Voices on Art-Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art-Caravaggio's Life and Art

good evening everyone welcome I'm Carolyn best director of Arts and Letters live at the Dallas Museum of Art and I'm delighted to welcome you to our artful musings event on the life and art of Caravaggio with Gillian dimeric and Andrew Graham Dixon as a courtesy to those around you please take a moment to silence your cellphone's and after both presentations Julian and Andrew are happy to take questions from all of you so once we get to that portion of the program feel free to raise your hand and a staff member will bring you a wireless microphone and if possible please stand when posing your questions just so that they can see you easily and address you directly and immediately following the event we invite you to meet Andrew Graham Dixon at the book signing in the concourse near the dma store where copies of the Caravaggio biography and other select books are available for purchase Arts and Letters live is supported by our annual season supporters McKay Caterina Endowment for the literary and Performing Arts and the Magee foundation Arts and Letters live endowment sent at the Dallas Museum of Art additional major support is provided by the Hirsch foundation the Fairmont Hotel Dallas is the exclusive hotel partner for the 2019 Arts and Letters Live series promotional support is provided by kera and I'd also like to thank our staff and volunteers for their help tonight as well as with richard serrano with art the suite productions our first speaker tonight is julian dimeric a fantastic new addition to the museum staff in mid-may Julian Julian joined the DMA as the Lillian and James H Clark assistant curator of European art he comes to Dallas from London where he spent two-and-a-half years as a curatorial fellow at the National Gallery while there Julian curated an exhibition of de gAHS works assisted in the final stages of the exhibition painters paintings from Freud to Van Dyck and worked on major Reedus plays of the post 1800's and Italian Renaissance galleries which included reimagining the displays of the National Gallery's collection of works by Titian and Raphael Julian studied at King's College Cambridge where he is about to complete his pH d here at the DMA Julian's focus will be on reimagining the presentation of our old master collection contributing to growing this part of the DM A's collection as well as devising a robust old master program the Caravaggio focus exhibition that I hope you enjoyed seeing tonight it's one of his first projects here at the Museum and he'll be setting the stage tonight by focusing specifically on the Caravaggio painting on the you Martha and Mary Magdalene please join me in giving a warm welcome to Julian dimeric well good evening and thank you for that very kind introduction it's what a treat to start one's career at a museum by getting to work on an exhibition by Caravaggio and it's an exhibition that really for us here at the museum marks a big sort of milestone in all sort of european or master programming it's been very pleased to see how well recieves has been the enthusiasm of visitors coming to see this exhibition and it's partly happening particularly heartening to see how much sort of close looking has been has been going on in that show that people have really taken the time to look at the picture which is not you know necessarily something that is possible in more typical exhibitions and as I said it's a milestone for us for a museum that is really embarking on focusing a lot more on old master programming and I'll sort of encourage you as well to return in about a month's time to see the second milestone which will be any read the complete reinstallation of our European galleries opening on August the 16th and really hailed you know by many as the first modern painter Caravaggio has for a long time being essentially largely forgotten by history he was for a long time unfashionable today we think of him as being part of this sort of Canon if you like of the great of the great masters taking a seat at the table featuring people like Michael or Leonardo da Vinci but he was very much have rediscovered in the nineteen in the 1950s and as such as Andrew will demonstrate in his talk he is an artist about whom we know actually very little we know that he's still very young when he comes to Rome and when he produces this picture around 1598 it's really part of a series of pictures where he's really asserting his style where he really is coming up with the technique of Keio school he is this incredibly dramatic lighting effect that will become really the staple of his earth and it's really a picture that he paints just before his big break at the the French Church in Rome has sort of first a public exhibition of a cycle of three paintings about in Matthew their release of reveals how revolutionary his artists on the Roman scene and everything should have gone well from then on but he had a tumultuous life he's as Andrew will show in his talk and will delight you with with the this information is that he's mainly as biography is mainly known through police reports and testimonies at trial he's sort of seen that this as this sort of bad boy of art history a passionate hot-blooded at rageous man and if I can give you just one anecdote of Caravaggio's my favorite one is when he's ordering eight artichokes for lunch in a Tavern in Rome and because the waiter cannot really tell him which one was right in oil and which one it was fried in butter he sort of throws the plate back in the waiters face and that's how we sort of remember Caravaggio he Delft