Art History: What Makes a Caravaggio?

please join me in welcoming Frederick Altran Warren Isetta what's that okay good tonight's topic celebrates the focused exhibition located near the MFA Fenway entrance it's a four painting show called Caravaggio and connoisseurship you've got two turns who and a what who is got Avadh you and kind of kind of so ship as to what and both topics are gripping one though the former may have more human interest and the latter does take some patience Caravaggio lived from 1570 won the 1610 and he's one of the most fascinating interest artists in history of art it was a game-changer in Baroque Rome he was a genius a scoundrel a murderer connoisseurship by contrast is often seen as arcane pursuit but it can also be fascinating connoisseurship is the process based largely on visual evidence of determining a works authorship and quality the term comes from the French verb caneta to know and the analogy might be with the practice of law in that one needs to marshal the evidence available in order to persuade a judge or a jury now we all believed in seeking the truth but I think we could also agree that a goal is to convince others of the validity of your arguments you can't just push a button on a machine and it will say gavage o or not kind of a joke you need to survey the visual evidence have a good memory look at lots of originals look again use photographs apply other data but really use your eye and come to one's own conclusion so my lecture we'll discuss the highlights and the lowlights of Caravaggio's briefs but storied career I'll be combining both great art and brutish behavior I'll also try to let you in on some of the secrets of how our destroyers approach connoisseurship in the hopes that you all will become more active observers of paintings going forward on September 24th 1600 caravaggio signed a contract for a second major public commission in Rome - canvases for the Chapel of Tibet Eochaid ozzie in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo this is the conversion of st. Paul it's a moment where Saul on the road to Damascus he had been a persecutor of Christians he suddenly struck to the ground and blinded by heavenly light God calls out Saul Saul why do you persecute me in this painting part of a long tradition of the subjects depicts the very moment of this conversion now think about what's not in this picture you don't have God above or heavenly light or clouds parting you don't have lots of other soldiers around you don't have the road to Damascus itself and you don't have a vast landscape lots of other soldiers indeed this picture is stripped down and tightly focused now the painting of the conversion of Paul which is on the viewers right there were two paintings that a pair one on the right one a lot this is on the right when you look into the chapel the scene is dominated by the looming body of the horse which is gingerly trying not to step on its Rider there's a remarkable sharp focus on details and textures on almost photographic precision strong lighting force increases the drama and of course is required by the let the narrative this has to be the blinding heavenly light that converts Paul now the proportions in kind of age are not always convincing I find it kind of hard to imagine how this head is connected to those feet and legs in the groom I don't necessarily belong to the same figure but the focus on details is just remarkable and also typical Caravaggio besides a little shakiness in his proportions let's say is there is no witness to the event in the painting there no onlookers throwing out their arms and wondering what's happened or wondering why the figure of Paul is suddenly been silenced the groom in fact is out of the light and indeed in the sense he's out of the loop he does not understand the magnitude of what has just happened the witness to this painting would in fact be the priest at the altar and any of the shippers who were close enough at a time of math and it's not just the overall effect but the details are remarkable just look at the way the softness of Paul's clothing the gleam of the metal their remarkable detail here is young innocent face interestingly not shown as a bearded older man and then the wonderful gleam of his heavy helmet and the soft the downy feather that is part of his costume so not just the overall claustrophobic effect but individual details brilliantly observed and in fact this is the companion painting at crucifixion of st. Peter on the opposite wall the viewers left it's almost painful to look at this thing according to tradition Peter refused to be crucified upright as Christ was he did not feel he deserved such a death so he was crucified upside down to underscore his humility the painting is one of violent diagonals strong angles and equally powerful lighting as the previous picture stark and indeed almost packs a punch the human aspect is almost too much notice the extremely long nails going through the hands and the feet of Peter for example or though almost embarrassing certainly eyebrow-raising enormous rear end of this figure who is pushing the cross of Peter up also knows the man's dirty feet I mean really bringing it right down into our world again no witnesses the scene takes place at night and is similarly very tightly cropped now this shows the chapel interior it makes clear that kind of odd you considered not just individual canvases but their placement within the whole you'll notice for example that the light in each painting mirrors the natural light in the space and also the paint the paintings seem to open up when viewed from several steps before the entrance to the chapel indeed presupposing the ideal viewing place average person not a priest could only get about as far as we can in this photograph kind of odd just two paintings with their strong crisp focus and strong lighting completely dominate the altarpiece by neibling Adachi of the Assumption now our four painting exhibition is part of a series of visiting masterpieces I curated a small show last fall of Piero della Francesca Senegal iya Madonna this was a one painting exhibition we wanted to really strip it down and let a single Renaissance masterpiece from the 14 70s do the talking so this is probably the last completed painting of Piero della Francesca he is a sort of thinks like character paintings of complete silence the bureau as the reputation in Italy and in Britain a bit like Vermeer does to us an artist of very limited or he want to track them all down there's even a pier della francesca trail going from a red so to Urbino to look at these works we had this painting about this big so blown up on a screen though it's Christmas is still evident and this painting came to us because it was had been stolen and then recovered within a year in the 1970s recovered by the Carabinieri which is a branch of the Italian military police they have a special art squad and to display their crime fighting prowess they decided over the last few years to show several examples of works that had been lost and then