Episode 60: Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of St. Andrew (1607)
VOICE 1: So it's a painting of a very elderly man right in the center of the painting. You see his torso with the ribs very prominent, being tied, not nailed, to a cross by another man who seems to be on a ladder and is in the process of tying the knots around one of his hands.
VOICE 2: And the feet are, of course, pure Caravaggio feet, like, dirty…
VOICE 1: Dirty nails.
VOICE 2: Cut, yeah.
VOICE 1: The sort of really ropey muscles of, like almost kind of attenuated muscles. It's like Body Worlds, sort of the anatomicalness of it. We're not just sort of being like, oh, look, there's some muscles, but it's like there's these bodies kind of in action.
It's quite dark, but there's a large shaft of light coming right at the torso of the crucified man. You can see sort of how red his neck is, sort of elderly, red, wrinkled neck and his beard. He looks very exhausted.
VOICE 2: Something that jumps out at me is the fact that the background is very sketchy and the colors are muted. So even the red I find muted.
VOICE 1: And grouped around the bottom of the cross are four or five other people, some of whom appear to be soldiers. One is wearing armor. And on the other side, an elderly woman, quite poorly dressed. No one's very clean. Everybody's quite wrinkled. No one's very pretty.
VOICE 2: The woman to the left, her eye, like there's this...the white in her eye, the glint in her eye, I think, is utter sorrow, I think, or pity or pain. And it's like she's, you know, her wizened face, it's like it's she's almost like she's a stand-in for like a lot of people or a lot of pain. Like that's sort of gathering in her.
We know it's Andrew who's on the cross. His body is bent to the right, and the person who is either tying him up or trying to get him to come down, I think...because he looks like he's already dead, so maybe he's trying to take him down, he's bent to the left, so there is there is opposition there. But there's also a connection because the loincloth, or whatever we want to call them, there's one line, basically, and I don't know, it could be like life on the left and death on the right.
And there is an intimacy to this painting that I find almost unbearing. It's so intimate. And I mean, we're at the same level as the people at the bottom, right. And it makes us, I think, both voyeurs and viewers. And that's kind of uncomfortable.
VOICE 1: It's not theatrical in the sort of, like, insulting sense of phony. Of feeling, feeling emotionally false. Like, I think there's that visceral, kind of, quality as well that theater is always aimed for.
We’ve all had that experience of sitting in a theater as the lights go down. You’ve just been leafing through a program, chatting with a friend, scrolling through your phone. The set sits inert on the stage, barely illuminated by the house lights. And then, the chatter falls away, like the sound has been absorbed into the upholstered seats. Real life gets put away, silenced, into our purses and pockets. The air becomes taut with anticipation. And then…the stage lights come up. The set comes alive, perfectly and brilliantly lit, with its entire quality changed. Because there’s something about artificial light that makes everything seem extra real. People come onstage, caked in make-up, but under these lights they appear normal. It’s a weird phenomenon, this artificial reality that feels realer than real. Plays have always been a little weird, if you think about them. You’re watching real people navigate real furniture, reciting their lines in real time, tapping into real emotions, with all their real consequences: I actually watched very real spittle fly out of Andrew Garfield’s mouth and hit Philip Seymour Hoffman’s face in the climactic confrontation between Biff and Willy Loman in “Death of Salesman” on Broadway, which I realize now I had the unique privilege of seeing. But in that moment, you knew how deeply they were really feeling it to make that scene so powerful. And yet. It was not real. They were actors. It’s a fiction, a story, onstage. And though it’s for us, us viewers, we kind of also feel like voyeurs. We’re witnessing something as we’re entertained by it. We could cross the invisible fourth wall into this drama and sit on the couch. I mean, obviously we shouldn’t. But we could. We could get sprayed with that spittle if we’re sitting in the front row. And that’s kind of weird, right? And so unique to the theater.