kills a man he flees Rome and dies finally on his way back to Rome aged about 39 and I think what what sort of fascinates me and probably fascinates Andrew as well about Caravaggio's work is how an artist that led such a tumultuous life produce canvasses which are so beautiful so subtle like like this one but yet despite that there so full of energy and reflect this colorful relentless passionate character and if you look at the work closely you'll see just how freely painted it is you know curved I do someone who works straight onto the canvas he didn't bother or at least we don't think he bought it with prepared with preparatory drawings his composition evolved straight onto the canvas he painted with instinct you know very much about tacking the canvas with his brush and here in this painting we stumbled upon my Magdalene and her sister Martha depicted behind the wooden table engaged in one looks like a pretty intense dialogue and that is because it represents this sort of moment of conversion Mary Magdalene you can see here illuminated by this light is this very well dressed a woman who at that time was thought to have been a prostitute you know Mary Magdalene is there's the sinful at that time is seen as a serious or a sinful woman from the city who prostrate herself in front of Christ and washes his feet in sort of repentance and and forgoes her life of sin for a life a pure life closer her to God and was particularly striking for me about these pictures you look at it and at first sight there's nothing to differentiate it from genre scene you know it could be one of Caravaggio's pictures of lute players or car players or fortune tellers all rooted in the contemporary Roman life there's no halo to sort of indicate a holy presence and yet somehow you know that something divine is happening that it's not just any scene there's a sort of there's this divine light that radiates through the picture and it is because really it is a moment of divine revelation but that very much takes place in the real world a real contemporary world of Rome at that time and that's really the power of Caravaggio's artists his ability to represent a religious story in a completely novel way in the contemporary world around him and here what's fascinating with this picture is he pretty much creates a new scene altogether so as I've told you Mary Magdalene that her scene of conversion is seen as the moment where she prostrate yourself in front of Christ washes his feet and that is the moment that she sees the new light but here this revelation this revelatory moment comes through her very earthly sister Martha and you can see Martha counting on her fingers counting her sister's sins in this sort of very sort of rethorical sort of way which was pretty much you know made visual by Leonardo da Vinci a few decades beforehand and as you can see to reinforce that effect her hand is illuminated by that light it's very sort of striking showing that she is counting and though her sisters the martyrs face is in shadow remains a shadow it is the hand it is the instrument of this revelation that is highlighted to us and it's it's it's it's worth noting that you know if a curve agile light always has meaning a lot of altars who follow Caravaggio and who use dramatic the dramatic light effects that he did use it for maybe a mostly decorative way but in Caravaggio it takes on a sort of a deeper or more sort of mitts of physical significance and but I think particularly striking in this picture is how Caravaggio captures the instant of the revelation of that sort of revelation that you have Martha who still has him her mouth opens he's just stopped talking realizing that her sister is seeing the light and her mouth stays open in sort of all in sort of silent awe at seeing what is happening in front of her this picture is full of symbols which at first hand read as quite obvious symbols of Mary Magdalene's vanity so you have on the table a cosmetic jar you have a comb he's holding a flower place quite conveniently against her with a rather prominent bosom and there is a mirror the mirror sort of the quintessential example of vanity you know the object that you used to look at yourself only instead of excluding the rest of the world so you could read objects at first hand as a sort of attributes of a vain lascivious life but they also point towards her salvation the jar that Odin that that that cosmetic jar could also be seen as the the ointment jar that Mary Magdalene is going to wash to anoint crisis feet at the scene later the flower is an orange blossom of a flower there's pure white and that could be seen as representing her sort of spiritual purity that she is attaining but what is extraordinary too is that the mirror which really as I said is the quintessential vanity element becomes also points always a salvation it reflects as you can see not her the mirror sort of reflects nothing apart from that source of divine lights the source of the revelation and becomes a sort of symbol of this new insight but having said all of that you know despite it being a profoundly moving religious image it's also very playful Caravaggio is sort of toying with his years it's incredibly multi-layered you know the model and we talked about this with Andrew backstage a few minutes ago you know could very much be a very prominent Roman courtesan of that time fille de who also appears in two other in two other paintings and the picture was probably painted for Olympiad or Bandini the niece of the Pope who was a sort of condom of Rome and who would go see prostitutes and sort of try to take them out of prostitution she is in a way a modern-day