- Good evening, I'm delighted
to see all of you here. I'm Gloria Groom, the Chair, and the David and Mary
Winton Green curator in the Department of
Painting and Sculpture. I'm so happy to welcome
you to this first program for the exhibition
that's opening tomorrow, that you can see it tonight, "Among Friends and Rivals,
Caravaggio in Rome". And as we begin, a brief reminder to please
silence your phones. And now it's my pleasure to introduce the star of tonight's
program and exhibition, Rebecca Long, recently promoted from associate curator to full curator. So now she's the Patrick
G and Shirley W Ryan curator in the department. (audience clapping) An internationally known specialist in 17th century Spanish and Italian art. Rebecca came to the Art Institute
in 2015 where she oversees all Spanish and Italian art before 1750. Her educational and professional career began with graduate studies at the New York University's
Institute of Fine Arts, with a focus on the
role of Italian artists in the Spanish court
during the Renaissance. Since then, she's held many
prestigious fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the NYU's Villa La Pietra and Harvard University's
Villa I Tatti in Florence. She's also taught art history as an adjunct professor at Hunter College and the Fashion Institute of Technology, both in New York, Indiana,
Purdue University, University of Louisville, and more recently,
Northwestern University. Before joining the Art Institute, Rebecca was associate curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Her arrival in Chicago in 2015 coincided with an ambitious undertaking, the conception and realization of the Deering Family
Galleries of Medieval and Renaissance Art, Arms and Armor. And as you know, that's a
really successful project. We love it with the jousting
horses and everything. And this she took on with curators, Martha Wolf and Jonathan Tavares. Most recently, Rebecca was the originating
curator of the exhibition, "El Greco, Ambition and Desire", co-organized with the Musée du Louvre. It opened here a week
before Chicago shut down in March, 2020. And perhaps a few of you were
fortunate enough to catch it before it shut down, or when it reopened briefly in the fall. And for those of you who
missed it completely, I recommend getting a
copy or seeing a copy of the award-winning Catalog, which Rebecca edited and co-authored. Her future projects include
a retrospective exhibition on the 17th century Spanish artist from Seville, Francisco de Zurbarán, which she's organizing with
the National Gallery in London, and again, the Musée du Louvre. But tonight we're celebrating
Rebecca's recent achievement as curator of the exhibition "Among Friends and Rivals,
Caravaggio in Rome". Please join me in welcoming
Rebecca to the stage, thank you. (audience clapping) - Thank you very much, and before I start, and I'll emphasize this again at the end, I wanna encourage you the mini show, we'll call it upstairs
opens officially tomorrow. But since it's a Thursday
evening and we're open late, if you would like to duck upstairs after tonight's presentation, you're welcome to see the
exhibition in Gallery 211. The name of Caravaggio has
been associated with a bold and revolutionary naturalism
to his contemporaries. His art rooted in the senses,
dependent on the live model, had an incredible power
and artistic influence. He began his career as a
painter of lyrical scenes of tavern and street life,
including scenes of card players, musicians, and fortune tellers. He ended up developing into
the most powerful religious artists of his age in his lifetime. He was the most famous
artist for active in Italy, and his influence spread throughout the entire continent of Europe. He was, however, a difficult
and violent personality, which is perhaps some of
what makes him entertaining or attractive to a modern audience. We have an insight into a
historical figure who really seems to have a personality that passes down to us through the ages. He, in his lifetime,
flaunted his originality, but he also hated to be imitated. He mocked authority, yet he attempted to sort of
glom onto the social prestige of noble patrons and church
patrons at the same time. His greatest gift, perhaps in all of these genres
of paintings, whether genre, scenes or religious scenes,
was a gift for empathy, making religious narratives in particular for a modern audience, even if you are not bought
into the kind of history of Catholic iconography, they seem contemporary, they
seem new, and they seem vivid. I'm showing you here one
of the few actual portraits of Caravaggio from his lifetime, although we'll see some
examples of self portraits that are embedded into his paintings by someone who knew him in his lifetime, although this was done, a drawing that was done after his life. I'm gonna read you a
description from a contemporary of what his appearance was, sort of couched in what we're
meant to take away from that in terms of social distinction. "He was a large young man, around 20 or 25 years when I saw him, with a thin black beard, black eyes with bushy
eyebrows dressed in black." He could have been a curator. (people laughing) "In a state of disarray
with thread bear black hose and a mass of long black
hair long over his forehead." And we see this commented upon by other people in his lifetime, the idea that he would buy
really expensive clothes, velvet, black was the
most expensive fabric in the time after the Spanish fashion, and then wear them to being thread bear, which is, maybe I'm
reading too much into it, but an allusion to the type of artwork that he ended up producing. Caravaggio was born in Milan, we only know this in the last few years. His baptismal certificate
in a parish church in Milan was discovered. His name is Michelangelo
Merisi da Caravaggio. So general understanding is
that he comes from the town of Caravaggio, but he
actually was born in Milan. And it seems like his
family moved to Caravaggio, which is a small town nearby. In 1576, there was a plague and they moved outta the big city. We understand this now
in contemporary society. They moved outta the big city to the small town of Caravaggio. They had an intimate relationship with the noble family of the Sforza and married into the
Sforza, the Colonna family. His father worked as