recovered by them and so the painting came in September accompanied by Luigi courts Alessa the deputy director of the category art squad and I'll let you try and guess which one is the Italian colonel next in this series which I also was the curator for is this one visiting masterpieces plural Caravaggio and connoisseurship and it's going on until June 15th so if you have any hard to impress out-of-town friends get on the move them now this is a four painting show and it's much more complex in its aims in that we're not just talking about a single work of art but really an artist too and we're also trying to involve our visitors in the practice of connoisseurship we have for Lawrence for loans from Italy too from Rome and too from Florence the first one the fortune teller this could have been alone the visiting masterpiece and in a way it has the place of honor so on the sort of far wall in the exhibition and it's a marvelous picture it's a you can see it's a young man dressed very beautifully my sort of my feeling is this is this poor young guy who is a wealthy kid it's his first day out alone there's some wonderful details in this and he is going out on the Roman Street there's a very pretty girl who's by his costume we know she's a gypsy and she is reading his palm tracing the lines in his hand she's also clearly beguiling his eyes look right in he doesn't notice them that she is in fact going to slip his ring off his hand so it's a pickpocketing so this is an example of the early Sean R works that is from daily life that Caravaggio first made his fame in Rome and then we contrast that with another picture from Rome a painting from a small town outside of Rome beautiful one of st. Francis and meditation and indeed it's a very moving work there's a wonderful humility of the Saint in his patched habit you can see all the repairs and the holes he's in a dark place a cave or a grotto he's holds the skull in his hands and of course meditating on mortality strong lighting from the upper left which becomes a kind of Caravaggio trademark and he much of its space in fact is in shadow so it's a wonderful painting really very beautiful and this is a key reminder that Caravaggio as we saw in the Taurasi chapel just a minute ago with a conversion of Paul and the crucifixion of Peter Caravaggio wanted to make it as a painter of religious paintings in public settings that's oh he was a radical in many ways but he wanted big public Church commissions and indeed he is one of the great religious painters of the whole Baroque period so besides those two paintings we also have two portraits these are both from Florence this shows Maffeo Barberini painted about 1596 from a private collection of flora and this is the controversial one in the show the shows to describe more about that later but it was shows the sitter is mid-20s he becomes the future Pope it becomes open urban the eighth in 1623 that's the urban days Barberini with the great patron of the sculptor Bernini among other many other artists and then another painting one so good this also could have stood alone as a visiting masterpiece this and this shows the knight of Malta we now believe him to be fraud Tonio Martelli shown about 1608 and so this is you know full decade after the earlier painting and only about two years before Caravaggio died there's depending on how you count and how many you think are bike a debauch is about eight or so in the United States and so to bring four or maybe four to Boston is quite an accomplishment itself and you see here the the paint handling is much looser and freer as Caravaggio gradually adopted swifter more abbreviated brushstrokes in fact many visitors have pointed out to me that this looks a lot like a Rembrandt to them though this was painted when the Dutch master was only four years old now who what's cutter Biagio well we actually know what he looks like it seems dude this is a posthumous portrait a drawing by W Leone but this is in fact is confirmed by self-portraits within paintings this is a commissioned just before the Taurasi chapel the famous martyrdom of Saint Matthew there's the gospel writer they're about to be killed in a space that looks like a bath and an angel very beautifully is leaning down ever so slowly from this cloud to hand a palm of martyrdom to the saint right there very moving picture and look in the background you'll see a sad face in fact and that's kind of odd you himself and in fact even sort of more dramatically he seems to have painted himself as the head of Goliath now everyone of course we all think that were to some extent victims but got a voucher really thought he was a victim as I hate there so this is ready to end of his life now his who was kind of agile well his full name was Michelangelo met easy Emme risi and threw an enormous amount of archival research in the past 50 years we know a lot about him he is born in Milan in 1571 and he's baptized on the 30th of September 15 771 but his nickname was always Caravaggio after the town near Milan where his family came from in 1584 he's apprenticed in Milan to Simoni Pedro Sano who claimed to be a pupil of Titian claimed and kind of a Jew though reaches Rome in the summer of 1592 about twenty-one years old and he was searching for patrons trying to make his way our young artists of enormous talent but he often found himself in great in great trouble he had regular arrests for carrying a sword without permission and often would get into fights and then there is the artichoke story so much of caught what we know about Caravaggio in fact comes from archival documents in particularly the police blotter in in Rome in the 1590s an early first decade as the 1600s this is the statement to the police by pietro antonio de focaccia who's a waiter this is the 26th of April 1604 quote at about 1700 clock which is lunchtime the accused together with two other people was eating in the mores restaurant at La Maddalena for I work as a waiter I brought them eight cooked artichokes four cooked in butter and four fried and oil the accused asked me which were cooked in butter and which were fried in oil I told him to smell them which would easily enable him to tell the difference he got angry without saying anything or grabbed an earthenware dish and hit me on the cheek at the level of my mustache injuring me and then he got up and grabbed his friend's sword which is lying on the table intending perhaps to strike me with it but I got up and came here to the police station to make a formal complaint static I think Whitey Bulger has nothing on 17th century Rome so you can see this guy is a hothead arguing with pulling out swords getting to fights throwing things at waiters he's a difficult guy but I want to also underscore how amazing and radical his art was imagine a world where the typical kind of paintings were things like this a Federico zucrow painter who works for a long time in Rome pictures called the Assumption but more actually kind of Madonna with Saint John the Baptist and st. Catherine this is a typical it's slightly innervated