Caravaggio: His life and style in three paintings | National Gallery

hello my name is Leticia Travers and I'm the curator of the later Italian and Spanish pictures here at the National Gallery and by popular demand today I'm going to talk to you about Caravaggio and cutter Rogers an artist who's as well known for his art as years for his bad behavior and the purpose of today's talk is really to talk you through his life so it is you know a lot about the biography of the artist but I'm going to use the pictures that we have here to illustrate why he was so famous then and so innovative in his style and the National Gary is extremely lucky to have three major works by Caravaggio one from each of the distinct phases of his career so it's the sort of perfect place to give you this talk if you like so Caravaggio was born in Milan in 1571 but his name is Michelangelo made easy but he's known as Caravaggio after the small town to the east of Milan from which his parents came and where he spent quite a few years during his childhood as well his father was a Mason a moratoria and he died when Caravaggio was just six years old and there's been speculation as to whether Caravaggio were launched in that career before he became a painter but there's really no evidence for that what we do know is that when he was 13 he was sent to Milan and he signed a four-year apprenticeship with an artist called Simona Peterson or an artist from Bergamo who'd worked in Venice and who sort of styled himself as Titian pupil and he works with him for four years and we have a contract but we don't have much else but one can imagine that in the workshop he learned the rudiments of drawing he learnt how to grind colors how to prepare canvases he may have learnt how to paint in fresco although he he is not a fresco painter later on in his career and after these four years with pipettes Anna there's a sort of mystery we don't really know what happened to him until 1592 and that is when he goes to Rome almost certainly in 1592 around the age of 20 and this is the problem with Caravaggio there's very little documentary evidence and of course it's been scrutinized and read in many many different ways and it's very fragmentary so we've tried to reconstruct his life on the basis of the documents but really we rely normally on the biographers who wrote about him which of course do provide conflicting information sometimes and often have their own slant on on Caravaggio so even that has to be sort of taken with a pinch of salt but Caravaggio arrives in Rome he's about 20 and of course now we know he became a very famous artist but when he arrived he was a nobody he arrived and he really was desperate destitute he jumped from one workshop to another he painted hack work we know he produced these sort of heads you know three heads a day for no money he lived with someone called Pandolfo Pucci who he nicknamed Monsignor insalata mr. salad because apparent that's all he ate under his roof he was given very meager food but the biographers do agree on certain points of these early years it seems that he arrived and somehow worked in the workshop of a sicilian painter called Lawrence or Kali we know nothing about him really and no paintings can be attributed to him from this time and then he worked in two other workshops and antiva dawdle gramática and cavalier dad Pina and what we know about these two experiences were is that for aunt Eva daughter he painted heads and for ad Pino he painted flowers and fruit and this is important because these two formative experiences really help in understanding the early group of works that Caravaggio produced and we know from the biographers that having sort of jumped from one workshop to another he then decided to launch himself as an independent artist but really struggled I mean he was as I said destitute he was painting pictures for the open market I mean artists at this time either worked with in a workshop framework or they were patronized by wealthy patron who would sometimes house them in their Palazzo and would protect them as well and of course Caravaggio had neither of those two things at this point in his career so he produces works for the open market and manages to catch the eye of influential patrons that way and we know that one of these pictures that he produced was the boy bitten by lizard which we have here in the National Guard there's another version of this picture in the fund that's Jana longer which is generally attributed to Caravaggio but is not unanimously accepted and as you can see remember what I said before about his formative years so here there's the combination of a beautiful still life with these sort of half-length figures and you can see how those formative experiences might have led to this kind of picture but this is a very original and novel kind of picture for its subject matter and that's almost certainly what attracted the attention of these patrons in Rome it's a sort of genre subject that of course one might have seen in northern Italy and even in northern Europe that really was very new to Rome and this picture has been read in many different ways has been read in sort of a kind of poetic vein looking at literature and poetry of the time it's been read as an allegory an allegory of the sense of touch it's also been read as an allegory of the the sort of pains