17th C Baroque Art Caravaggio cc

We're going to start first by looking at this diagram that discusses what chiaroscuro is, and I have a couple of vocabulary words underneath it. Chiaroscuro is just a fancy Italian word which means shading, but in the instance of Baroque art it really means high contrast and shading. So if you read books and in literature sometimes they refer to chiaroscuro as a high dramatic shift. So for instance there's even pieces of music in which there are actually dramatic shifts of sound and dynamic meaning goes from loud to soft that sometimes are referred to as chiaroscuro. In this instance what we're doing is I want you to understand the elements of how light and shadow work and we're going to relate it to Baroque painting because high chiaroscuro coupled with a spotlighting effect which is also called tenebroso or tenebrism are going to be at the heart of an artist's work that we're going to be looking at called Caravaggio and all of his followers. So first of all with lighting what they began to understand was that light moves in a predictable pattern especially across curved or shaped objects. So you often have a highlight, you have these transitional tones, core of the shadow, light that bounces around is called reflected light, and then you have something called cast shadow. And this kind of lighting and this kind of dramatic lighting is often used in a lot of work in a lot of painting that creates high drama and also creates volume because for instance if you just drew a circle it didn't have any of that shading on it, it wouldn't have any volume whatsoever. The artist who is being credited with being the master of chiaroscuro and the master of tenebrism who establishes or sets the stage for all the artists that follow after him is this guy named Caravaggio. Now originally his name would have been known as Michelangelo Marisi Caravaggio or da Caravaggio because he was from a place called Caravaggio in Italy. And the problem with that is that everybody calls him Caravaggio because that's where he's from so you just have if you go to a museum and you ask where Michelangelo Marisi's work is you're not going to find it. So you have to actually call him Caravaggio and that's how he's listed in the textbooks. He's an Italian painter from the Baroque and almost all of his work, this is a sort of like a little bit of a cheater, comes between 1595 and about 1605. So on a test you could get away with just putting down 16, 1600 as the date. Let's approach this painting first from a formal or physical point of view. You can see that first of all you can actually trace on his shoulder a highlight, some middle tones, a core shadow, and then reflected light. And the same thing happens with his head. His head is actually an oval, an egg shape, and you can kind of see that you can trace those same kinds of elements of light and shadow. Then his hand and his shoulder behind him sort of dissolve into shadow. And that hard edge on the left-hand side with the high contrast of light and dark and then the sort of soft edges that happen with the murky shadowing in the background is called tenebrism. And it creates a lot of visual interest and it creates these patterns of light and shadow that make it very dramatic. There's also a sort of way in which this highlighting and this tenebrism and this high contrast of chiaroscuro change the composition of the painting in some ways. Because even though this guy's placed smack center in the picture plane, there is this sort of zigzag that runs through the picture where the light creates a diagonal and then the core shadow that runs through his face and his shoulders creates a sort of another diagonal and then his hand zags the other way. It's almost like the letter z is running through it. And in a way what he's doing is he's making an image that's very, very dramatic by using a shift of light and shadow and he's changing the composition from something that would have been seen originally as a symmetrical even composition to something that's called asymmetrical in terms of its composition. That's going to be in a lot of Baroque paintings where you're not going to have things in the center sort of like the School of Athens or Masaccio's Trinity with Donors. Now you're going to have off-center or off-balance compositions. Now the next thing that we need to take a look at is the color and the quality of the color that's being used in this painting because it's typical of Caravaggio. And I have my suspicions that the use of color in especially in the small portraits that he does is often influenced by economic necessity. That in Caravaggio's painting it's a lot like that portrait we looked at by Annibale Carracci where it's basically earth tones. There are no primary colors meaning red, yellow, or blue in this painting. And in fact when he chooses to do something that looks kind of bluish what he's using is he's using grays for instance in that pot of water that's down in the corner. There is a little bit of red in the cherries that are at the bottom of the painting as well. So this is primarily an earth-toned canvas with high shifts of light and shadow and shading. The next element that I kind of want to talk about is the fact that the way that Caravaggio paints is a style that's called alla prima. Alla prima painting is a way in which an artist, we don't have any drawings by Caravaggio because what we think he did when he would paint is he would actually draw with burnt sienna or burnt umber paint and what he would do is you probably put a coat of paint down on the bottom and then he would do a sort of drawing on top of it and here's a demo of how that works. So this style of painting is called alla prima and which means that he is kind of a genius painter in a way that he was able to make paintings without preliminary drawings and really set things up. It became a very popular style of