sort of like a major Domo or kind of a site architect
for the Sforza Colonna. And that kind of patronage, those noble personal connections
will come back to him over time, over the course of his career, he apprentices to an
artist that no one knows, basically in Milan, in 1584, it was a four year apprenticeship,
so he was an adolescent. This is the tradition of the time. The artist's name is Simone Peterzano, and he styled himself
as a follower of Titian, like maybe he met Titian in Venice, but he certainly is not
a follower of Titian. But anyway, he was kind of
one of the established figures in the art scene in Milan. And Caravaggio just starts off there. And does we think his full apprenticeship, no work survives before
he lands in Rome in 1592. And we have an account from one of his biographers
writing in 1672, so quite a bit later. But he claims that
around the year of 1590, Caravaggio was well known already in Milan for brawling with gangs of young men, and that he had committed
a murder which forced him to flee from Milan, first
to Venice and then to Rome. That's a little bit
spurious in the details, but based on other sources, we do think there was some
sort of violent incident, maybe not a murder,
but that he left Milan. And at some point in that
year or two in 1591, 92, he lands in Rome. And when he lands in Rome,
he is a journeyman artist. He doesn't have patronage, he doesn't even have really a connection to any of the major studios. He sort of tries to get in with some of those established
artists in their studios, which is how you make your
way in a grand artistic market like Rome was at the time. It is the center of patronage in Italy because of the presence
of the Catholic church and because of the papacy and then all of the familial and cultural hangers onto the papacy. So this is the orbit that
Caravaggio would like to get into, but you need an introduction. And so he starts off painting works that, and I should say starting out
none, maybe one, maybe two, one or two works are actually signed and we're depending on archival documents and stylistic analysis
in order to attribute these paintings to Caravaggio. So especially in this early age, we know that he was working with artists as an assistant in their studios, probably as a still life
specialist above all. And there are a couple of
these half length male figures with a still life element
that we think probably fit into these first couple of years in Rome. This in the Roberto Longe in Florence. And there are three or
four copies of this, which is an indication
that people liked it, it was successful. This very famous painting, which is the first time that
we know of that we see him as in the guise of a
figure in the paintings. This is a self portrait as if he were the figure of Bacchus. It's called the Sick Bacchus
because he has this greenish, grayish complexion and
no one has really come up with a good explanation
for what that might be. He had some early instances of being wounded in fights, of being sick, whether or not that's actually
how he's depicting himself or it's some other stylistic choice. The important thing is to see
the kind of moving forward of this embrace of still life, which at this point in time in
the history of art in Europe was not an independent genre. You didn't just paint a still life. So they're embedded in a
larger composition like this. This one is a famous example of him attempting to depict a violent reaction. In this case, if you
look, it's hard to see in the slide, but if you look closely, there is a lizard hiding out in the floral still life who's biting this gentleman's finger. And again, this sort of effeminate, beautiful young man shown half length with the still life element dominant and attempting to capture some
sort of a fleeting emotion. And then the still life, right? And this actually, this painting always
feels like the still life is sort of tacked on to the
depiction of the figure. Another one of these beautiful young men, we'll get into that, but
really that's still life can and will be lifted out separately. And this is why scholars have speculated that he may have been actually
a still life specialist working in bigger studios for
other artists at this time, kind of the most accomplished of these in terms of the treatment of the anatomy and the light and the sensitivity to the still life is this
painting in the Uffizi, where we see kind of
where he'll end up going. So the still life is extremely beautiful and extremely realistic. When you pay attention to the details, the leaves have holes in
them, the fruit is over ripe. The figure of the Bacchus type figure has ruddy hands and dirty fingernails. So we are seeing an observation
of things that are drawn from real life, but shown in
the guise of Bacchus is a God. He's supposed to be ideal and perfect. And yet we see this kind
of alternative approach to how that should be depicted. And then the idea that this
is how you hold a wine glass if you're elegant, I would
be terrible with this. You hold it by the base, this
beautiful Venetian glass, and you see the ripples of the wine on the surface as his
hand moves a little bit, which is just the kind of observation that he becomes known for. And this early period of
observation of still life really comes to a head, one of the first independent still life, so not part of a larger scene, but a still life of and for itself, which was painted for
a powerful church man who was also a collector named Charles Borromeo, sorry, and it's in the Ambrosiana, which was his personal
collection in Milan. And who clearly aside from
collecting religious art, appreciated this kind of approach. And again, you see the bruised fruit and the sort of wilting
leaves, the illusionism that the basket is
coming out over the edge and might tip forward is
also an invention of his. His figure painting in this circle in Rome is really where he makes a mark and attracts patronage and moves forward. One of the earliest, and again, we're just basing the
dating of these paintings on a perceived kind of
progression of style, but one of the earliest
paintings that we think we know is a scene of a fortune teller. In the past, she has been
called a gypsy fortune teller. We would today call her a Romani woman who's fortune telling. And this is a kind of