that hide behind Beauty the pains of love the lizard hidden amongst the sensuous fruit you know but actually I think the most convincing reading is perhaps the most straightforward which is just really it's a it's a study in expression this boy I've sort of you know this kind of moment of surprise of unexpected pain and he's sort of shrinking away but it's a fascinating picture I mean before he was bitten by the lizard what was this boy actually doing you know has this flower behind his ear there's something you know it's being read in a sort of homoerotic vein as well and there is something very sensual and sensuous about this picture of this early group of paintings of youths and boys which I should say are often based on clearly on live models and on people that Caravaggio knew sometimes they also include his own portrait we know he used his own image because he couldn't afford models he can afford to pay models and this picture has also been read as a self portrait although generally that's now discounting I personally don't think it is a self portrait I mean I'm sure you know this picture and if not after the talk do come and look at it more closely the really striking element of these early works is the quality of the still life I mean this free you can just pick these cherries up you know it's good enough to eat and the combination of that with these sort of sensual nudes quite and Regina's looking and rather ambiguous to it's an odd subject and you can imagine it would have spurred interesting and lively conversations if it was hanging on you know a Cardinals wall or on a sort of in elite circles and as well as this sort of picture of the youth there's a famous picture in the bodies of a boy holding a basket of fruit as well where once again still life plays a very important role in these early pictures he also painted through street scenes and you know famously the card sharps you know card players cheating hiding cards behind another man behind signaling a tall fortune tellers and these were highly theatrical scenes but things that one would have seen in everyday life in the streets of Rome at the time but incredibly novel to sort of elevate these genres in a way to sort of history painting you know still life was really the lowest form of painting in around 1600 but yet Caravaggio really managed to elevate that he famously said the painting still lives required as much artistry as painting the figure which you know to us today doesn't seem such a sort of dramatic thing to say but at the time you know it was really quite a novel approach but what he means is you know the importance of nature of looking around and so this was his real innovation it was looking at nature and painting still life but also using live models and he was also criticized for this later on in his career you know for the fact that he didn't select the best in nature he just painted exactly what was in front of him but it was really the most original aspect of his art so these early pictures brought Caravaggio to the attention of powerful and influential patrons in Rome principally the Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte who then invites Caravaggio to live with him in his Palazzo so he now has looked after protected for about five years and also the mark is even chainsawed Justine Yanni another key figure in Rome at the time and they start you know buying pictures by him they start commissioning pictures from him and you know he's certainly far more comfortable within quite a short space of time but the real breakthrough for his career comes in 1599 he receives the commission to paint the pictures today in the cantata le Chapel san luigi dei franchisee and you have to remember these genre paintings were for a private patron and also for a private environment they were hanging in these palazzi and they were really accessible to only a few people and an elite if you like but suddenly this is his first public commission and it's the first time that his art can be seen you know in the public domain if you like is accessible to artists and people visiting Rome and when these pictures were unveiled and you can still see them today in the compare le Chapel the the calling of Sam Matthew and the martyrdom of Matthew when they were unveiled I mean it caused a real sensation and we know from the biographers people flocked to Rome to see these pictures and of course it was part of an artist training you would go to Rome and you look at classical antiquity and you'd also look at contemporary art being produced and so artists from all over Europe were coming to Rome and so very quickly Caravaggio's fame and reputation really went far beyond the confines of Rome itself with these public paintings and shortly after the compare elite Chapel he was commissioned to paint pictures in santa maria del popolo in the chassis chapel again these are private commissions these are private patrons it's not the church itself commissioning him but these pictures were finally on view in public and that's why in a way there's a kind of delayed public reaction to Caravaggio's art you know he'd been in Rome for a number of years but 1600 is a key moment and the result of that is that he's hugely sought after and as well as Del Monte and Justine Yanni who I've referred to there are three brothers the matte day who are very