painting that was used during the Baroque era and a lot of the painters that we're going to be studying next, for instance Velázquez and Rembrandt also paint often in the alla prima method and we're going to be looking at some small modellos or models that Velázquez did and that Rubens did that will indicate this. Iconographically or symbolically you're probably like when is he going to get to that because this painting is kind of an odd painting right? Well probably what this painting represents is Caravaggio's sexual proclivities and it might relate somewhat to some of the things that are going on in his life and his biography. Caravaggio according to some sources started out more or less as kind of a street guy, a street tough and it's very possible that he was semi-orphaned or he was an orphan and that he was apprenticed under a painter and learned how to paint but he didn't like the painting style of the painter he was working with but I also think that from some biographies I found that he picked up extra cash on the street by basically selling himself as a male prostitute to a male audience. Now this painting is a depiction very possibly of that sexual proclivity it could even be sort of a semi-self-portrait. Another interpretation of this painting is a term called amor vincit omnia or amor vincit omnia which means love conquers all and in this instance what he's kind of showing you is this sort of classical looking guy he almost looks like something out of a classical painting for instance from the Farnese ceiling but hanging off of his middle finger is a lizard that has just bit him near those cherries and of course the cherry can be a symbol of some kind of sexuality and often is a in slang is a representation of basically losing one's virginity and this lizard as we saw for instance in Durrer's Night the Deaf and the Devil, lizards can represent something that's not so savory and can be a representation of a serpent or some kind of evil and this kid is getting bitten on his middle finger right so there's a possibility that what Caravaggio is kind of showing you is that if you have lust versus love that it will conquer you just as easily as love does and that it can lead to some sort of demise and I think that it's probably no accident that Caravaggio is kind of making a little joke on religious painting and classical painting by showing you this clear vessel of water next to the cherries and next to the boy's finger which kind of represent those ideas and what Caravaggio often does in a lot of his paintings is he does include still life elements he's really very masterful at painting still life and you can actually see on the cherries that that it shows it's like the chiaroscuro sphere we looked at the other thing that about Caravaggio that's very masterful is that he does something that some italians the italian word for this is a concetto which just literally means a conceit he's showing how well he can paint a vessel of water and a clear vessel of water which is also a really tough thing to do and it's one of those things that comes up in a lot of painting where artists are showing how well they can paint something by painting a clear vessel of water which also represents something which means purity. Caravaggio has also sort of set the stage for actually almost all art that follows him that's visual art and what I'm talking about in particular is that Caravaggio has had an influence on filmmakers so this is a film still from an Alfred Hitchcock movie called Strangers on a Train and if you were to compare the two images what you'll see is Caravaggio has sort of shown the way to Alfred Hitchcock in terms of lighting we have this wonderful heavy chiaroscuro and this tenebrism where the figure is dissolving into the background and Hitchcock also realized that the use of diagonals and not making things completely symmetrical is another way of creating dramatic tension and so in a way even working in black and white it's almost like working with low-key palette and filmmakers are taking their page in a way or a cue from what Caravaggio is doing as a painter. Caravaggio's biography gets even more interesting he goes and he works for a cardinal for a while and then he's in Rome and while he's there he's still I guess you can take the boy out of the streets but you can't take the street out of the boy and so what Caravaggio would do is he'd go get drunk he'd brawl and there are a couple of police reports that discuss the fact that he was carrying a weapon at that point in time if you had a sword and it was unlicensed it was illegal sort of like carrying an unlicensed handgun or a concealed weapon at the time and at one point he gets into a duel actually on a tennis court and either mortally or nearly mortally wounds this guy and Caravaggio has to split town and he actually at one point he goes to Malta and when you know and in Malta he's already fled Rome he gets into trouble with the knights of Malta and then he has to split town there and the way that he dies actually is he thinks that he might have a papal pardon or something like that so he's headed back to Rome and he misses his boat but all of his stuff is on the boat so he starts chasing the boat up the coast trying to catch up to it and we lose track of him there and some historians have suggested that he died on a beach somewhere of some of malaria or some other disease or maybe someone killed him so he's kind of an interesting character who has a lot of interesting biographical material and there's a bunch of biographies both fictionalized and semi-fictionalized that you can pick up and you might want to take a look at that including a film by a guy named Jim Jarmusch I think is his name but all this ties in a little bit with how Caravaggio sees the world so one of the things that Caravaggio is credited with and we haven't really seen since ancient Rome since Pompeian frescoes