1571-1610 • Italian • Painter • Baroque
"Has anyone else managed to paint as successfully as this evil genius, who worked naturally, almost without precepts, without doctrine, without study, but only with the strength of his talent, with nothing but nature before him, which he simply copied in his amazing way? " - Vencincio Carducho, 1633
In his own time, Caravaggio was compared to the Anti-Christ, whose "false miracles" would lead great numbers of people, deceived and moved by his paintings, straight to hell. POUSSIN, who hated him, said, "Caravaggio came into the world to be the ruin of painting." Caravaggio was transgressive and radical in his personal life as well as in his public art. His criminality was heinous and cowardly-he attacked one of his victims with a sword, from behind-he was dangerous and unpredictable. He killed a man in a dispute over a wager on a tennis match and was himself murderously beaten. Little defense of his behavior is possible, though modern scholars have proposed alternative readings of the historical sources that discuss Caravaggio, and these range from blaming the prejudice of his contemporary biographers to the effort by later writers to mythologize his violence. "The miracle of Caravaggio is that a man personally so out of control ever mustered the discipline to make paintings, much less produce masterpieces," Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey wrote in 1987, an adequate summing up. Caravaggio's unprecedented "realism," or NATURALISM, was anti-IDEAL to begin with and adopted the everyday world of the lower classes as a conventional setting. In two versions of Supper at Emmaus (1601 and 1606), the news of Christ's resurrection is presented, and the reaction to it becomes, in the later work, increasingly subtle, personal, and complex. Caravaggio seems to be following an effort to popularize CounterReformation revivalism as it was promoted by Saint Philip Neri, founder of an order called the Oratorians. Caravaggio set ordinary people in unexceptional settings, and then he exploded the ordinary with the miraculous. Light was his means of exposing idea and feeling, and his dramatic use of it was unprecedented (see CHIAROSCURO) little wonder his detractors worried about his power of persuasion. His contrast of light and shadow, bright and dark, is especially eerie in combination with the undercurrent of outrage in his works the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1608) is an example: The man holding a knife behind his back stands astride the naked John, forcing his head against the ground. At the ready is the charger, or platter, on which the severed head will be given to Salome (as indeed it is in another of Caravaggio's paintings).
Unsettled drama also permeates Caravaggio's blatantly confrontational homoerotic paintings, with their seductive, androgynous figures. His first major PATRON, Cardinal del Monte, was a man who lived a self-indulgent life, mainly in the company of young boys dressed up as girls. Caravaggio resided in Monte's household for a time and reflected his sponsor's taste in a series of images. In Bacchus (1597-98), the god offers the viewer a goblet of wine, lounges like a Roman sybarite, and has before him a luscious bowl of ripe fruit that is, on closer inspection, rotting. Beauty and decadence, light and dark, ordinary people and strong emotion are characteristics of Caravaggio's paintings. His devotion to naturalism was so pronounced in the Death of the Virgin ( 1605-06)-the Virgin so clearly looks like a corpse-that the fathers who commissioned it for a chapel in the Roman church of Santa Mariadella Scala found the painting offensive and rejected it.
(They were not the only people who refused a work after commissioning it from Caravaggio.)
RUBENS, in Italy about that time, persuaded his own patron, the Duke of Mantua, to buy the Death of the Virgin.When the BAROQUE era is seen as an international wave with a number of national styles, it is clear that Caravaggio precipitated the first, "Early Baroque," in Italy, and that his influence on artists of France, the Netherlands, and Spain, as well as of Italy, was decisive.
Caravaggisti
Painters who came under the influence of CARAVAGGIO and adopted his style of painting, even if only briefly (e.g.,BAGLIONE).
Caricature
Based on exaggeration or mockery of physical traits, the caricature is a comic portrait, or a scene for ridicule, satire, and burlesque. The decoration of the famous sound box of a Mesopotamian lyre of c. 2600 BCE, in which animals play the roles of people, may be among the earliest caricatures. Fragments of POTTERY from ancient Egypt dated c. 129 5-1070 BCE have paintings in which cats and mice are dressed as humans in what seem to be parodies of the upper classes. Social satire inspires much caricature. Artists of ancient Greece and Rome practiced caricature, although it was their poets and dramatists who used it most effectively. MEDIEVAL images of Jews frequently took the form of wicked caricature, as did propagandistic PRINTS of the leaders of the Catholic and Protestant Churches during the 16th-century Reformation.
The initiation of caricature as serious art is generally attributed to Annibale CARRACCI in the last decade of the 16th century. Caricature as political attack flourished in England during the 18th and 19th centuries, when artists often sold directly to the public, not to avoid editorial infringement on their point of view but, rather, to profit directly from the party or candidate offering the best price (HOGARTH was an exception). Major caricaturists in England were James Gillray (1757-1815); Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827); George Cruickshank (1792-1878); and TENNIEL Their work was rarely credited as art, but the very people who denounced it (e.g., WALPOLE) also collected it. Somehow the work of the French caricaturist DAUMIER has fared better in entering the CANON, while for the most part; work of the English artists did not. The· ephemeral nature of political satire-the fodder of caricature-is doubtless the cause of its short life and lack of appreciation, though the artist's drawing skill is frequently exceptional. The distinction between caricature and CARTOON (in the modern sense of the word) blurred during the 19th century, though "caricature" is the staple of political cartooning. Caricature remains fundamentally "purposeful deformation of the appearance of the original," as Richard Brilliant writes. And it presumes a shared culture, for, as he adds, "recognition of the person to be portrayed is essential. ... To be successful, hence recognized, the caricature depends on the viewer's prior knowledge of the original and on the deformation of those facial features thought to be most typical of the subject."