wealthy bankers in Rome and they commissioned Caravaggio three paintings in the course of two years and we know that because we have documents and he goes to live in one of the brothers Pilate and one of those pictures is the supper at Emmaus that we have here in the National Gallery this is this was painted in 1601 and for me and sort of shows the real is he's really at the height of his career he's riding on a way if you know the crest of the wave he's incredibly famous at this point and he's already developed as an artist I mean you can see just by comparing the two pictures either side of me there's sort of awkwardness is particularly the anatomy of this boy you know the way the shoulder doesn't quite work you can see there's a sophisticate already in the separator mayor's the other extraordinary thing about his art not just using of live models is of course his use of light which is what he's now also most famous for but what was extraordinary his use of light as its it's using the light in a way not just for sort of the kind of aesthetic enhancement of the picture but the light always really underpins the meaning in his pictures so here we have the risen Christ instead of showing him on the road to emmaus where he meets two disciples who don't immediately recognize him they invite him to supper and here they are at supper and this is the moment the Christ blesses the bread and the disciples realize that they're sitting with the risen Christ and he's chosen the culminating moment in the narrative and this is what Caravaggio is so so brilliant at doing it's a familiar subject but he represents its own a completely novel way and with a sort of freshness of vision as well and as I say he chooses the culminating moment in the narrative and the light is essential in conveying the story here because it's the light of recognition this is the moment the disciples have recognized him they're leaping up this one's leaping up out of his chair his elbows jutting out the other one is sort of spread his arms in surprise and the innkeeper completely oblivious to what's happening remains in the dark you know his face is in shadow because you know he hasn't seen the light if you like and this wonderful light not only under underlines the message behind the picture if you like and really enhances the message within its look calls very theatrical very dramatic and the way he crops the composition is very theatrical you know this sort of half 3/4 length cropping brings you right into the picture space you know you are no longer just a sort of passive viewer you are taking part you're a participant in this picture not just because their elbows are jutting out into your space or their arms are being thrust out into your space but of course there's brilliant device of the basket of fruit you know you're so tempted to just push it back you know it's so precariously balanced on the edge of this this table and it's even more vivid because actually this picture is so carefully worked out when we did x-rays and infrareds there are almost no changes in his picture except for one and that is that the apostle on the right originally his me was in front of the tablecloth and what he did was he changed and put it behind the white cloth and of course it's obvious why he did that it's to emphasize the projection of his arm and of course the projection of the basket because it makes it so much more vivid this basket sort of falling into our space and the still life here is again I mean it's sublime it's developed beyond the still life in the boy bitten by the lizard and you know once again this fruit is you know good enough to eat you know you can smell it you can touch it almost the picture was clearly greatly admired it sort of encapsulates everything that people admired in Caravaggio but it was also criticized one of the biographers been Laurie in 1672 criticized it for showing Christ's unbated I mean he's shown youthful and unbidden which is certainly unusual and little unorthodox I mean Michelangelo did that in the Sistine Chapel in the Last Judgement so Caravaggio wasn't the first in fact he may well have been trying to reference that in a sort of subliminal way but it was also criticized for for the fruit saying this fruit can possibly be in season at the same time and at Easter tide you know when this pisode took place and I find that amusing because it's almost bellary's irritation that you know it's so convincing and you know Caravaggio's really tricking us into believing this fruit exists in this basket and he sort of says well of course it couldn't exist all at once in one basket at this time of year but in a way that encapsulates also how polemical Caravaggio was his whole approach to art was very different from other artists he may received sort of traditional training in the workshop of pathan or but his approach was very much no drawing there are no drawings that exist although one has to assume with a composition like this there must have been preparatory drawings that now no longer exist and he very much painted directly you know in front of the models positioning them using these strong light sources and this was an incredibly novel way of painting very unlike normal studio practice at the time and this picture also sort of exemplifies these kind of religious history pay things that Caravaggio became so famous