painting of what we might call vaner mannerism attired version of an elegant style notice the elongated bodies the hyper elegance and the somewhat frozen poses idealized spaces and a certain overbearing lassitude in this context elegant people not a lot going on kind of adjust earliest works or revolutionary if you grew up with something like that and then started seeing things like this quite extraordinary these are larger-than-life figures they're taken from real life the costumes are up to date and not timeless kind of classical drapery it's a situation right from the Roman streets kind of amusing pickpocket at this kind of moment you want to check your own pockets to make sure you're not going to be taken and in a remarkable attention to tactile concerns right around the same type same time Caravaggio then would increase from two to three figures wonderful painting in the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth and we've got again a young man who's being taken advantage of it's quite a sophisticated Morse code system here he's got it with his worn gloves he's making very clear what the hand is here but that's not even enough right this guy's pulling other got other cards if not cards up his sleeve tucked into its belt and so it's clear what directions the game is going to go and then around the same time this wonderful painting of Bacchus from the ofit's II on the same basis in fact crop up again and again and some of them indeed seem very similar to cutter by just own and this makes also reminds us that kind of idea was a still-life painter of astonishing facility and in fact in its early years in Rome he had a sort of specialty that the kind of subcontractor to come in and paint still-life sections with in other people's works and so we've got the god of wine offering us a glass now now it's not the god of behind it's clearly a handsome young boy in Rome in the 1590s also it's pretty clear to me that something else in addition to a glass of wine is being offered here is breakthrough gotta buy just break through with the calling of Saint Matthew this is a come to Le Chapel in the French church san luigi de fête and Chazy in rome and now we have costumes of 1590s rome and kind of body types the people that you might see on the streets are now in the service of a christian story this was quite radical this is the story where christ here is pointing to him calling his disciple matthew who's the first evangelist Matthew was a tax collector and he's part of this a group of well-dressed men kind of young stops in a tavern this is a contemporary crowd not set in the biblical past and it's hard to emphasize how radical this was so this was on the left wall of the chapel the ultra piece the first version was in fact rejected and this painting it says destroyed because it was actually in the Berlin Museum and destroyed in World War two sadly but this was the first version it was rejected because the angel who is also the attribute of Matthew is here moving the hands of the Evangelist and I think the point was that the Evangelist here the saint does look a bit like a buffoon with this incredibly graceful angel and he's had a guy with his big legs crossed and doesn't really seem up to the task except as the vessel of or the tool of some other figure the second painting clearly much more successful because it indeed stayed on the altar and it's beautiful alert a handsome man who was listening intently to a beautiful angel who swings in from above he's now kind of taking dictation the angel seems to be counting off points in the story of Christ and you wonder if this is the long list of the gaps that at the beginning of Matthew's Gospel but as Caravaggio continued to receive public acclaim and accrue private sales he ran into more and more trouble it all came to a head on the 20th of May 1606 and when kind of odd you killed an acquaintance Renu Chua tomassoni during a kind of arranged fight like a gang rumble it took place next to a tennis court and by tradition they thought is that he lost the tennis match and the bet and then decided to kill his opponent Caravaggio leaves realm he's a fugitive on the run goes to Naples where he paints his extraordinary altarpiece of the seven works of mercy so these are the you know clothing the naked feeding the hungry providing water to the thirsty but they're all crammed in one remarkable tight sight space you realize that claustrophobia and violence are clearly key to this artists psyche again these beautiful angels coming from above sort of strong diagonals multiple sources of life strong kuro that is the contrast of light and dark all hallmarks of this crisp type style then he goes to Sicily getting further and further away from Rome and finally Malta which is the islands kind of in the middle of nowhere where he seeks refuge he's Amelie welcomed by the Knights of st. John the crusading Order that owns the island and paints his largest picture a huge one of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist and again sort of his theatrical taste not just for the strong chiaroscuro this exaggerated lighting but that is painted his own signature in blood there at the bottom so then kind of odd Joe is jailed in the summer of 1608 after he had another brawl and the big fortress in Malta is not a place you can escape from and indeed he must have had someone on the inside someone who helped him get out and so he escapes the prison of Malta and the summer of 1610 when moving its way up the peninsula he offers a particularly bleak endgame he obtains a pardon front of boat and but as he makes his way back up the peninsula towards Rome to clear his name and resurrect his career is in prison for two days probably by mistake in the seaside town of Porto Ercole a not far from Rome and when he finally gets out of prison he realizes that his all his belongings have gone on without him up further up the coast and he catches a fever falls ill and he dies in July is 1610 the most famous of all Italian artists of his day alone and away from Rome the city whose art he had transformed now although Caravaggio only lived one decade into the 17th century he dies in 1610 he is the most influential painter of the whole century not just in Rome not just in Italy but indeed across Europe and we can see that in our own collections here at the MFA for example paintings like the fortune teller one of our for visiting masterpieces influenced lots of other artists to took on half-length genre scenes particularly this kind of picture was very influential to those who came from Northern Europe Flanders present-day Belgium or the Netherlands and look in our own collection they're great two broken boys singing or the procuress again this is one of those kind of contracts right if this guy wants to keep plank making beautiful music with a pretty girl you better put some coins into that hand and so this is very much taking the costume types the sort of rivals humour and the clothes crisp focus of Caravaggio and then playing this on for another couple generations paintings