a stereotypical scene that often would occur in a tavern or on the side of the street. And she's shown as in a way, drawing in this young man who's dressed in garments that are expensive. He's meant to sort of
signify a young noble man, although the figure
type is still the same, the beautiful young man
with kind of round cheeks and curly black hair that we saw in all of those half
length Bacchus figures. Now he's sort of transformed into a contemporary Roman figure and she's reading his palm. And in some of the early accounts of this fortune teller scene, the writers would say that
she's stealing his ring. And that is based on a stereotype of what these fortune telling women who worked on the streets of Rome were sort of stereotypically
known for, which was thievery. And in this case, I've
looked and looked and looked, and there's no ring there. She's absolutely not stealing his ring. There's a real kind of layering of meaning of both in the period and also now. And so this, I have a quote from, he had an early biographer, several 17th century
biographers wrote about him, this one about basically
60 years after his life, but based on earlier biographies. And so fairly well-informed,
he's writing in 1672. And he says about this painting, he's talking about
Caravaggio's figure type and where he draws his models from. "When he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Glycon",
these are ancient statues, "In order that he might
use them as models. His only answer was to point
toward a crowd of people, saying that nature had given
him an abundance of masters. And these two half figures,
Caravaggio translated reality so purely that it came
to confirm what he said." And so even though I think
when we look at this today, we see it's a little kind of cleaned up. It's a little stylized. That is the takeaway from
how his work was received in his lifetime and
after in Rome and beyond, was that he was drawing
models from the street. He was going into the tavern
and he was drawing models from the people that he hung out with. And we'll get into that
kind of, he had a life. (people laughing) Also to point out again,
maybe he lands in Roman 1592, again, we're guessing at dates
1594, a little bit later. These paintings were
incredibly popular immediately. And so with many of them,
and just in this case, we have two paintings that
are considered autographs, slightly different variants
of the same composition who the paintings went
through noble collection. So there's a desire for other
artists and Caravaggio himself to repeat his compositions
in multiple versions because there's a need for that or a want for that in the market. When you go upstairs to 211, one of the highlights of the
installation Among Rivals is this picture from the Kimbell Museum, which gained him entree
into his first circle of noble patronage with a man called
Francesco Maria del Monte, who was cardinal of the church. He was not as wealthy as some of the kind of
princes of the church that we think of. These are hangers on and usually
family members or nephews or something that are related
to the Pope at the moment. They're in political favor
and they gain the wealth and power that you would assume with that. But Del Monte, he wasn't unconnected, but he didn't have the wealth
that some of the others did. And he was really out there
trying to find and collect contemporary artists and
young contemporary artists. And he's Caravaggio's first major patron. And then because he's an important figure, he was very courtly, he loved music. He loved feasting, not really the most holy life perhaps, but, and collecting art. But he couldn't afford the guys who were already there on the scene. So an artist like Caravaggio
was intensely desirable to him. And this is the first
painting that we know of that ended up in
Del Monte's collection, a scene of men who are cheating at cards. And he lays out in this
picture a narrative that once you can kind
of glean the details, and if you were someone who
lived in 17th century Rome, you would immediately see
what is happening here. And I'll read you the
same biographer from 1672, sorry, writing about this painting. And he lays it out. He clearly was standing in front of it when he made the notes on this. He lays it out very clearly. "He showed a simple man holding the cards, his head portrayed well from
life and wearing dark clothes. And on the opposite side, there is a dishonest youth in profile who leans on the card table with one hand while with
the other behind him, he slips a false card from his belt. A third man close to the
young one looks at his cards and with three fingers reveals
them to his companion." And so the young man is a dupe. He's dressed in black and dark red velvet. This is the height of
expensive clothing at the time. He is a young man from a wealthy family who is not streetwise. And these two gentlemen who
are in very theatrical costumes and really drawn from the theater. That's not what you
would wear on the street. This kind of colorful
patch together costumes and different colors and
patterns are cheating him. And Caravaggio gives you everything that you need to know to read the scene. So even down to the
detail of the older man behind the young dupe has the finger cut out of his glove so that he can feel marked cards. And this becomes really
the jumping off point for an entire genre of
tavern scenes in European, especially in Italian art, but also in Northern European art. Working for Cardinal Del Monte, the owner of the last painting, I mentioned that he was a patron of music. And we have a series of
pictures that show musicians working in this kind of,
again, beautiful young man, shown half length guys, this picture at the metropolitan
and this lute player who's shown in the act of
singing, his mouth is open, but his tongue is behind his teeth. He's in the process of singing. You could actually, people have identified the music that's on the page in front
of him, which is a love, a magical about love. And that gets us to the religious painting that's in the exhibition upstairs, another one of these
half length approaches to composition figures behind a table. But in this case, they're saints, although they're shown
in the garb, in the guise of individuals that you would recognize from 17th century Rome. And the religious subject is