in doing but also so so so good at which were essentially for a private clientele predominantly of religious subjects religious subject matter intended for palazzi but sort of painting these religious pictures almost like history paintings there's a real timeless quality about these pictures I think and that's largely also to do with I think the light this use of light because the still life brings this picture into our own reality if you like it's so realistic if we feel that it's in our time and yet the sort of light a encompassing the picture does kind of give it this very timeless eternal quality so 1601 this is really as I said he's riding the crest of the wave this is really the moment for Caravaggio in Rome and the Commission's just keep coming mainly from private collectors from private patrons some fall to pieces for their own chapels within churches but a great deal of these sorts of religious history pictures but this is also when Fame slightly gets to his head and and he really does get into quite a lot of trouble from about 1602 to 1606 we can tell from the police records you know he's constantly called in you know carrying sword without a license you were not allowed to walk around Rome with the sword and you know if you were under the patronage of someone like the Cardinal del Monte in his household fine but not around the streets of Rome and certainly not threatening people with it but once again I suppose Caravaggio's become this cult figure and everyone looks at him slightly in isolation and I can assure you he was not alone in doing this you know many artists at the time were caught and arrested on the same things really but there are these famous episodes in 1603 Caravaggio's involved in a very sort of vicious libel trial his contemporary and rival giovanni baglione accused kind of a drone others of writing some very scurrilous verses about him and posting them all around rome and there's this trial is actually beautifully documented it's you know time we hear Caravaggio's own words if you like from his own mouth because he's in the witness box as it were and it's written down what he what he thinks about art whether he befriends who he knows in Rome and it's a really useful piece of information but it is one of the very few bits of information we have about him in 1604 there's the famous episode where he's at the tavern on del Moral and the waiter brings him a plate of artichokes four of them are cooked in oil four of them are cooked in butter and when Caravaggio receives the plate he asked the way to which the butter in which are oil then the waiter says why don't you smell them and find out and what does he do he picks up a plate throws the plate of the waiter cuts him and then threatens him with his sword and the way to just run straight to the police and his testimony is it's interesting because you get a view if you like of Caravaggio but again he's not alone in this is a very violent place Rome in 1616 10 and artists were not the only ones you know getting up to these sorts of tricks 1605 his landlady sues him because in fact Caravaggio had wounded a notary and then had escaped from Rome he'd run to Genoa for a few months he came back to find he couldn't get into the house he'd printed and his landlady said well I've seized all your possessions because you you hadn't paid me rent for six months you've also damaged my ceiling and you know I'm not letting you in so he starts throwing stones at her window and we know this again because you know there's a trial and her testimony and so we know he's in quite a lot of trouble at this point he's not resident in a wealthy patrons home either but you can feel that you know he we know one of the biographers in fact says well he paints for a bit for a couple of weeks and then he wonders about room strides about Rome with a sword on his hip for a month or two so he obviously had sort of surges of productivity and then really it ended up getting into trouble and you feel slightly that it's slightly spiralling out of control and of course it's all heading towards the famous incident in 1606 where he gets into a scuffle with Ron or Thomas or knee and wounds him fatally and follow his murder he runs from Rome and then he's really on the run I mean pretty much for the last four years of his life he first goes to Naples for a few months and then makes his way to Malta where he's actually made a knight of the order of st. John you know a great a great thing to be granted if you like paying some wonderful pictures there including the famous beheading of sin John the Baptist in Malta sort of in exchange if you like for the knighthood but also gets into trouble there gets imprisoned managed to escape from prisons clearly someone helping him on the inside makes his way to Sicily moves around Sicily and makes his way back to Naples and all this because he really wants to get back to Rome and he's waiting for the papal pardon after the murder of Thomas orny you feel in a way you you feel in a way through his art as well that there is a sort of he's running you know his art definitely changes key and once again we're very lucky here to have an example of his late works these salomi are being presented with the head of John the Baptist and you can see how different that picture is from everything else you know that I've spoken about so far it's