like the one in the show of st. Francis and meditation influenced both in their humility and a crisp lighting the sort of you aren't their character very important for lots of subsequent painters including in our own collection our purchase of just three years ago or rots your Gentileschi is some time friend of Caravaggio this one is st. Francis reported by an angel or a much later beautiful painting our large Zubrin of Saint Francis you can see the stark lighting the claustrophobic settings all very much identity to this type even portraiture examples like Torontonian Martelli the name we give now to this knight of Malta the fourth ever visiting masterpieces was influential to portraitists across Europe think no further for example then our Rembrandt of Reverend Ellison strong light some areas and very crisp focus other areas plunged into darkness or painted much more Samara light more broadly we have in our galleries great Chino Simar animus receiving word of the revolt of Babylon or a big carvajal altarpiece by is not an Italian but in northern this is a Flemish artist adoration to shepherds but the same kind of dirty feet and humble types that we have in our in Caravaggio's Roman altar pieces and then even this picture a great one but kind of a mystery unidentified Flemish artist maybe he's a French artist we're not quite sure around 1620 but the kind of violence the strong candlelight that you are there level of realism picked up by yet another painter so transformed by Caravaggio so example so with those instances here you can just see even in our one museum's collection and even just looking at paintings let alone drawings and prints how influential Caravaggio was now let's turn a bit from the who to the what from kind of odd you to the other half of our equation kind of sir ship as I said before connoisseurship is the process based largely on visual evidence of determining a works authorship and quality and you might say well is the painting signed much more complicated than what something assigned because there are lots of forged signatures artists would also sign things they did not themselves paint many of you remember in my show Titian Tintoretto Varon a is a rivals and Renaissance Venice this picture right here I had this right when you walked in its own it's a pinion by giovanni bellini or at least it's signed giovanni bellini from the Metropolitan Museum I saw it in the storeroom there a few years before doing my exhibition it was being just been cleaned and this picture I had in the show to talk about because this was I believe done around the time that Titian would have been in Bellinis workshop so if Titian had not painted this picture at least he would have grown up learning to paint pictures like it and I used this to make the comparison between painting on wooden panels to painting on canvas the combination of oil and canvas unlocks all sorts of new expressive possibilities so here's this picture here prominent signature as if it's a little piece of paper stuck to that stone parapet but look at this and you can see that well certainly more than one hand was at work and it doesn't seem very coherent I mean poor st. Peter here is looking out of the composition she this figure here st. Catherine is out of scale this painting is in fact a kind of cut and paste job from several earlier pictures by Giovanni Bellini and then assembled by his workshop assistants so this makes clear right at the beginning of our period and around 1505 or eight that a signature does not guarantee that the artist the master himself did not delegate the work to somebody else this happens all the time now another question about connoisseurship though you've got to use your eyes is to think about the hypothetical reconstruction of an artist over that is look at a bunch of things that seem similar and as you piece the clues together say ha these could all be by the same artist because for many many artists particularly in the 15th and 14th centuries and indeed going up through the 16th we do not have any names for them so you've got to give them a name and this is a painting called the Sherman fir della which is owned here at the MFA given by Zoe Oliver Sherman and this artist this is in fact the name piece for an artist we call the master of the Sherman ver della and from the style you can see you've got st. jerome over your female sainted flagellation this is this painting is the name piece for a follower of Frangelico somebody who worked in provincial areas of Tuscany second quarter of the 15th century and from this painting here at the MFA a small over has been assembled things that are so similar to this one that they have to been done by the same hand now let's look at a more famous Italian Renaissance painting in our collection this is one we now call by frog Carnevale we give it a date around fourteen sixty seven based on archival notices but it's a very large painting showing the presentation of the Virgin in the temple extraordinary architecture and I've always liked this picture for the details you can see for example despite the up-to-date architecture very sort of 1460s even old-fashioned politics that is a multi panel altarpiece lots of gold gothic arches and if you look closely you can see the candles here on this candelabra candelabrum the candles in fact are lint I mean amazing these tiny brushstrokes to make the flame always like this but this picture is part of a fascinating connoisseurship story it goes in part because this are large panel is well in fact one of two and this is our picture here and that's the one of the Metropolitan Museum although they've got the pretty blue sky I promise you ours is in much better condition aha and these paintings work for a long time called the Barberini panels because starting in the early 17th century they were located in the Barbary Palazzo in Rome and listed the various inventories of that family and so again you without the name of an artist reconstructed hypothetical hypothetical reconstruction and named them to master the Barberini panel then in a great instance of brilliant detective work Richard oftener in 1939 wrote a long long article devoted to the master the Barberini panels and back these two pictures and it's except it was a kind of intellectual tour de force that Richard Oscar was kind of imagined he was trying to determine a recipe by having a careful tasting of the dish he looked at these pictures again and again and thought about everything he knew about them to try to figure out the ingredients that went into this dish so based on the visual evidence often decided that the artists of these two paintings the so-called master of the Barberini panels had been familiar with the Venetian artist Yakov a Bellini who's the father of Giovanni Bellini and looking at these are pages from very beautiful elaborate sketchbook of pen on parchment at the Louvre so this is the Dormition the Virgin and this is the flagellation but in a way the subject is less important than the setting what's taking place is in a way less interesting than