by ‘Do you like Caravaggio?’ asks wealthy Dickie Greenleaf from his enigmatic new friend, Tom Ripley, early in the current Netflix drama based on the acclaimed Patricia Highsmith thriller, The talented Mr. Ripley. The question is a type of test, and more than one class. It is intended as a measure of character, of soul. For Greenleaf, the playboy son of an American shipping steward on permanent vacation on the Amalfi coast, the answer could serve as a key, unlocking a world of shared culture and tastes.
Questions about Caravaggio are also being asked in London as the National Gallery opens its doors to a show examining the last work of the artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, which is on display in Britain for the first time in 20 years. His masterpiece 1610, Martyr Saint Ursulaloaned by a gallery in Naples and is a large shadowy study of violence and religious fervor.
In preparation for the show, British art critics took out their biggest vocabulary to hear again about the great star of Baroque ‘n’ art. “It is hypnotic,” wrote the Guardianand Jonathan Jones last week, urging theatergoers to see his static play for free, instead of paying for West End tickets. They can also stare at Caravaggio himself, who stands to one side of the figure of the saint, in the last self-portrait he painted months before he died at 38. This, after all, is the man who changed all through emotional introduction. severity and recognizable humanity into the business of portraying biblical stories.
“It’s hard for us to understand now how different his work is from the work that came before,” says National Gallery curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, explaining how Caravaggio pushed back the artistic tradition of beautiful objects creation above all else. “It’s the opposite. Even when we come across these images without the usual level of religious knowledge then, they can communicate. One of his innovations was realism, you see real people with goitres and wrinkles. He even painted the famous prostitutes of the city.”
What inspired this stark new vision? Whitlum-Cooper speculates that the artist’s childhood was in Milan, a city ravaged by plague and ruled by the extraordinary Cardinal Borromeo: “There is a sense of need to feel; for things to be true, even to perform self-rehearsal actions. It’s tough.”
She suspects that her artistic freedom came from the lack of formal training as an apprentice in an artist’s studio. “He hadn’t even learned how to paint frescoes when he signed up to do it. And there is no evidence of sketches under the paint. It looks like he applied paint directly, with real bravura.”
Because of that ‘cinematic’ lighting, Caravaggio is a superstar in the screen age
Jonathan Jones, the Guardian
Caravaggio appeared again and again in the new Ripley a series, in scenes in Naples and, later in Rome, which is only a geographical coincidence. As Jones said looking at Saint Ursula: “That ‘cinematic’ lighting made Caravaggio a superstar of the screen age.” The artist’s celebrated chiaroscuro has fascinated photographers and filmmakers for many years: in fact, it started from almost the first moment it was possible to play around with real light, with electric bulbs and projectors, rather than paint.
“There’s something about the way it bends and frames the image. We see it as a cinematic language,” says Whitlum-Cooper. “The size of the canvas also means that the viewer is almost done with the image; almost participates.”
Andrew Graham-Dixon, author of the 2010 book, Caravaggio: Sacred and Prophetic Life, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini is thought to have been the first to watch it on screen. “Then Martin Scorsese, of course. When he was doing Middle Streets he used to go as far as the Met to study the Caravaggio. He designed the film around its framing, by starting a scene in the middle of the action; usually with someone doing something horrible, like torturing someone.” Scorsese added that he was immediately taken with the work, explaining: “At first I related to them because of the moment he chose to portray in the story. Conversion of Saint Paul, Judith Beheading Holofernes: he was choosing a moment that wasn’t quite the moment the action started … he would have been a great filmmaker, no doubt about it.”
For Graham-Dixon it’s not just light and shadow, but presence that still inspires directors. “Perspective for artists was a great success. This meant losing any sense of what you were meant to be looking at, like a school photograph. Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro perspective was sabotaged and allowed him to emphasize details. If he thought, ‘I just want to show the tear on his face catching the light,’ well, the Chiaroscuro allowed him to do that. This is the lightning strike he brought to the world of art.”
And the legacy of cinema goes beyond camera work. The artist’s life has also been tackled on screen. The movie Derek Jarman 1986. Caravaggiohe played up his sins, and made an Italian art house biopic 2022, Shadow of Caravaggio, focused on the censorship of his art. Graham-Dixon’s own book has just been bought by an American film company, he says.
The exhibition at the National Caravaggio includes the gallery itself, Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist. Headings were a favorite theme. Towards the end of the Ripley A series of museum guides in the Galleria Borghese are heard describing an equally bloody painting, David with the Head of Goliath. “Caravaggio connects the murderer and the victim by portraying David as compassionate in the way he looks at the severed head,” the tourists are told, as Ripley, now a murderer himself, listens in.
Steven Zaillian’s black and white adaptation makes much of the extraordinary life of the painter, who was on the run for murder, like Andrew Scott’s “talented” anti-hero Highsmith. In a flashback of 350 years in the final episode, Zaillian shows the ghost of the artist – painting him hiding from the Knights of St. John while they are being tracked down, just as Ripley comes upon the police. “I thought that little parallel was interesting,” said the director.
In Naples Ripley is also taken to see a Caravaggio that has hung in the Pio Monte della Misericordia for over four hundred years in an incident, Seven Mercy, which takes its title from the picture. In this background two men can be seen preparing a body for burial. Ripley discovers that it was painted a year after the artist himself was accused of murder in Rome. Caravaggio, probably vilified because of homosexuality, then dropped by his patrons and struggling to pay bills, soon began a downward spiral that gained speed when his face was disfigured in a knife attack outside a Neapolitan hotel. He had already been sentenced to death for killing Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 in a row after a tennis match. The outlaw fled to Naples, and Ripley faced Rome under an assumed identity. Once there the killer visits the San Luigi dei Francesi, where there are three Caravaggios, one of which shows an assassin brandishing a sword.
Ripley has a terrible glamor in the Caravaggio way and this is an uncomfortable fact for Whitlum-Cooper: “The way we fetishize violence is problematic. It does not feel for Black women or men who may have committed crimes. So we tried to counterbalance that in the show with an emphasis on the story of St. Ursula.”
Related: Review of The Last Caravaggio – an unmissable and darkly murdered finale
Caravaggio’s final artistic inspiration was to do full justice to an early Christian princess from Britain who was said to have traveled to marry a pagan prince, according to a mystical religious text, The Golden Legend. The 11,000 virgins who were with Ursula were then killed in Cologne, but not before “the chief” offered the princess her hand in marriage. When she went down to him he shot her with an arrow. The painting shows the fatal act in a close, life-like scale.
“Many were against Caravaggio’s style. He was on the losing side of a religious struggle about whether the church is for the poor or should be controlled by the rich,” says Graham-Dixon. “The clergy did not want pictures that would suggest that the religion was for the masses. They wanted the old style of paintings, where the Virgin Mary is like the Queen of Heaven, not like some poor woman in a night shelter.”
Before Caravaggio’s death in southern Tuscany, when he was still on the run he probably succumbed to malaria, his creative influence was already felt in Naples and Sicily, which were Spanish possessions at the time. This is how his great effect on European art, and then on film, was seeded, according to Graham-Dixon: “Nobody was rooting for him then, except for all the other artists who couldn’t remove his work out of their heads. “