paring it down to its bare essentials it's that the palette is much more muted the brushwork you know it's really moved away from the very descriptive approach in these early works particularly in the supper Timaeus this beautifully refined brushwork here the handling is much broader it's much more expressionistic if you like and there's a real emphasis on the kind of rhetoric on gesture and expression also this kind of zooming in on a scene I think you know makes it all the more powerful this is salomi who Herod has said you know what is your wish I'll grant you anything and she says I want the head of John the Baptist so he's beheaded and here you had the brutal executioner thrusting forward rather like this man thrusts his arm out he thrusts the head forward and he's dropping it into the solver into the platter and the Baptist's mouth is still open you know whether he's sort of emitting a scream or it's his last breath it's a very moving thing and that's right in the front of the picture you know here you have a beautiful basket of fruit there you have this this decapitated head right in front and I find a very moving picture partly through the way he's applied the paint you know as I said it's very broadly painted you can feel there's more kind of expression in the way he actually lays the paint on the canvas and you know there's no sense of background at all I mean here of course you have a sort of sense there in the kind of neutral place there's a wall with a light behind and so on but here they're really in darkness and I think it's all the more effective for it much more theatrical and so the brutality of the executioner thrusting this head forward it is an interesting counterpoint to the really quiet figure of the old maid you know she's so sorrowful she's so introspective that head in shadow sort of looking down and these are types you know by this point I you know it's generally believed that he wasn't using live models in the way that he was earlier on positioning models these types reappear in other pictures at this date and I mean although of course they must be inspired by people around him I don't think he positioned them in the same way that he would have done in this very orchestrated way in the earlier pictures I find very moving this juxtaposition of the youthful and beautiful salomi with the old made you know sort of looking in two different directions I mean it's a picture that at first glance looks so simple but there's great complexity here I think and you can read it in so many ways and I find salomi overall is it's so enigmatic I mean she demanded to have the head of John the Baptist and what is she feeling here she's looking away and you know is it disgust you know the sort of bloody bloody head I mean she's holding the plateau with her her sort of white cloth almost like she can't bear to hold it you know with her bare hands but there's a sort of melancholic expression so I mean I read sort of regret almost there and shame at having requested such a thing but you know these three heads in a way a sort of heads of expression which sort of brings us back right to the beginning you know this is what kind of odd job was so good at doing and communicating expressions through his figures through light and here the the palette is so subdued I mean you know you have color in these pictures but this really is very limited it's a black and white picture more or less this picture was probably painted in Naples as I said the second stay in Naples while he was on the run while he was trying to make his way back to Rome now it seems that he heard that a papal pardon had been released so he he boarded a boat in Naples on its way to Rome with paintings to present to Shapur Borghese the papal nephew and the boat stopped to Porto ethically where he was arrested and in fact there was a misunderstanding he was thought to be someone else and when he was finally released the boat had disappeared his pictures had disappeared and desperate he started set out on foot to make his way back to Rome and he caught a fever and there he died very solitary death very lonely death and he was 39 and it's interesting to remember that because for an artist of such Fame you think of people in a similar sort of league you know Titian Rubens Rembrandt I mean you know particularly Titian and Rembrandt you know they painted well into old age and they had incredibly vast active workshops with Channing out pupils I mean Caravaggio was essentially quite a sort of solitary figure he had no workshop in the traditional sense to speak of I mean he must have had students and one or two have been identified you know helping him prepare pigments particularly once he'd reached Fame and success but he had no traditional workshop you know of a masters of teaching his pupils the rudiments of drawing and painting and so on and he moved around a lot but he essentially stayed within Italy and Malta you know Titian Rubens you know they moved across various courts in Europe and it's interesting because you know the geographical sort of confinement of Caravaggio cools didn't stop his fame spreading because of course Rome was this magnet for artists at that time but you know one has to remember he you know in terms of documented activity we only have about eighteen years of a kind of career that we know of and it's incredible