that show this kind of thing is the depiction of still life and Caravaggio actually paints still life painting for the sake of still life painting and there are other painters who sort of emulate this either that or they come up with independently at the same time and so in this instance Caravaggio is painting a basket of fruit and if you look at this basket of fruit the way that it's arranged even though it seems kind of like a symmetrical composition because the fruit is in the center of the picture plane that branch with the fig leaves on the right hand side kind of add this sort of diagonal to it and the way that your eye flows through this picture even though the main object is in the center it's not visually balanced where it's completely if you drew a line down the center of it where there's the same visual weight on either side there's this empty space on the left that has a kind of slightly ill balanced compared to the right hand side with the fig leaf and that makes it an interesting composition the other thing Caravaggio does is he makes his still lives usually at eye level and that's something if you're an artist you might want to consider if you look at really good still life usually they're they're painted almost where the object is on a shelf at eye level to you because it's visually a little bit more interesting and since he's doing that he actually shows how that basket of fruit kind of comes off the edge of whatever that tabletop or that shelf that it's on and it's almost threatening to tip off and that might also be in some ways a representation of what it's supposed to mean that that the life we live in is a little tenuous and could tip off any time and that's complemented also by the fact that if you look at the fruits and the vegetables or actually all the fruit that's in here and the leaves they're rotting uh they have wormholes they have uh they're decaying slightly it's not this basket of delicacies that looks completely luscious and like you want to dig in and eat it there's actually issues or problems with this stuff and so that goes all the way back again to Masaccio with the trinity with donors and this is a sort of memento mori because as the things of all flesh go and fruit is flesh if you think about it we all rot we all die and eventually we we need to go to heaven and so or we want to go to heaven let's put it that way and so what is being suggested or has been suggested about this painting is that Caravaggio is not just painting a still life for the sake of a still life but he's actually kind of making a memento mori and later on uh you're going to see in later periods of art history especially in the 1700s in Holland and other places they're going to be other paintings that show this same kind of decay with delicacies and things that are um that are sort of luxury items in our world so Caravaggio in a way does something that's a little different um and and I think sort of innovative in that he is combining his own sets of iconography with this boy with the basket of fruit is showing you this boy with this basket of fruit um is kind of a combination of his uh boy being bitten by a lizard you know sort of the apple of his eye as it were with a basket of fruit and the thing is you know youth fades away people rot people die right and you um the same way that basket of fruit will will rot and die and even though you may have lust and you may be uh interested in this physical world we live in eventually even these momentary fleeting pleasures will be gone and the eternity that we're left with is something in which we kind of need to get right with god now that may be an over-interpretation you're going to have to you know check with your doctor check with your your professor about what they believe but more or less those are some of the standard interpretations of this kind of iconography in caravaggio's painting now we know that he lived in a catholic world during the reformation and he was simply trying to make imagery that would appeal to a client base at that point in time and so the next painting we're going to look at it really expresses that this painting called the supper at emmaus is actually a story um about jesus uh from the new testament and basically describes jesus being reborn or risen and that faith does not die that's kind of the sort of metaphorical or allegorical or symbolic meaning of it so the story goes something like this uh these disciples of jesus are on the road to a place called emmaus and they're going to stay at an inn and have dinner and rest for the night there they run into this guy on the road who seems like a really nice guy and they all hit it off and they they start talking about the teachings of jesus and so they invite this guy to go back to dinner with them at this inn because obviously he is a disciple of the teachings of jesus they go to this inn and they sit down and they offer for this guy to say the blessing or prayer over the bread and as this guy saying the blessing over the food they realize that this is no ordinary man that this is jesus and at that moment the way it's mostly described in a lot of uh you know recounting some of the story is basically keep links out he just disappears and it's an epiphany and it's a shock to them and they realize that even though his physical remains have have gone the way of all flesh jesus is risen again and his spirit is risen and that his message is still with us now you can believe whatever you want to believe but that's what this painting means so i'm not suggesting to you that you have to believe in that religious message if that's not your religion however caravaggio is and he's really pushing this idea that wow you know jesus has ridden has risen and we are going to be resurrected now he does this in such a way it's so visually persuasive and so counter reformation in a way what he's doing is he's using some of the