that this is Mary Magdalene, the woman who's holding
onto the curved mirror and her sister Martha. And Mary Magdalene in the
biblical understanding is a thought to have been a prostitute. Again, in the biblical understanding. And Martha, her sort
of more devout sister, is hearing her as she's
giving up that life of sin because she's been convinced by Christ to turn into a life of
sanctity and devotion. So all of the implements of
vanity, her beautiful dress, but moreover, the mirror, the curved mirror and the
comb and the pot for makeup are the things of her previous
life that she's giving up. He, in this early Roman period, really gloms onto a kind of
approach to religious painting where he's taking figures that do seem like they're
walking off the streets of Rome and casting them in
the guise of a historic, quote, historic person from the bible
or from biblical history. And this is his second approach
to the penitent Magdalene. And a biographer at the time
said about this picture, "It seemed not a
religious painting at all. A girl sitting on a low
wooden stool drying her hair." And that casting of a contemporary figure as she's wearing 17th
century Roman costume into the guise of a saint is part of what made him so approachable and desirable for his audience. An outlier. (person laughing) He doesn't shy away from
kind of violent depictions, it's usually in the sense of the history of the Catholic church, martyrdoms and stuff like that. But decapitation is something
comes up again and again. And this was a commission from his friend, we think from his friend
Cardinal del Monte, to the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, Fernando do Medici. And it's actually on a shield. It's on a curved shield. It's the ancient tradition
of the head of Medusa defeating Perseus because
of her hideousness and stopping him in his tracks, or that's the idea because
of her hideousness. And it's a tradition to depict the head of Medusa on
a shield for warriors going into battle, for
soldiers going into battle. But he takes it to another level. Those are real snakes
that make up her hair and a kind of attempt at an expression envisioning what would happen if this were happening to a real person. He is active in Rome a
bit as a portraitist, although I think I would
say not as successfully as his religious and his genre paintings. This gentleman, Maffeo Barberini,
becomes Pope Urban VIII. So again, he's attempting
and successfully attempting to ally himself with really
some of the most powerful church affiliated households in Rome. This picture, unfortunately, really unfortunately and tragically destroyed in World War II. And so we have a very bad old photograph, but I think it might
not have actually been that great of a painting to begin with, but a woman that we think is
called Fillide Melandroni, who was a cortisone in Rome. Rome is a town full of men. And so there was an active
appreciation for women who worked as courtesans and oftentimes with
Caravaggio getting into fights about them, women that he was
romantically affiliated with, and then the other men that they may have also
been affiliated with. And in this case we know that this woman called Fillide Melandroni
was a model for Caravaggio. So we see her turn up in the guise of St.
Catherine of Alexandria caressing the sword that
will be the end of her life. Another beheading, this is like the precursor
to the beheading. And here's another beheading, maybe his most violent painting, quite well known where
the same young woman, probably Fillide Melandroni,
is the model for Judith gaining power over the General Holofernes, And I just wanna come back and point out that she's the same woman if we think she is Fillide Melandroni, is the model for the Magdalene in Detroit's painting, which is upstairs. He makes a name for himself in 1600, he shoots to the top headline when he has a commission
for the Contarelli Chapel and the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, he has the commission for
two of the side paintings and they're still in
situ when you go to Rome. They're on the Caravaggio
circuit, they're monumental. And his first outing as a
history painter for multi figure, large scale compositions. This one is a little
bit complicated to read and when you look at the x-rays, he had a first go at the
composition he thought didn't work, and then he went back and did this, which maybe also doesn't quite work. But the painting that does work is the Calling of St. Matthew. Matthew is here, who me, is what he's saying with that gesture. He's a Roman tax collector,
he's the bad guy, and here's the figure of Jesus
Christ who's saying, yes you, and this is really set
within the kind of interior, or maybe it's in the alley
outside of a Roman tavern, but this is in there. The gentleman around the table
are wearing Roman costume just like those theatrical costumes in the painting of the. So this dramatic telling
of a story, and again, within the guise of contemporary Rome, is what makes him really quite compelling and his first iteration or experience with being rejected, which is something that happens to him throughout his career. He had several alter pieces
that were commissioned and then turned away for reasons that are mostly lost to history. Again, the painting on the
left of the screen lost, unfortunately from the
Kaiser Friedrich Museum during World War II. We only have a black and white photo, The Calling of St. Matthew. What in the world could be
problematic about this, right? It's beautiful, the idea that Matthew is a father of the church, right? He's one of the four evangelists, the four writers of the gospels. And this is showing him being inspired by the divine to write his gospel. But in this case, he's barefoot, his foot is dirty, this
foot, it's the altarpiece, the main altarpiece. It's sticking out over the
main altar of the church. And the angel isn't just inspiring him, he's physically holding his hand and moving it so that the
implication, and again, speculation from artist joins, the implication might be that he's unable to complete this task on his own. And then the painting on the right, which is the one that you
see in the chapel today, you have the same inspiration story, but the angel is cleanly up above and he's ticking off the