that he had such a lasting impact on artists at the time artists as I said before came to Rome as part of their training if you like they came to look of antiquity they came to look at contemporary art and of course artists from all over Europe they're an enormous number of Dutch Flemish and French artists in in the period of Caravaggio's lifetime but also in the decades immediately following and this of course helped spread his fame well beyond Rome itself these artists came to Rome spent a few years studying the art they're working there haunt holes to Bryggen Barbarin I mean some of these even stayed in the palazzi of Caravaggio zone patrons and then they went back to Utrecht or to Flanders wherever they came from and they they would carry back you know Caravaggio start and also interpret it in their own way and so his style really got propagated across Europe in very many different ways of course every artist took something different from Caravaggio the northern artists were particularly struck by his use of nature and of live models that's more in line with their own tradition of painting I mean the use of light of course was was you know had a huge impact on art in the 17th century but of course that changes and you know one thinks of Caravaggio's having invented the candle light scene he never painted a single candle you know it's extraordinary because we all think that but of course these candlelit scenes the one associates with him of course derive from his very singular use of light but they're sort of taken to a whole new level of course George de la Tour takes it really to a great level of sophistication and theatricality but he probably never even went to Italy he never saw a Caravaggio so there are sort of you know misconceptions a bit about Caravaggio's influence on artists in his own day but also his influence had a sort of ripple effect across Europe I think became diluted because of course an artist would go to Rome and then would absorb things from Caravaggio go back to where he'd come from and in a way through amalgamate that into their own style and this is something I'm particularly interested in and this autumn we're going to be having an exhibition here that opens in October called beyond Caravaggio and that's going to be looking at not Caravaggio isolation but very much at the impact that he had on art across Europe really in those sort of verse 30 40 years of the 17th century Caravaggio dies as I said he dies in 1610 he's 39 and yet he has this enormous impact on art immediately and in fact in a way it really sort of balloons after his death you know you can see that collectors are desperately scrambling trying to buy pictures by him and pictures by his followers commissioning pictures by his followers and more and more these works being produced just for the open market there's clearly a huge demand for them but it's all over by middle of the century by about 1630 in Rome and by the middle of the 17th century across Europe Caravaggio and Caravaggio 'some which is how this sort of artistic phenomenon has been called carriage ISM is really out of favor and you know Caravaggio really falls into oblivion I don't think people really know that mmm you know now he's such a famous figure but he was only really rediscovered in the early 20th century you know it's relatively recent times culminating in a real important exhibition in Milan in 1951 which presented for the first time all known works by Caravaggio and the Caravaggio by his followers and it's only really in the last sort of 60 70 years if you like that an enormous amount of interest has been applied to Caravaggio and of course now to those of artists known in his circle but I hope that through these three pictures I've been able to tell you a little bit about Caravaggio's life but also I think here in the National Gallery you can see just how his style develops over time these three pictures are so different and in a way reading them alongside that the sort of the biographical details of the artist's life are really key you know from the sort of the importance of nature and expression in the early works to the great sophistication of his mature works and you can see in a picture like this just how you know original he must have seemed to his contemporaries and then the late pictures which of course were the subject of an exhibition here you know a few years ago Caravaggio the final years they're sort of on a different emotional key I think thank you very much you

Channel: The National Gallery

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Keywords: Caravaggio, Letizia Treves, The supper at Emmaus, Milan, Rome, innovative painter, innovative paintings, still life, ambiguous paintings, live models, use of light in paintings, nature, expression, revolutionary artist, storytelling, religion, realistic observation, use of light, Caravaggio painting technique, Caravaggio paintings, 17th century, art history, exhibition, Art, fine art, museum, National Gallery, London, Trafalgar Square, Paintings, Art history, National Gallery London

Id: 1KcdgFxmnb4

Length: 30min 51sec (1851 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2016

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Michael Fried covering Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

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