extraordinary arcades and checkerboard paving and deep plunging recessions but the same idea of this plunge in perspective this idea that we're looking down on the architecture we've got a high we the viewer have a high viewpoint the small-scale the figures all these things seem to be part of the artistic personality of this so-called master of the Barberini panel and oftener in this fame art famous article goes on to talk about the rigidity the solidity of the draperies as if they're kind of chiseled from stone that you see here in pyridyl Francesca's flagellation of Christ there's a kind of classical coolness in this painting so Piero della Francesca is one of the ingredients and then think about the mets picture here look at this business type of feminine beauty you see on the left there the figure in the circle in the meds painting of the birth of the Virgin Mary and this in standard of female beauty indebted to FRA Filippo Lippi the great Florentine painter of the mid Quattrocento mid 15th century and you can see this is a huge picture new fitzy the coronation of the virgin and just notice here how similar that facial type is to that indeed the veils the handling of the neck the way the drapery folds of the sleeves and the skirt very very simpler very simple similar and indeed showing pretty clearly influence of one artist over the other then think about the architecture famous painting of an ideal city again at classical coolness the plunging perspective and again I think that makes it pretty clear it's almost the same color scheme and sense of recession in both kind of pictures the Met one and this ideal City the style of Urbino and often was also then able to group a whole bunch of paintings not just thinking about the ingredients but thinking about other things by the same artist this is a wonderful painting in the crest collection now in the National Guard of Art in Washington DC again very strong plunging recession high view points the setting as or more important than the action being taking place and so you see here these are clearly the same same artist and so what officer did is that this remarkable feat was to decide that there was a artist who had traveled in northern Italy gotten to know the work of yakou Bellini had close contact with para della Francesca but trained as a pupil in the workshop of Filippo Lippi and then later worked in Urbino where our picture was made and subsequent archival discoveries have confirmed this to be completely correct and indeed the artist we now call frock carnevale but the point was Oscar was not dealing with archival documents he was doing all of this with his eyes and his visual memory quite extraordinary indeed he got the recipe totally right and we now call the master barber new panels we call him struck carnevale but in later periods the 16th and particularly 17th century the practice the questions of connoisseurship become very thorny because you have the problem of versions and copies right more than one painting that looks very similar it's won by the artist and won by somebody else they both by the artist are none of them by the artist what are you doing there a whole lot do you decide the best one is by the artist or do you size it maybe none of them are very good and the original is lost and they're all copies by someone else you can see a difficult decision again there's no machine with a button you can push it's about making judgment calls and that's why the analogy to the legal profession or making a legal argument is very important things happen there is truth but a big determination is can you convince others of your theory now returning to Caravaggio this famous painting of the lute player for around late 1590s around 1600 at the Hermitage Museum it's extraordinary you could see lips are parted like he's beginning to sing the hands are so delicate the lightest chest beautiful wonderful still life here and then violin a bow a page open to a known Madrigal and this picture is Ben agreed to be kind of aaja original but in the early 90s disappeared private collection and whole exhibition was done at the Met and in fact their Batoche painting and this one were brought together and when I saw the two together I said oh no you shouldn't have brought the one from The Hermitage because it made a great claim or better claim without anything next to it I certainly love the still life elements but facing the loss seemed a little hard didn't seem to have the spark of the other one and then you realize now the more you look there are many many of these so this by many is kind of odd you not buy all this is a little further out here private collection I guess I'll call it circle of Caravaggio and this sounds completely implausible but I promise I'm telling you the truth in September of 2007 I got a letter from an art dealer who was not doing well I had heard and he was trying to make it all back in one big sale this painting was offered to the MFA for 95 million dollars not exactly a bargain and despite the magnetic appeal of Caravaggio I decided the EMA base purchase funds could be better used elsewhere and indeed this is clearly a copy it just seems just so harsh and stiff and remember it's not an artist when you make a copy you're not thinking out something new you're kind of in a sense tracing and although I liked I thought the still life is pretty if this thing had sold correctly just a few years earlier for a hundred thousand dollars as a circle of Caravaggio picture so this makes very clear that even though claims have been made to distance the specific paintings that had passed through various aristocratic collections how do you know the painting you're talking about is the one unit in front of you right how do you know the one that's document is that so these are very tricky kinds of questions and in fact the dealer in question went bankrupt two years later so I would like to conclude by taking a closer and slower look at the four pictures in our exhibition I want to think about the connoisseurship problems that each one represents each of these four pictures in our show has been doubted at some in the past and more or less now two are completely accepted by virtually all Caravaggio scholars and two other ones are more contentious let's start with the fortune teller this one you can see I have great affection for it when you see it in person it is a grand thing even though the theme is a sort of funny incident from daily life there's a grandeur end statute to the figures the details are just remarkable look at this right here how beautiful the cuff is here the wonderful cut velvet and then a very jaunty incident I didn't notice until I'd live with this picture a few few days this young man here out on his first day in the in the wide world and not doing so else he's taken off his glove and he's pushed it kind of tucked it into the hilt of the sword right into the basket there but wonderful sort of suave gesture like you might imagine a skier tucking it into the kind of the ribbon or the pole looks people handle and just a