didactic points of inspiration. And then Matthew writes them down. They're both extremely beautiful, but there is a really distinct difference in the interpretation. This cycle of paintings just
rocked the Roman art world. No one had ever seen anything like this. He goes on in the next year and two to do another major chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, also still in situ, the crucifixion of St. Peter on one wall. And one of the most powerful paintings I think he really ever produced,
the conversion of St. Paul, St. Paul is again one of
the bad guys, a Roman. And again, the early Christian movement. So sayeth the texts and he's on the road and he is knocked off his horse by a vision of God and converted. And what does that look like? Well, here's a man who's
been knocked off his horse, blinded and kind of overwhelmed. The first iteration, which was rejected, is the one on the left, which is maybe too fussy and not quite as emotionally direct. Again, there's no documented reason why these paintings
didn't please the patron. But in this case, we do again, have a surviving first
version and second version. This kind of dramatic approach to staging religious
narrative is really what marks his later Roman works like this sacrifice of Isaac where he's
following the will of God to sacrifice his son and he's actually pinning his neck down. And in many of these paintings, it does not get that physical, in terms of treating this subject. He's pinning his neck down, he is got the knife right there, and the angel has to come in
who stops him, who says, no, you've proven your point. Yes, you've proven your point, has to grab his arm to stop him. It's a much more dramatic
and personal approach than what is the tradition. The gesticulation, the kind of stereotypical
baroque approach to composition where people are gesturing and interacting and on top of each other layered together with expressions of drama. You see in smaller scale works like this for a private collection, a painting that if you've read the book called "The Lost Painting", was rather famously rediscovered in the Jesuit College
in Dublin in the 1990s, the Betrayal of Christ by Judith in the Garden of Gethsemane and the gripping of the
figure in the middle. And I just wanna point out
that the bearer of light to the scene is a
self-portrait of Caravaggio. On a larger scale, this same kind of drama and gesticulation. This was for a new
establishment of a church called the Chiesa Nuova, for the Order, which was a counter reformation new order. It's now in the Vatican
Museums, and again, with the really careful approach to how to build a crescendo of kind of mourning in this scene as Christ is being placed into his tomb. One more famous rejected altarpiece that many of you will have known, you go right past it on your way to the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. So slow down, for a church called Santa
Maria della Scala in Rome, and it was rejected. It's a fabulous altarpiece,
the death of the Virgin Mary. And miraculously, all
of Christ's followers, his disciples appear at her deathbed and it really is a
portrait of grief, right? Everyone's sort of reacting
in a different way. And then we have, again, Mary Magdalene, we see her here in the foreground, just doubled over with
her head on her knees, reacting to the grief that she's feeling. Why would you reject that? The early commentators say that they think that the very dead looking
body of the Virgin Mary, they accuse him of having
used the body of prostitute who had drowned in the Tiber
River in Rome as a model. And that's certainly not
what you want as the model for the mother of God, right? What that's speculative. But the idea that she looks very dead is probably actually what
the criticism is here, because traditionally in the
history of art in this subject, she's meant to be shown dying, seated upright with her hands like this and like going straight up into heaven. And Caravaggio couldn't deal with that. Like that's not what it looks
like when someone passes away. And this is a much more affecting and realistic approach to that. He starts to get into trouble with, in terms of the law in Rome. And this is maybe why we know
him somewhat the best today. He shows up, we know him very well in the history of art
because of his interactions with the police in Rome. And he shows up in the criminal archives. I have several examples. In 1600 he was living
with Cardinal del Monte, his first patron. He was arrested for beating a nobleman, a guest of the cardinal with a club resulting in an official
complaint to the police. Between May and October, 1604, he was arrested several times for possession of illegal weapons, that's carrying a sword,
a concealed sword. And for insulting the police,
he was throwing rocks at them. He was sued by a tavern waiter because the waiter got his order of artichokes wrong. It was boiled versus fried, and whatever he got
wasn't what he ordered. And he threw the plate of artichokes at the face of the waiter. In 1605, he had to flee
to Genoa for three weeks. He seriously injured of Roman notary in a dispute over a
prostitute called Lana, who was both a lover and
a model for Caravaggio. The notary reported having been attacked with a sword, causing
a severe head injury. Caravaggio's patrons
intervened and he was allowed to come back to Rome from Genoa. He was then sued by his landlady for not having paid his rent, out of spite he threw rocks
through her window at night. In November of 1605, he was hospitalized with an injury that he claimed was caused by himself falling on his own sword. Probably not, the most
dramatic of them though is on the 29th of May in
1606, he killed a young man, a sort of lower nobleman called, who came from a fairly powerful family. He killed him, murdered
him in a street fight. And the sources are back
and forth on what the reason for this altercation
was, over a tennis game, a fight over the attentions of a unknown, but he murdered him and
that's a capital offense then as in now. And he's given a death
sentence and had to flee Rome. So from Rome and for the rest of his life, he dies in 1610, he's on the move. It's not that he is not known, he's a celebrity wherever he goes. He first goes to Naples for a
few years where he completes major altar pieces for, in this case a charitable