Of course, here at The Lonely Palette, we’re in the business of paintings, not theater. And no matter how realistic a painting is, you’d be hard pressed to confuse a painting of something with the thing itself. Heck, even when the Renaissance aesthetic ideal of a painting so real that it could be a window onto the world changed our technical understanding of what art was capable of, nobody looked at a Renaissance painting, with its uniform, all-over light sources and grid-like perspective and static figures and smacked right into that window like a bird. No one ever actually mistook it as real. But as the Renaissance evolved into the Baroque period, this window became less like a stage set under house lights. Those overhead lights flickered. The chatter quieted. And the stage lights came up. The artificial yet realer-than-real reality set in. A painting could feel emotionally real, uncomfortably real. You of course couldn’t walk into this enormous Caravaggio painting of St. Andrew’s crucifixion. But look at the gleam off the armor of the elbow that bends towards you. Look at the taut muscles and firm grip of a hand tightening knots. Look at the old man’s reddened, weathered neck. Look at the guard assessing the integrity of the crucifix with bureaucratic nonchalance. Okay, sure, you can’t walk into this painting. But you really feel like you could.
And it’s this theater that’s practically on your lap, this realer-than-realism that makes everyone feel like they know Caravaggio so intimately, and so intensely. When I told my sister I was writing this episode she said, “oh, I love Caravaggio. I think.” He’s just one of those painters that makes you go ick while you swoon. Because while he was, famously, a brilliant painter of high contrast chiaroscuro and intense facial expressions and fruit, he was also, infamously, a bad boy. Like, serving some serious hotheaded punkass realness. I mean, we actually know more about him from trial documents and court testimony than from the writings of his students or the workshops he led, because he probably didn’t have very many students, and most certainly didn’t lead any workshops like the other old masters of his generation. But he also didn’t do a lot of things the way the old masters did. For one thing, he didn’t grow old. He only actually produced art for about 18 years, before dying of a fever, on the run for murder, at the age of 39. But those are 18 extraordinary, prolific, punk-ass years. And today, we’re going to dive in deep.
Caravaggio was born Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio in 1571 in Milan, and the moved to the town of Caravaggio, about 35 kilometers outside of Milan to escape the plague that would ultimately kill both his father and grandfather on the same day in 1577 – and I mention this detail not only to explain his name, which, like Leonardo DaVinci is basically just the town he’s from, but to set the larger tone for this Caravaggio’s incredibly traumatic upbringing, and how steeped it was in instability and death right out of the gate. You know he has experienced the suffering he went on to paint, again and again. His mother, destitute and raising five children, died in 1584, when Caravaggio was only 13, which was the same year he started a four-year apprenticeship with Simone Peterzano, who referred to himself as a student of Titian, and is now known, more than anything, for teaching Caravaggio. But in the moment itself, Peterzano was a Mannerist painter – and we talked about Mannerism in episode 33 – interested in jarring, funky perspectives, close attention to detail, and the deep emotionalism of his figures. This style, as you can imagine, would have been incredibly formative for a young Caravaggio.
Not much is known in the rest of Caravaggio’s teenage years until he arrives in Rome at the age of 20, broke, desperate, and almost always spoiling for a fight. In the art world, he was kind of the equivalent of a 17th century artistic solo law practitioner, or, say, independent podcaster; artists in Rome at this time either worked in workshops or had wealthy patrons, but Caravaggio was painting for anyone and everyone on the open market, hoping to court those wealthy patrons that would hire him to fill the smaller palazzos and huge churches that were popping up in Rome like weeds. And in these early days in his career, his paycheck depended on his incomparable ability when it came to two artistic practices: painting flowers and fruit, and painting heads for larger paintings that weren’t actually attributed to him. In terms of the fruit, remember that when we looked at Rembrandt in episode 39, we talked about genre paintings, and how painting still lives of fruit was basically the bottom of the artistic food chain. But not in Caravaggio’s hands. His still lives were painted with exquisite, precise, juicy detail, like the bulbous, lusty grapes in his painting “Young Sick Bacchus” from this period, in 1593, or “Boy Bitten by a Lizard” from around 1596, where the flowers sitting in a cold, wet, sweating vase sits behind cherries you could practically pluck from the frame. His ability with still life was absolutely peerless. But for all their virtuosic rendering, these fruits were blasted by art historians of his time, who were clearly annoyed that he was wasting his talent on fruit that would have been rotting or out of season. And this criticism matters, because the establishment was always dinging Caravaggio for the quality of his subjects, from dirty-looking fruit to dirty-looking people. But there was, of course, a reason for why he painted what he did – he was dirt-poor. He was always only painting what he had access to, from crappy berries to friends who were well-acquainted with the streets. But seriously, what he did with them. And how extraordinary was his ability to look in the first place, to look around him and so deeply into these subjects, these crappy berries and grimy, dirty-footed vagrant friends, and capture them with the same sensitivity, the same sensuous, caught-in-the-moment quality and the kind of extraordinary attention to detail in both the botanically-correct vein of a leaf and a dirty toenail, and in doing so, elevating these grim subjects, and genres, to the level of history painting.
