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When cinematographers talk about their craft, many are keen to reference paintings as a window into their work. Some of them cite specific artists: Rembrandt (Gordon Willis), Georges de la Tour (Nestor Almendros), Edward Hopper (Laszlo Kovacs), Vittore Carpaccio (Vittorio Storaro)—- of course, Vermeer for all of them. However, no painter has so universally been a lodestone for cinematographers as the early 17th century Italian, Michelangelo Merissi, born in Milan, but whose early childhood was spent in the Lombardy town that is the source of his name—Caravaggio.
Chalk portrait of Caravaggio, c. 1621 by Ottavio Leoni. Musee Jacquemart Andre
For art historians as well as for the general public, the dramatic details of Caravaggio’s life command center stage. Shakespeare himself could not have created a more compellingly complex character: part devil—prey to street fights and sordid sexual encounters; part angel—a master of deeply emotive characters and religious ecstasy captured in dramas on painted canvas.
Caravaggio apprenticed in and came out of a Lombardian tradition of naturalistic painting that was as distant in style as it was in geography from the Mannerist conceits that had prevailed in Roman and Vatican ecclesiastical painting since the Renaissance. The reforms of the Council of Trent, held from 1545 to 1563, offered a ready forum for artists who could paint in this newly realistic vein; the Counter Reformation of the Catholic Church sought art and music that was more accessible to the faithful. Caravaggio was the right man for the right time. He painted from life models, not idealized fantasies—often-street urchins, rent boys and prostitutes. Several times, he became mired in controversy when a model for a saint or the Madonna was recognized by sponsoring bishops or cardinals to be a known courtesan. Some commissions were initially rejected and changes were ordered because of his warts and all rendering of models, including martyrdoms of saints with filthy feet, scars and body blemishes. A Madonna was painted for a small altar in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It stayed there for only two days. A cardinal’s secretary (according to a Wikipedia entry) wrote:
In this painting there are but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust. . . One would say that it is a work made by a painter that can paint well, but of a dark spirit, and who had been for a lot of time far from God, from His adoration, and from any good thought.
Continue reading ‘The Lost Painting: A Caravaggio Found’
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