organization in Naples. The painting's still in its
original location from Naples. He gains a knighthood
in the Knights of Malta and he moves to Malta. Probably he thought a knighthood would help him out with
this case back in Rome, sort of socially climbing,
his largest Ultra piece, something like 17 feet by 12 feet for the major chapel of
the Knights of Malta. Dramatic and beautiful depiction of the head beheading
of St. John the Baptist. And the only time that
we know of that he signs his name on a picture and gotta be a stereotype,
in the blood of the Baptist. It says F Michelangelo, and
then it kind of goes off, but Michelangelo, and that would've been right
over the altar in the church. From there, he goes on to Sicily, paints a series of altar
pieces that are very kind of humble in their approach. Shepherds and poor people in
the guise of religious figures. In this case, this painting was unfortunately
stolen from the church in 1969, presumably by the Sicilian Mafia. At the end of his life, quite a conundrum. He seems to have thought that
he could get back to Rome and gain a pardon from his death sentence. He sets off in a boat. He had gone back to Naples, got into a fight, been injured, sets off in a boat to go back to Rome, armed with a couple of paintings that end up in the collection of a powerful cardinal
of the church, Borghese, maybe they were meant as a kind of bribe. But he ends up on the beach. There's a whole story
about him missing his boat. Basically he ends up on a beach, it's the summer and he either gets malaria or he has kind of sepsis or an infection from his injury in Naples,
and he dies in 1610 on the beach in a town
called Porto Ercole. But for our purposes, his legacy is long. And that's what I hope we bring across in the exhibition upstairs,
together with pictures, together with him of followers
like Giovanni Baglione, who was one of his first biographers. Baglione writes The Life
of the Artist in 1642. The Art Institute has
this fabulous painting. Not many of his paintings can
really be called fabulous, I'm sorry, but true. This picture of the Ecstasy of St. Francis that exists in two versions. Ours has the blue on the
angels, Ultra Marine, LACMA's does not have ultra Marine. So maybe ours is the more prestigious, but it's based on an iconography
that Caravaggio developed. And he really criticizes
Baglione for being, he basically accuses him of plagiarism for these early pictures, which are inspired by the
kind of spiritual feeling of these religious paintings. But also in some cases, a
little bit of the actual figure just kind of lifted. This was a direct confrontation, a very problematic to
modernize picture by Caravaggio of the Victorious Cupid in which the model is an adolescent boy
who's quite, quite nude, Cupid being the victor over
all of the worldly achievements that lay in the foreground of music, literature, et cetera, et cetera. And then Baglione shows a divine figure of love of cupid conquering earthly cupid. And in the figure of the devil, this is the portrait of Caravaggio. (people laughing) Why do they hate each other? So he, I have to find my
notes to read the quote. Baglione gets a commission
to do a major altarpiece for the main church of
the Jesuit order in Rome, which was the new church at that time, it's an altarpiece
that's eight meters high. And Caravaggio was jealous. Baglione got this commission, and Caravaggio did not. And also Baglione in his
view is copying his style. And so he starts, he and his friends
circulate a series of poems, really inappropriate
poems throughout Rome. And he gets sued, Caravaggio
gets sued for libel. Here's a quote, I'll censor it. Jovan, you are a no nothing. Your pictures are mere dobs. I'll warrant that you will not earn so much as a farthing from them. It's an inelegant translation, not even enough cloth to make
yourself a pair of breaches. So you'll have to go around
with your ass in the air. So take your drawings and cartoons around to the grocery store, et cetera and maybe wipe your bum with them, or, and he's referring to an associate of Baglione called. Or stuff them up Mao's wife's, so that Mao can't, and then he says. (people laughing) I'm sorry I can't join in
all of this mindless praise to Baglione's alter piece picture. But you are quite unworthy of
the chain that you're wearing. And a disgrace to painting, the chain is an allusion to, if a nobleman thought that you had given good service to them, you might get a gold chain is
kind of the highest estimation oof what you could achieve
in your profession, a recognition. So yeah, there's a libel trial, the testimony survives in transcript and Caravaggio's convicted. He's thrown into a prison in Rome, not his first time for two weeks. The French ambassador
to Rome bails him out under house arrest and it
goes onward from there. And remarkably, so Baglione
is probably best known to art historians today as a biographer. He publishes this biography of artists of his lifetime in 1642. And he's not that hard
on Caravaggio actually. He talks about him being a
rough character, et cetera, et cetera. He does not
mention the libel trial, but he does talk about kind of, his popularity as a figure
in the history of art. So as a follower who was really
treated badly by Caravaggio, Baglione kind of comes off looking like maybe not the best artist to our contemporary eyes,
but not that bad of a guy. Another person who
actually knew Caravaggio, follower who knew
Caravaggio in his lifetime is this gentleman unclear
really in the history of art. Who this person is who we know
of as Cecco del Caravaggio and we think his name is
actually Francesco Buoneri, but his nickname, Cecco, is a sort of shortening of Francesco and it's a kind of convoluted path to connecting a man in
the early biographies known as Cecco with a man that we know of in some of the
documents from the period as Francesco Buoneri and thinking that they're the same person. We know nothing about his biography, active for kind of 10
years, this circa 16, 10 to 20 figure is what
we think he was active in. And you can see a kind of
more elaborate way forward from some of these early
examples of works by Caravaggio like this loop player. And then a much more
elaborate still life in a very distinctive style by Cecco, by Francesco. And the Art Institute has
