by Central London’s most obscure new show isn’t about a Hollywood star treading the West End, or a grand premiere in Leicester Square. Instead, unsurprisingly, it is a dark room with two paintings in the National Gallery.
I was there on Thursday and I couldn’t believe my eyes as queues flowed out of Room One of the Trafalgar Square site and down the stairs, with a sports team on hand to control the crowd (well, queue keeping it orderly – this is the National Gallery after all).
The Last Caravaggio is the most popular small-scale show in that room since two of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers were hung side by side there ten years ago. Of course, it helps that the display is free, but it also shows the power of the Italian old masters to capture the imagination of visitors.
The gallery’s own Caravaggio show, Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist, along with the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, which traveled over from Italy for the first time in 20 years – was for a major exhibition of the artist’s late work and was caused the same frenzy in the National Gallery.
Although the artist was an overnight celebrity in his own time, Gabriele Finaldi, the gallery’s director, told me that this renewed embrace of Caravaggio is recent (in terms of art history), since the scholarship in the fifties.
Now, four hundred years after his death, why are crowds drawn to his work and so many people?
Firstly, there is the undoubted quality and arresting nature of the pictures; the bloody scenes we are immersed in – this is the violence close to ourselves – and the raw emotion they show.
That’s the bold way he puts those scenes together. Stand in front of Saint Ursula (good luck getting a prime spot – sharpen your elbows) and you realize the painter has dropped you right into the middle of the action. You are not a spectator, you are part of the chaos that has just happened. It’s immediate, it’s emotional.
His style was also revolutionary at the time, with the use of dark and light (apply your friends to the technical term chiaroscuro) making these figures move towards you, only heightening the drama. It’s hard not to turn your back to the severed head of John the Baptist creeping towards you in the gallery’s own painting.
The works feel very modern. They are gritty, using real people with dirty faces, torn clothes, with broken fingers, not the ideal representations of the scenes that were so popular at the time. “It was completely revolutionary and not without criticism. People were surprised by this,” National Gallery curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper told me at a press preview of the show earlier this week. “There was a lot of moral panic.”
Centuries before the advent of film, Caravaggio could be said to have a director’s eye for composition and action, and that also kept him relevant. He has been highly praised by notables including Martin Scorsese, who once wrote, “He would have been a great filmmaker, no doubt about it” citing his work as an influence on Mean Streets and Taxi Driver .
“The pictures are very cinematic,” Whitlum-Cooper told me. “They’re as big as you are, and you’re right in front of them, there’s a presence and a punch to it – he obviously didn’t know about cinema – but it speaks to how we look at things. It immerses you. You’re in it.”
Besides, Caravaggio had a lurid backstory, and is always famous, for better or for worse. He was the archetype of the bad boy artist. The National Gallery’s website talks about how he would jest with a sword “never ready to engage in a fight or an argument… Caravaggio was arrested several times for, among other things, cutting an enemy’s cloak, cutting a plate of artichokes throwing at a waiter, scaring a guard and abusing the police.”
In fact, his life could easily justify a polished drama drama. Because, one day, he pushed it too far, and killed a rival in a sword fight. He was forced to flee Rome, first to Malta and then Naples, even there with many examples of his temper getting the better of him – at one point, he was permanently disfigured while fighting. Rome pardoned him, but he was mistakenly arrested on his way back, he was released but died of malaria before he could return.
Whitlum-Cooper says her story “reads like a movie script. The violence and everything else. Caravaggio has an almost tragic flaw – he can’t let anything good happen, he’s so self-destructive.” To connect him with his contemporaries over here, there is something Shakespearean about his story.
Speaking of prestige drama, Caravaggio is at the forefront of it – he was a major influence on the brilliant new adaptation of Ripley, which arrived on Netflix earlier this month starring Andrew Scott. There are almost always references to the works in the show, parallel to the artist’s life story, influences on how it was filmed, and, in one episode, the artist even makes a surprise appearance3.
In fact, Whitlum-Cooper said she had to go watch the show because so many people were asking her about it. Before she did I asked why Caravaggio is still so popular. “He changed the world and continues to do so today,” she replied.
The hottest (free) ticket in town was painted in 1610 and continues to draw crowds today – although waiters will be hoping artichokes are left off the menu in the National Gallery cafe.
The Last Caravaggio is at the National Gallery until July 21; nationalgallery.org.uk