tools and some of the elements that are actually developed in the north and he does it better than for instance even albert durer does so what i'm talking about is first of all you have this table that intersects or intercepts your view of this character who is jesus sitting behind the table this is a reference probably to the last supper by leonardo it's a way of pulling you in and he also sort of refers back to jato's lamentation where we have those two figures in the lower left hand corner who are basically also intercepting your point of view because that figure on the left hand side does that that his back is to you he kind of pulls you into the picture in this way because if you notice that this figure who's sitting in this chair and incidentally those are called savranola chairs um he is his elbow is projecting back towards you the viewer and you can see his elbows sort of projected back and there's a little tear in it that makes this little white thing that projects even further back towards us i love the reflected light on his face it's really interesting then you have the figure on the right hand side who is doing this almost uh look of amazement his his arms are akimbo and that's also a reference to the lamentation although jato didn't do as good as uh as caravaggio did and what he's showing you is this this hand sort of leading you in towards this figure of jesus and then jesus's hand which is foreshortened and and caravaggio is really a master of foreshortening he shows you jesus's hand pointed out towards you pulling you into the viewer into the picture as well then of course there's a and all of these gestures these humanistic gestures sort of relate somewhat to uh the humanistic gestures that we saw in leonardo's last supper then he does those things that he does so well that are so wonderful for instance the little still life objects that show how skillful he is for instance there's a basket of fruit that's on the table there and it's leaning just over the edge then on the left hand side that's that's really supposed to be wine if it's truly what uh is going on but actually it's a it's a clear vessel of water so there he is he's showing you how well he can paint water and then he has that strong diagonal of light that shifts across the picture plane that makes the picture seem as if it's a more diagonal kind of composition even though he sets things up as a sort of symmetrical composition and that heavy care a squirrel now the last thing he does which is similar to the boy being bitten by a lizard is the models that caravaggio chooses to use just like a nibble a karachi did in some ways are common people off the street because for caravaggio common people were the disciples of jesus and so why not use common people off the street as your models a last little sort of interesting element which i think is just kind of a neat little thing is there's a persian carpet on the table which is a symbol of wealth and would have uh sort of expressed a sort of uh luxury item from the time period caravaggio was always in trouble and uh he really you know at times he offended his patrons so immensely that his his uh his commissions were rejected and this is probably part of almost a marketing strategy or at least he was just trying to be a difficult kind of guy but more or less this is a painting that is a bible story in which you're supposed to really imagine that this could happen to you and therefore he's using all those genre elements that we talked about where these are real looking people especially the the guy who's holding the horse looks like someone who just got off the street of course this painting could have been extremely offensive to some because a large part of the painting is devoted to the horse's hind quarters and so in a way it's almost the reverse of what we were talking about when we looked at mantegna where he reduced the size of the feet out of respect to the viewer here caravaggio is doing a foreshortening he's doing it much more masterfully especially with that figure in the foreground who is foreshortened and projecting towards you but he's also sort of thumbing his nose at the viewer and making fun of the viewer and sort of you know willfully offending us in a way by by shoving a horse's uh butt in your face when this painting was originally made um some of the critics said it looks like an accident in the blacksmith's shop because they couldn't tell where the horse's feet were and where the uh the groom's feet the guy who was holding the horse's feet were now the story of it in particular is a story of uh of saint paul who was saul of tarsus and basically he was uh accused of saul was not a very nice man he was a soldier slash um you know um someone in the uh in the uh jewish synagogue who is who is pursuing the the new christians and at one point um the story goes something like this where he is riding his horse and he is struck almost by like a beam of light it's thrown off of his horse and it's described he has scales uh in in you know in his eyes and he goes blind and he hears a voice that says saul why are you persecuting my my people and um at that point he has sort of an epiphany or religious awakening and he realizes that uh jesus was the man and that he should be following in jesus's footsteps and uh he renounces his ways before that and he renames himself paul uh and so he goes from saul of tarsus to uh to paul to saint paul and he becomes one of the um the people who recounts the life of jesus and so this painting is at that dramatic moment when it's happening and it's the same with the supper at emmaus those are all things that we see in baroque painting where usually when you look at a baroque painting is at the moment of action there this is happening right here and now and you are being heavily influenced by it and that dramatic action that moment that we're talking about is heightened by the