wonderful touch there this is also by the way one of the best-preserved part of the picture other parts have been over stored over the years and this is very well preserved but interestingly this picture has been doubted in the past underneath there's a fascinating x-ray see there's the boy there's the girl there's the hands we were just talking about the sword and you see underneath it was painted on top of a vertical picture of the praying Virgin Mary and so that's kind of odd right there though it kind of makes some sense because the stains of Virgin Mary underneath is roughly in the sky style of the Cavalli HP know was one of the big society painters in Rome in the 1590s and in whose studio Caravaggio worked during his early years in Rome and you'd think again so that's a curiosity right there but you get the idea that may be kind of odd you said can I just recycle this canvas here and this picture works perfectly as a kind of Agia but then you think there's another picture that looks almost like it and this one is in the Louvre it was given to king louis xiv in 1665 by camilla pan fili so one of the great Roman families and the similarities though had people wondering could artist is difficult as material I mean a guy who would throw a plate of artichokes in a waiters face what do you want to do two versions of the same thing it's that kind of psychological obstacle we have to get around but people now believe that which makes the other side and make sense is that if you are trying to make it in the world and a patron offers you enough money of course you'll do two versions of the same thing so the new thinking is that this one in the Louvre is just a little bit later than the one we have in our exhibition here part of the problem though is that until recently this picture did not look as good as it does now it was covered by old retouching that is lots of over paints and there were two restoration campaigns most recent one just a few years ago and although certain details these hands have been very been very abraded they were at various times people tried to clean them remove varnish and took some of the paint with them the paint is the paint colors that sunk this should be much more distinct it's actually really a green but it sums to a kind of dark greenish black but certain archival research the discovery the x-ray and also a judicious restoration has made a good case and now almost everyone accepts this as a Caravaggio original this painting comes from the small town outside of Rome only discovered in 1968 so very recently in terms and this picture you assume that this would be a Caravaggio original based mostly on its quality and they're interesting details too if you look here as a 10 dimensional a Pentimento is it means a visible correction in a work of art when artist has tried to redo something add something typically change a contour move a hand or a finger around and you can see the hood of Francis here was once much smaller and then once the paint is dried it's not clear if it's car Maggio or someone considerably later decided to lengthen the hood right here and so this was painted in two different campaigns but that's the kind of changing originality of intent that you would associate with an artist making an initial painting not someone copying something else the problem is though the picture looks almost exact like this in that's that sorry that's our picture and the one that looks just like it is this one here you can suggest that similar they are with basic difference is there's no Pentimento see the hood is done in two campaigns that's one and then this prominent patch here is not visible here but otherwise it's almost exactly the same painting and you have to look for subtleties in terms of the play of light and shade on the faces and then decide is it the slightly softer or the slightly starter shadows and lights that you call Caravaggio the new thinking that was in fact that the picture we have an MFA is an earlier one the one that enrollments comes from a couple years later but overall the jury is still out the other two pictures those are from Rome these next to the portraits are from Florence this as I said before is the controversial one when I saw it in black and white photographs 20 years ago thought no way face is too wooden this isn't Caravaggio and then I heard a lecture given by Keith Christensen who's the chairman of the European paintings department at the Metropolitan a year ago at the wodsworth Athenaeum at the time of the show they had of Caravaggio and his followers and when he put the slide up again my heart song is it not by Caravaggio face is just to would this artist there's very few pages that have but settled in quality of light and dark that's kind of odd Joe has I just didn't see it there but then I listened to his arguments it began finally the thing for myself that's important don't be swayed by preconceptions look anew at the evidence every time so we knew the sinner right Matt Fela Barberini the future Pope Urban the eighth but I've never seen this picture until we opened it up in mid-april open the grate and saw and indeed it's quite grown on me let's think about some of the details because one way you make your case for cars connoisseurship is not the kind of malcolm gladwell blink you decide you think about the evidence you lineup the ports that make satan this seems to be car imagine not that little thing there doesn't seem to be typical of the artist so you a match your evidence I think quite fascinating is the way the sleeve is done see the beautiful folds coming down it projects right at towards you of course we've seen that before right this hand coming here also notice the way that the foreshortening of the arm is done so that the rich is completely hidden right you don't see that any of the risks come straight out as you do in this picture on the right and the comparison of course is to the Bacchus you know painted just a year or two before we think the picture of the portrait is then there's the matter of the extraordinary still lifes here very beautiful I love the detail of the course of Venetian bars but the water has not been changed someone should have dumped out the water and replace it a day or two ago and then the wonderful detail look at that of the floating rose leaves right in there I mean this is something painted by a confident artist this is not just a sort of minor painter the hand here a bit cool all like I will admit but it's also kind of beautifully projected again that same arm here and this guy is so busy he's got two books going right now now compare though this still life to this one right here very similar in shape detail of flowers the kind of way they tilt up towards our space there's a Christmas about it and all of that course we have seen the still lights on the right as well and that's the one in Hermitage and I think this makes a very good comparison that you're going to argue for Caravaggio you do it with these kinds of details another part I love is just the subtlety of the hand again a bit