hands down his most important and ambitious picture, which is very, very large altarpiece, a commission for family's
private chapel in Florence, in the Church of Santa Felicita. It was the family of the
Tuscan ambassador to Rome. There were three pictures
that were commissioned and really this is the
only one that survives. It's the only work that's
documented from this artist and it's dated, it's a contract that's dated 1619. And it's how we know what
the name of the artist is. When we call someone Cecco de Caravaggio, art historians call that a not name. It's when you're making
up the name of an artist that you don't really know the name of. Anyway, it's one of the most
important Baroque pictures. Italian Baroque pictures in the US and we're very blessed to have it. Cecco may have actually
been an artist model and studio assistant of Caravaggio, and he may have been drawn into
a more intimate relationship with Caravaggio. I'll just kind of leave it at that. But later commentators
indicate that there may have been from our current perspective, obviously problematic sexual relationship with between this studio model who was adolescent and Caravaggio. But these two pictures in particular, the victorious cupid that you saw earlier, and another picture, which
are clearly the same model, have often been called Cecco as the model. So for this chapel, we have our
picture, which was rejected, never ended up in the chapel. We're following on a trend
from his friend Caravaggio. Unclear why. Unfortunately, the other picture that we know of from the chapel by the northern artist,
Gerard von Honthorst in the Uffizi was severely damaged, destroyed in the Uffizi bombing in 1993. And so what you're seeing
now is what we have, almost nothing. And the third painting by a
not well-known artist today called Los is unknown. So the full context of this has
really been lost to history. But just to kind of point
out some of these drawings upon Caravaggio that you see, which is a very clear
sense that these are models that are posed in a studio
that are drawn off the street, that are put into costumes and poses and that the soldiers are
wearing contemporary armor. That this angel is kind of
acknowledging the viewer and looking outward,
that the Christ figure, he's on a cloud, but he's clearly kneeling
on something, right? He's kneeling on a block in the studio and then that's been
transferred into a cloud. And then finally, a kind of
more derivative, I'll say, not so closely personally
linked with Caravaggio, this follower, Bartolomeo Manfredi, really one of his most quirky and interesting pictures
is here in Chicago, a very large picture of Cupid Chastised, which is also based on this kind of nude, youth cupid figure that comes
out of Caravaggio's work. Mars is angry at Cupid for
distracting Venus basically. He becomes really well known as a conduit from these early tavern scenes and fortune tellers and
music makers, gamblers, into the kind of next
generation of followers, where things get a little
bit darker and a little more, a little less kind of idealistic. So a picture like this one in Detroit and this one in LACMA, where you see a kind of
the card sharp figure being taken to a new height. So with all of these
pictures in this exhibition, Caravaggio, he's known for these large and dramatic and interesting, compelling canvases of religious figures. But when you look at
these earlier pictures from his Roman period
of these tavern scenes, genre scenes like what we have upstairs, this is in a way what is most compelling to his followers going forward. The taste for Caravaggism, which is what we'll call his followers, the taste for Caravaggism in Rome, and then a little bit in
the north of Europe as well. It really burns fast and bright. So by the middle of the 17th century, this is a style that is out of fashion and everyone has moved along. And that whole moving along goes also together with the history of the criticism of art. So that scholars really, this whole movement dropped
off of the radar of collectors, of scholars until unbelievably, the middle of the 20th century. There was a hallmark show in Milan in 1951 that raised Caravaggio back into the public consciousness. And so American collections
like the Kimbell, like Detroit, there's also a
major painting in Cleveland. Those were bought in the 1970s. And when I tell you that you cannot buy a painting by Caravaggio today, I mean it. So an artist who lived for 39 years, who had a very short career in Rome and then a peripatetic
career trying to run from the law for the rest of his life, a total output of maybe 50 to 60 paintings depending on who you ask,
really had a major impact in the future of the
history of art in Europe. I think we have a few
minutes for some questions and we have a microphone
and some staff members who will bring you the microphone
if you raise your hand. - [Speaker] Great presentation,
thank you for giving it. I'm over here. - Raise your hand, okay, hi. - [Speaker] I have an observation and I have a question for you, based on your presentation. I'm gonna say that
Caravaggio was an R&R person, at one end of the continuum he was a rogue and the other end he was
a religious aficionado. And, my question to you is
with your depth and breadth of Spanish art, what
drew you to Caravaggio? - He's one of the fundamental artists of the 17th century in Italy. I mean his slightly utter
contemporary Bernini is another, and then the kind of more painters like Poussin in the following decades. His movement of naturalism,
of drawing figures from life, of observing the model in the studio rather than idealizing a figure that you've drawn and kind
of in a Rafaelesque approach, kind of smoothed out the craggy edges of, instead of looking at a
figure in front of you, that is really foundational
for the next several centuries. I mean, you can go quite far
into even the 19th century for artists that may have kind of drawn on that tradition of working from life, of working with models that
are drawn off the street and in casting them as types that are not who they actually were in real life. They're actually models. And so for Spanish art, I think you see to your original question, you see artists who sometimes
