggio review – an unmissable and murderously dark finale
Caravaggio’s final artistic impulse was to treat literally an early Christian princess from Britain who, according to a mysterious religious text, was said to have traveled to marry a pagan prince. Golden Legend. Ursula’s accompanying 11,000 virgins were later killed in Cologne, but not before the “chief of the Huns” proposed marriage to the princess. When he turned her away, she shot him with an arrow. The image shows the deadly act up close, on a life-like scale.
“There was a lot of resistance to Caravaggio’s style. Graham-Dixon was on the losing side of the religious struggle over whether the church should be for the poor or controlled by the rich,” says Graham-Dixon. They wanted old style pictures.
Before Caravaggio’s death in southern Tuscany, when he probably succumbed to malaria, his creative influence had already been felt in Naples and Sicily, which were then in Spanish hands. Graham-Dixon thinks this seeded his huge influence on European art and then cinema: “No one was supporting him at the time except all the other artists who couldn’t get his work out of their minds. ”