And of course, let’s talk about his ability to paint heads, and faces. The period that Caravaggio was active in, the Baroque, was no stranger to emotional expressiveness – we’ve talked about this at length in both episodes 8 and 33, so no need to rehash them here, other than to say that this was a time that embraced capturing the climax of a moment, both emotionally and narratively. Think about Michelangelo’s David, the pinnacle of Renaissance sculpture, who stands, just chilling, either before or after shooting that slingshot. Now think about Bernini’s David, a century later, his muscles taught, in the act of shooting it. This is the time we’re talking about, the height of the action. So it’s not like Caravaggio is necessarily doing anything novel when he paints his figures openmouthed with surprise, or fear, or pain, at the tippytop height of their emotional moment. He just does it so fucking well.
Caravaggio’s facial features are so potent and psychologically present that we completely understand why the 20th century art historian Andre Berne-Joffroy wrote that “what begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.” We’ve said again and again that modernism is this capturing of life lived in real time, the sense of snapshot, the feeling like subjects aren’t posed but are instead eternally moving and twisting and reacting and living their lives, and that the painting is just capturing the second they looked like this, in this caught moment, where we can walk right in and witness it. And while plenty of painters attempted, and even achieved, this Baroque sense of psychological immediacy, Caravaggio was clearly in a class of his own. Take his painting “Medusa” from 1597, which is meant to render the mythical Gorgon at the exact moment of her decapitation by Perseus – again, the climax of a scene. Just look at this face – the gaping, off-kilter mouth, the knit brow, the bulging eyes, the dynamism, the sheer gruesomeness. This is a decapitated head, meant, some say, to be a self-portrait, that still feels conscious and compelling, even in its moment of death. It’s insane.
And speaking of insane, let’s also talk about his technique. Infrared imaging has been done on his paintings to see beneath the paint, and has discovered that there are almost no preparatory drawings, and when there are, they’re barely changed from sketch to painting. Dude painted like this directly onto the canvas. And the themes that he repeatedly explored were informed by his technical choices: he favored strong, direct indoor light sources, never natural light, to create amazingly high-contrast, almost artificial tableaus of very real people – like I said, he didn’t use proper models, but friends willing to pose, and captured them with astonishing realism, unwashed hair, dirty fingernails and all. But what’s also extraordinary about his use of light is how, as National Gallery curator Letizia Treves says, it’s not just an aesthetic enhancement in his paintings, but actually underpins their meanings. She uses the example of his painting The Supper at Emmaus, from 1601, a watershed year in Caravaggio’s professional life, which we’ll come back to. But it’s this in specific painting that we see how Caravaggio uses light to pack a narrative punch. The painting is, again, the culminating moment of the action: the newly-risen Christ is in an inn off the road to Emmaus, and right at the moment that he’s blessing the bread, his disciples realize who he is – and it’s the light that represents that moment of recognition, with the obliviously innkeeper appropriately in the dark. Caravaggio was at the height of his professional career, painting a familiar subject in such a novel way, with what Treves describes as an extraordinary “freshness of vision,” and with such technical prowess and vivid immediacy: the leap of the figure out of the chair, the brilliantly foreshortened limbs and fingers, the utterly exquisite still life of the jug and fruit on the table. And here, again, it’s the light that binds the scene together like magnificent glue, too intense to be real, yet reinforcing the kind of realer-than-real theatricality of a stage, down to the shadows on the back wall. The compositional cropping of the painting makes us feel like we could be in the room, we could be tempted to push back that fruit that’s sitting so precariously on the table, while at the same time utterly enthralled with the scene that we’re watching onstage, as we sit in the darkened theater.