like the face of the st. Francis much of it is in shadow right not brightly lit much it's in shadow and is a play of light and darks of the hand this is the left hand that's on the out on the arm of the chair just think that's just beautifully done that's such a suave and impressive passage and also I want to draw your attention to the cuffs here this is fabulous when you look at this cuff up close you realize the artist is not tried to replicate any actual pattern of a lace or some sort of embroidery now the artist is used in pasto that is so thick ha it'll highly raise brushstrokes they stand up a bit on the surface like that old whiteout typewriter correction fluid right really tacky and thick painted right on that there's no pattern and this is again the sign of a competent artist and contrast that with this this is an artist who has painstakingly redone in paint every single thread of that lace right and he guesses who this is exactly it's our own missus Goldthwait and our great complex this is Copley when he's still in Boston he has not gone to England yet he's not learned all these shortcuts he is a painstaking artist recreating everything now Caravaggio never paints this much detail but I think with a strong Keira scare up in the upper left still likes this set does this accomplish still life the sense of great reflections the face that seems to project in three direct dimensions I think it's fair to say the comple is that Caravaggio of colonial America and so then we think again is another question of course about our picture with a portrait the connoisseurship question is not just who's the artist but also who is the sitter and we know it's my fave Oh Barbara knees that guy actually got a quite specific spatial type and what's fascinating there's another private collection picture showing the same guy several years later a little more jolly a little older with a strong pointing hand and this is also my veil Barberini both these pictures though in private collections have not been studied as much as one good museum and the jury is out on both of them but I think it's fair to say that having to live with our slightly younger MFA Barberini for more than a month he's really begun to convince me that this picture is an original by Caravaggio then finally to turn to our last picture which is the franchiser Martelli and the name and fat comes from Medici inventory this painting is in Florence cups of Medici inventory which gave the name of the artist and the sitter so it's a specific knight of Malta and this man would have been part of the the famous defense in 1565 by the the Knights of st. John on the Order of Malta against an ottoman invading army navy more than three times their size one of the great sort of sieges of the entire Renaissance period but now the older man is looking back on life and he holds in one hand a rosary and the other hand his sword so these are the two poles of the order of these Crusaders faith and fighting and we're lucky though that he wears the son of the cross the Maltese Cross because this is a black shirt against a dark brown background a grey background and if you didn't have the cross it would be very hard in fact to see the volume of his torso this is Caravaggio he does not at all have the tightness and precision or parent precision of his earlier works but this you know when he's on malta in the last couple years of his life his handling does break down into much more expressive and abbreviated kind this picture though and as you see there there's the rosary and then it's the same sword almost as we saw in poor young man in the fortune-teller though painted a totally different way the different system now of highlights and bringing the three dimensions out tricky thing though of course again as I said with portraiture it's not just determining the artist and everybody agrees this was got a vaji oh now but also determining the sitter and were quite a while there was the idea that it was in fact the same guy as a lofted vinya court was a picture this is painting in the Louvre very well-known who's the Grand Master of the Knights of st. John that is he's the one in charge of this crusading Order and the thought was well it's the same sitter the same man couple years apart that's how you could account for the slight differences in the facial features but it's pretty clear we have it on label up in the exhibition that they may have both have kind of bulbous noses beards and a head is that the same angle they are two different individual again there's no machine that gives you that answer you couldn't can't look for something that will an error will go back and forth these are visual determinations we have to make for ourselves so I have summarized for you what makes a Caravaggio what made him so radical to his contemporaries and so compelling to his followers including those who never knew him during his lifetime and in some cases knew his work only second or third-hand through the work of other Caravaggio thir Caravaggio influenced artists we thought together about the practice of connoisseurship and some of the tricky problems of authenticity that surround Caravaggio I hope you will look at this elusive artist and the practice of connoisseurship in a new light now it is your turn I invite you to return to our visiting masterpieces exhibition and decide these questions for ourselves but one more piece of advice as you gaze carefully at these four paintings make sure not to lose your ring thank [Applause] thank you thank you thank you I'd be pleased to try a few questions and if you've quite specific ones you can also ask me I'll stand in for quite a while and we can talk more specifically we've got microphones there anyone now thank you where you have artists who clearly worked with studios with the princesses studying under them what how much by the master do you consider required on the question of connoisseurship before you would say that he signed it incorrectly because that's a great question about many artists had assistants and in fact when you even an artist who would insist on doing as much as possible by himself Caravaggio would have contracted I hope you know the stretching in the canvases or had someone else grind the pigments make the coffee that kind of thing and when I showed the painting to Giovanni Bellini and workshop picture before even though there's a signature on the bottom that doesn't mean that Bellini did it rather means that he the whole thing was more or less up to the level of quality of the shop and the analogy I like to use is that with a celebrity chef right it's not like you know Alain Ducasse or Todd English is actually cooking your meal but rather some chefs determined the recipes train the staff figured out the preparations maybe even design the space now I think it's useful to make a distinction between the conception that is the design and execution and there's a famous letter by Rubens where he talks about he's trying to account for the various levels of quality in works of art he's trying to sell to somebody he