do the same thing or who treat an average everyday figure with dignity and purpose and narrative purpose. So like in Madrid Velazquez, my forthcoming project
on Francisco de Zurbarán these are artists that I wouldn't say are directly influenced by Caravaggio. They couldn't have known him, but that's a sort of trend
that crosses Europe really, in the first half of the 17th century. Yeah, anyone else? - [Speaker 2] Hi. Great lecture, thank you so much. Has there been any speculation
with any ability for accuracy on his anxiety disorder
or his mental illness? - Yeah, there has been, I can't cite a definitive study on that, but there is a sort of understanding that especially his
last few years in Rome, he's spiraling downwards, his kind of interactions with the police. He was living in the palace
of Cardinal del Monte and then he goes out on his own and he's got a really shabby apartment. We know the inventory of the possessions that he had and it was basically nothing. He's living despite all of
these high flying commissions, he's living slightly
above the poverty line I would say in our
contemporary assessment. And he's getting into more
and more and more fights, escalating to the point
where he murders Tomosoni, he was actually probably
trying to castrate him is what the records indicate
in terms of the injury that his victim had. And there is a real understanding then for the rest of his
life that he's in flight and that speaking of an anxiety disorder, that would do it, right, that there is a kind of downward spiral. And while he does have noble connections to the Colonna family from his childhood in Caravaggio and in
Milan that he draws upon to help him out of sticky situations, that kind of noble patronage
that he had in Rome, he was out of that circle
when he goes to Naples and then to Malta and Sicily. So yeah, there's a sense of, it's hard to diagnose figures from history through a modern lens and our understanding of mental health, but there is a real understanding that there was a spiral there, yeah. - [Speaker 3] I wouldn't
have asked this except I heard from your
biography that you worked in Indianapolis museum. About 10 years ago we were there, there was a painting
of the Sleeping Cupid, which I've always read is
only at the Pity Palace, what's the story? - So there's a painting
of a sleeping cupid that is from his very late
period, perhaps his last, he goes back to Naples a second time, so perhaps his second Neapolitan period or perhaps the end of his Sicilian period. It's unclear, there's a
painting of a sleeping cupid in which he's a child cupid and he looks like he's deceased. And that's kind of what
everyone sort of says, oh, that's pretty typical for this artist and how he would approach
that sort of subject, which is not to idealize it. And there's a copy of that painting in Indianapolis at the
Museum of Art there, and there are several other copies. There's one in a private
collection in Florence and there's an inscription of the back of the painting that we
know who made the copy. And it's not Caravaggio, so autograph and not autograph copies. And that happens a lot with him. I don't know what the current thinking of the autograph nature of the painting in Indianapolis is, but we know that he did
make his own copies. And then I should say, the Cardsharps is his most copy painting
from his Roman period. There's 50 copies that are
known by other artists. So that makes it a murkier question. They were very popular
compositions, and again, I don't know what the
current thinking there is. - We have time for one more question. - [Speaker 4] Thank you
very much for the lecture. What I'm taking away is
Caravaggio's naturalism versus the idealized and
the religious portraiture that you were talking about. How would that been received
with his contemporary time? Was it a stark transition? Was this well embraced? - Yeah, it was both. I have a quote here, I can't
remember if I read it or not, but it was controversial and in particular younger artists, that's a
little bit of a generalization, but there was a contingent, his friends, they were often the people
that were in the taverns, they all lived in the same neighborhood. It's basically at the foot of what is now the Spanish steps in Rome. The steps weren't there
and the 17th century, but that was the artist neighborhood. I think it's still a
little bit of an artist, like once you get past the luxury shops, it's a little bit of
an artist neighborhood. But they all ran around together
and they knew each other and they really embraced this style because what he had been coming out of, which I didn't have time to address, is a really kind of cold and formerly observed
idealized late mannerism. So kind of taking an artist like Rafael and taking all of the originality of that and kind of couching it in
a more formalized framework in a way, that you're not
depicting things from nature. You are maybe working from a
model and making a drawing. And that's, I didn't mention
this, Caravaggio did not, as far as we know, make
drawings, none survive. And often the case with
his followers as well, they were working from the live
model, we think on a canvas. And I think that artists felt that was freeing in a way, but it was also for
the critics especially. And so Baglione writes his
biography of Caravaggio in 1642. There was another biographer who wrote a kind of passing account in I think 1620. But most of these biographers,
Baglione knew him personally, obviously, but then most of
them didn't know him personally. And so by the end of the
century, 17th century, like I said, this style
had gone out of date. And so the critics that write
about it and the biographers and the critics, theorists
are very critical and there had been a turn
towards the idealism again, the idealistic approach to
figure drawing after Caravaggio. So for that 20 year
period or 25 year period, it was kind of the hot, new style really. It was revolutionary. No one had done anything like that before. It's like depicting a scene of the Madonna and Child and Saints, but you're wearing a ball cap and a striped polo and
jeans as one of the saints. And that's really how
people would've read it. They would've recognized
themselves in the paintings. And I think that was
both what was compelling but also controversial. So it's kind of 50, 50. Okay, thank you all very much for coming. (audience clapping)