So picking up where we left off. Caravaggio’s in Rome, scraping by on fruit and faces, when, in 1599, he finally scored the commission that thrust him into the public eye, and became the sensation that he always knew he would be. Rome at the time was a must-visit training ground for artists and art students all around Europe. So even though Caravaggio barely left Rome, his reputation was spread far outside the confines of the city when these artists went home. Meanwhile, inside the city, he was gaining commissions left and right, a hugely sought-after genius who of course had matured enough out of his hotheaded punkass ways to not let this newfound fame go to his head. Oh no wait, jk, he was an absolute schmuck. From 1602 to 1606 – and again, we know this from the police records – he was arrested at least 11 times, known for painting for two weeks and then spending the next month swaggering from one tennis court to the next, sword in hand, challenging anyone he met to a fight. This is a man who refused an offer of holy water to wash away his venial sins with the reply that all of his sins were mortal. He was sued by his landlady. He was the subject of a vicious libel suit. He punched cops. And of course, no retelling of Caravaggio’s life would be complete without mentioning the infamous capital A capital I Artichoke Incident, when he was at a restaurant and presented with eight artichokes, half cooked in oil and half cooked in butter, and when he asked the waiter which was which, and the waiter replied that he should smell them, Caravaggio did what all normal restaurant patrons would do in response to that kind of cheek and threw them in the waiter’s face. To be fair, most of these crimes up to this point could be categorized as venial – it wasn’t until 1606 when he finally killed someone after losing a bet on a game of tennis and one of the players ended up on the business end of his sword. And so, six years into his meteoric fame, he fled Rome as a fugitive.
And okay, stories of hot buttery oily artichokes flung in someone’s face are always fun, obviously, but what’s really interesting about all this unhinged aggression is the affect that it had on his art – both inside and outside the frame, and both during his time in Rome and when he was on the run. Even at the height of his career and his commissions, his work had a kind of claustrophobic intensity and a potent undercurrent of violence – beheadings, sacrifices, calling for blood, gruesome biblical scenes always, of course, at the brilliantly lit climax of the action. I’ve always been particularly struck by “The Taking of Christ” from 1602, the moment of Judas’ betrayal of Christ. Everything about this painting feels frenzied, the reaching hands, the gasping mouths, and yet also so frozen in the moment, with limbs cut off on the sides, as much of a modernist snapshot as Degas’ Aunt Fanny from episode 4. The light is ostensibly coming from the moon, and of course, the sheen off the armor of the arresting officer is nothing short of sublime. But more than anything, you can feel the immediacy, the bodies gripping one another, pushed against each other, uncomfortably close, the weight of body against body, the snugness of the frame around them. You see an artist who knows bodies in throng. He knows the kind of mob energy where someone could end up run through with a sword.
And then, of course, he’s on the run, and his paintings after 1606 reflect this too. Which brings us to our painting of the day, “The Crucifixion of St. Andrew” from 1607. For all of Caravaggio’s trademark tight realism, there is a looser feel here – in the fabrics, in St. Andrew’s torso, in the background, in the musculature, in the ropey veins and wrinkles of the woman’s upturned face, even in this sheen off the armor of this official. During this period, quite understandably, he no longer in a studio, he was no longer using live models, and so much of his work is painting types, those heads and facial expressions that he cut his teeth on before moving to Rome. His work during this time is pared down to their essentials – a sense of a broad gesture, larger facial expressions, more rhetorical, less subtle, less attention paid to surface detail, so no perfectly-rendered baskets of fruit to reach out and touch. And while there is of course no sense that these paintings are in any way dashed off, or, to be sure, any less emotional, their complexity, as Letizia Treves says, is under the surface.