says this one totally done by me this one done under my supervision this one started by the best of my pupils and I touched it up and what you see what I'm getting at though there is not one answer but you can get pictures that the design is so intelligent it makes a lot of sense would've been thought-out and detailed by a mature mind that's probably done by the master or certainly done by the master and then potentially executed by somebody else or parts executed and a fascinating thing as you look is the subspecialties some artists would bring in someone to the architecture someone else maybe the uncut of agio for the still life so one else maybe the match himself would do the figures typically with portraits you need to do the space in the hand from life otherwise you was getting your portrait done because they hey wait a second I've not theme in month you know and and but then you borrow some clothes or use closing your own Studios we also have a prejudice though because so much of what we think about art is based on the later 19th and 20th centuries right we think about MANET or Monet working by themselves or the sort of isolated beleaguered genius then go turning out one painting by himself you know everyday and so we've got this idea that the picture is done entirely by an individual you know this idea of genius and with renaissance and baroque artists almost always it's in the context of a kind of a workshop a lot of people like a restaurant kitchen and so this is a long answer but I think what I'm saying is that in a big painting from before the you know through at least the French Revolution you can almost always see more than one hand but as long as we can decide that those are minor instances and overall it shows a single artist at work and you can call it them you know by the master even if they're subsidiary passages by someone else and but when you get to the later 19th century you single artist they generally are not taking pupils but not doing huge compositions they're doing easel pictures the kind of thing that a single person can finish by him or herself it's a great question someone on the back yep yeah well exactly this was actually done in Rome there's a longer answer than I could could give you now but if you look carefully at this the addition to the hood here was definitely done what the paint was dry it's two different campaigns potentially even two slightly different mixtures of brown paint so they're not done at the same time and again there's no strong answer because there's some people who believe well you know the hood was added or extended it is a Benton meant to Pentimento but that artist was not cut of agio someone did it later and so there is no clear-cut answer and it's the kind of thing where people take sides and a consensus despite some technical evidence may not emerge for several decades so I think we just have to decide in this case the jury's still out one more well a lot of artists would go I mean the whole idea of a von der ER right going back to the Middle Ages an artisan would go someplace else to learn other styles and become a better educated artist Rome was of course not just important for the contemporary art you know Caravaggio's and center it's also of course important for ancient art and one thing about kind of odd that is so revolutionary is he claimed that the best examples were not the statues of the ancient Greeks and Romans because I sort of received wisdom was the ancient Greeks and Romans they had already idealized they figured it all out their statues were the most beautiful because they had taken all the different sort of body types and put them together into an idealized whole carve out according to tradition turned his back on this and said no for him the greatest examples of the people in the streets before you but for most artists the idea to see huge Roman ruins to see the results are the remains of the civilization they thought much greater than theirs that was incredibly powerful and also Rome was a big bustling place and you try to make it there if you couldn't you would go back to Holland or France or England with a reputation of someone who is up to date you know you know you could dine out for the rest of your life having spent a couple years in Rome right it would have been so impressive and also you knew that you know if you could make it there you could make it anywhere you could if you could handle it more or less in Rome you had it level of technical expertise and a sophistication that would put you at least at the level of many of our most above boasted people back in your home country so it was a was an honor to have gone to Rome and in fact nice lead-in with exhibition I'm curating opening here at the MFA in October of Goya the Spanish artist his career had not even fits and starts he was going nowhere he's working in rural Aragon and he goes on his own expense to Italy for a year spends time in Rome then goes to Venice and Florence other places but when he comes back he tells everybody that he had studied in Rome and that would set him apart with his provincial contemporaries so looking forward to going okay one more well and that's a quest yes I did using live models just you know posed somebody and I mean artists always to use I mean from that sort of later middle middle ages on artists would have someone usually you know the least talented person best-looking person in your studio you have it'll impose and and then you draw Caravaggio does not seem to have left any drawings and you know certain other artists you know the hundreds and hundreds of drawings compared to dozens of paintings but the story is in fact with with the fortune teller that you know pointing in fact it's the example Ballou that according the story that he was turning his back and saying don't base your art on statues you want the real truth his people on the streets and then there was a passing gypsy girl he says come with me and takes the studio and then starts painting her there so that's the reputation and you have to think he would have made some drawings but it is interesting that many of his paintings show incisions that is you take a sharp point a stylus like the point of a compass and you can still see this on some where he would trace around the edges and use that as a guide to future painting but these kind of stories are plausible that he painted directly from human beings so that's the intermediate steps of drawings because it's a freshness there's an immediacy there's not this idea that he spent hours and did lots of preparation before picking up a brush that he went and sort of saw the motive the motif and decided executed without too many intervening steps in order to keep it alive and exciting okay I'm tired they're out have a good night [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 170,180

Keywords: Caravaggio, art history, connoisseurship, renaissance art, italian art, european art, art lecture, course

Id: L9nhI9704cI

Length: 59min 56sec (3596 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 04 2017