use of heavy spotlighting or tenebrism and of course he tends to use a reduced palette in some ways which also kind of makes the color less important and the light and the shadow more important now the last thing is that with the light and the shadow in all of these paintings it's meant to represent the light of god or enlightenment in some way so we're going to take a look at that in the next painting here we have another dramatic painting called the calling of saint matthew the calling of saint matthew is part of a cycle of of oil paintings that are humongous they're about 10 feet tall or 15 feet tall so they're bigger than life size in the contarelli chapel of san luigi dave francesi and um in rome and so this calling of saint matthew is riffing or playing a little bit on some of the ideas that we had looked at before um in terms of for instance the uh tribute money by massaccio if you look at the the sort of arrangement of hands and how things move across the picture plane here what you're going to see is that caravaggio is um playing this game kind of like what massaccio did where you have a game of finger pointing going across the picture plane across these these groupings of people in this instance what we have is saint matthew matthew was a tax collector who was leading a sort of unjust life after the after jesus was already off the planet and um he is in a tavern and he has also a religious epiphany he has a sort of calling where no one else can see jesus but at one point he seems called to participate in the christian life and so what caravaggio is doing is he's literally interpreting this by showing you that jesus is in the right hand side and you can identify him because he's wearing a toga and wearing uh biblical style clothing then the hand that is reaching towards him is sort of a reference to caravaggio's namesake which is michelangelo and that's the hand that we saw in uh in god giving the spark of life to adam and then it moves across to matthew who's pointing at himself saying who me and he's the only one who's clearly looking directly at jesus and what we have again is what he um what caravaggio does is he sort of updates the clothing styles by putting all of the apostles in clothing that would be worn during the 1600s and putting jesus in the biblical clothing and what he's trying to do is get you to relate to it it's also using a lot of the same elements that we saw before there's some backs to the viewer you're being pulled in by by looking over someone's shoulder in a way he also has this strong diagonal of light that's coming from the upper right hand corner and raking across it and beaming down on jesus and g not on jesus on matthew excuse me and and what this is is a representation of his enlightenment literally being enlightened and brought into the fold and being brought out of this earthly world where money matters here's a picture of the chapel where the paintings are hung on the left hand side you can actually see the painting itself and then you can see in the center of this picture is the painting that of saint matthew as he's writing his account of the life of jesus on the right hand side is the is is the martyrdom of saint matthew now the painting that we see here that's hanging in the chapel is the painting that was accepted but the painting that was actually made at first by caravaggio was rejected this painting on the left hand side of saint matthew and the angel only exists in in photographic reproductions that are black and white because it was destroyed i think during world war ii during the bombings it was rejected mainly if you look at it matthew has this sort of goofy look on his face like you know he doesn't know what he's doing and then referring back to the farnese ceiling we have slung leg theory where this angel who's wearing this diaphanous gown is languidly sort of pouring over matthew and guiding his hand and he kind of looks like oh what's going on here you know and um and uh this angel is sort of guiding his hand in almost a sexually provocative way then on top of that matthew's feet are bare and they're pointed at the viewer so of course the patrons are going to be like this is not an appropriate vision of who saint matthew is saint matthew uh you know the angel guided him almost like how we have stories about gabriel guiding muhammad uh it was you know it was it wasn't necessarily a recitation it was more like he was divinely inspired and you're making matthew look first of all kind of silly uh overly sexualized and he almost looks stupid so we're going to reject this painting now the interesting thing about it is even though caravaggio was constantly getting into trouble with his patrons he was enormously popular for two other painters and so there are these other painters called caravaggisti who follow in his footsteps and you can see in this instance we have a painting by rembrandt von rhein who is a dutch painter who worked mainly in amsterdam uh about 30 to uh to 70 years after caravaggio died and he's emulating caravaggio's use of real people real models he's emulating the sort of earth toned palette and the heavy chiaroscuro and the tenebrism but notice it's a little bit more respectful and matthew looks intelligent he looks like an intellectual he looks like someone who's actually um thinking about what he's doing and that angel is divinely inspiring him and a reference that you know is a popular reference to popular culture that this imagery is there was a movie um uh the goo goo dolls did a song for it now meg ryan was in it it's basically uh wings of desire i think the the movie was called in which at the beginning of the movie there's a german version and there's also an american version uh in which the angels are comforting people people can't see the angels but the angels are whispering in their ears and i'm pretty sure that's where the filmmakers got that iconography