And then, only three years after this painted was painted, Caravaggio died, in exile, alone. By 1610, he had skirted in and out of Naples, for four whole years, waiting for the pope to pardon him for the murder, and when he did, Caravaggio boarded a boat with his paintings, was arrested under false pretenses, was released after both the boat and the paintings were gone, and then attempted to reach Rome on foot, caught a fever, and just…died. This brilliant painter never had the chance to become an old master. And he never trained the legions of students in his style to carry on his legacy.
But artists did anyway. The impact on the art world from these 18 prolific, punk-ass years is incalculable. And his death sent seismic ripples through the art world. Artists and patrons scrambled to buy his paintings and order commissions from his followers. It even had a name, “Caravaggism,” its followers the “Caravaggisti”, as all those artists I mentioned who had flocked to Rome and then home again brought his techniques with them, from his meticulous rendering of the natural world to his use of live models to his brilliant singular light source. It should be noted, for example, that Caravaggio himself never used a single candle in his work, and that the contemporary French painter Georges De La Tour never went to Italy, or saw a single Caravaggio painting in person. And yet Caravaggio is always credited with influencing De La Tour’s dark background and flickering illumination.
But then, as always happens, the pendulum swings back, Caravaggism fell out of favor in the middle of the 17th century, and then came the critics waving their pitchforks. 18th century neoclassical painters seriously couldn’t clutch their pearls fast enough, decrying that Caravaggio “set out destroy art with his base realism.” 19th century art historians were also positively disgusted with him, with noted priss John Ruskin, for example, describing Caravaggio’s work as dull and vulgar, that he overlooked beauty in favor of “horror and ugliness, and the filthiness of sin.” I mean, go off John Ruskin, but if this is torture, chain me to the wall.
Fortunately, early 20th century art historians got their heads back on straight, and began talking about Caravaggio in the terms he deserved, noting that so many beloved 17th century artists, from Vermeer to Rembrandt flat-out wouldn’t have existed without Caravaggio’s influence, and that the trajectory of neoclassicism and mid-19th century Realism would have been irrevocably altered, much as it would have pained them to admit it. This rediscovery culminated in a landmark exhibition in Milan in 1951 and brought to Caravaggio the renewed, squeamish swoony attention that he currently enjoys, and his continued influence not only on contemporary art, and contemporary audiences, but on contemporary cinematography. “Caravaggio pervaded the entirety of the bar sequences in Mean Streets,” Martin Scorsese said in an interview. And you see it, the climactic moments, the dingy group scenes, people pulled from the street, leaping from their chairs, and, more than anything, the use of powerful, determined single-source light that creates that artificial realer-than-realness, ideal for a cinematic moment. “Caravaggio,” Scorsese concludes, “would have made a great filmmaker, there’s no doubt about it.”
I’m sure he would have. But the thing is, we go to plays, and art museums, for that matter, for something that we don’t get in films. And it feels like this is something that Caravaggio knew, even with his cinematic genius. Because we want something realer than real. We want to feel like we could get spittle, or a piping hot plate of artichokes, thrown in our faces. We want to feel the emotion behind them both. We want air that is taut with anticipation, grapes we feel like we can eat, biblical stories painted with humane, almost uncomfortable empathy. Gods and gorgons, angels and hothead punks, that could be us, that actually are us, eternally moving and twisting and reacting and living our lives. Dirty fingernails and all.
CREDITS:
Special thanks to Roberta Barker, Patreon patron extraordinaire, for suggesting this episode, and her friend, Maria Euchner, for their beautiful descriptions at the top. Thanks as ever to Debbie Blicher for her production help. For more information, past episodes, and all the high-contrast, dirty-footed images, head to The Lonely Palette dot com, and you can also like us on facebook, follow us on twitter @lonelypalette, or on Instagram @thelonelypalette, and believe it or not, leaving a rating and review on apple podcasts is STILL a great way for newbies to discover the show, so pop on over and smash those five stars, if you’re so inclined. It is hugely appreciated.
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