Martha sort of assisting their conversion and Caravaggio is using one of those prominent Roman courtesans to to stand in for one of them but the most prominent prostitute of the Holy Scriptures and so Caravaggio's painting is both sort of lovely lofty but it's also grounded in the sort of gritty contemporary reality of Roman life it sort of it's pure curved agile it's on the one hand pious but it's also profane but for the mentally it's deeply human but above all for me the true miracle here is that Caravaggio is able to render visibly what isn't something visual the very moment of a profound life-changing spiritual experience he translates something that happens in the mind into paint if you see those are the Mary Magdalene's gaze which should be directed at her sister she isn't really looking at her sister anymore she is looking inside her head looking inwards sort of feeling experiencing that moment of divine revelation and I'm really delighted to be welcoming and introducing Andrew grab Dixon tonight who came all of the way from Britain a solely for tonight's event and is visiting Dallas for the first time he was born in London and educated both at Christ Church Oxford and at the Cultural Institute of Art and is one of the leading art critics and presenters of art television in the english-speaking world in he has presented numerous landmark series for the BBC including the acclaimed a history of British art Renaissance and art of eternity as well as many individual documentaries on art and artists more recently he has teamed up with chef and friend George o Locatelli to combine his love of art and food in the popular series it on Pat and if liked me those are your sort of two obsessions in life I highly recommends the delicious viewing experience and for more than 20 years he published a weekly column on art first Indian independent and most recently in The Sunday Telegraph he has written a number of acclaimed books on subjects ranging from medieval painting and sculpture to the art of the present Andrews books and his broadcasting have garnered numerous awards he spent more than 10 years researching and writing this biography of Caravaggio Caravaggio a life sacred and profane which was a New York Times notable book he combed through the criminal records of the era to glean extraordinary extraordinary details about the artists run-in with the law and skillfully evokes the social and religious context of early 17th century Italy author Peter Carey called the book a thrilling lesson in the art of seeing a detective story with a highly satisfying ending but perhaps I think for me the best way to introduce Andrews talk is simply to read you a very short quotation from his meticulously researched but also beautifully written book which lyrically encapsulate the artist because we are at a literary event after all Caravaggio's images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance faces are brightly illuminated details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations yet always the shadows encroach the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning so please join me in giving a warm welcome to Andrew Graham Dixon thank you very much [Applause] good evening here he is I am in my sort of peripatetic and slightly unusual life as an art historian I am I met Keith Richards because I was interviewing him in New York he just published a book about his life called life and so I thought I'd give him a copy of my book which had just come out so he swapped books this was on the back cover this is AA v le Oney who was a wonderful draftsman who created a series of images of notable characters of Rome in the 1590s including Caravaggio here he is and Keith looked at it and OH Caravaggio I liked Caravaggio it was a bad boy wasn't he I said yes he killed a man I said yes at least one do you know what he looks like a rolling stone he was a rolling stone contemporary with this image comes one of the in my book I think I examine and analyze something like 390 separate documents that survive relating to the life of Caravaggio so although Julian's right in a sense in saying we know very little about him when you compare what we know about him to what we know about Shakespeare it's like 300 times more but as Julian rightly says it's so it's as if you were only to know Jackson Pollock through his record of arrests but one of the very first documents concerning Caravaggio it's not actually an arrest but he's been he's being cited as somebody who may be able to help the police in their inquiries and it's a description of him given by a barber in a case that came to nothing and no one was hurt as far as we know but it's interesting because this barber who spends his life standing on the corner so often you find barbers are called as witnesses because they see everything they often have their shops on the corner and the barbers the judge says are you sure that it was caravaggio that picked up the dagger that was dropped by the guy and the barber says 'yeah and i know was him it's definitely him I'd know him anywhere because he's got black hair he's got black eyes he always wears black clothes although they're fine clothes he wears them until they're almost falling to pieces he's one of those who wears black after the Vespas bow now they didn't have streetlights in Rome so people who wear black after the Vespers bell that's kind of code for dodgy he's a man who can turn himself into a shadow he is a living piece of chiaroscuro if you like he arrives in Rome he's a bit of a bum and he's he's got great gifts he screwed up his apprenticeship in my opinion he signed apprenticeship forms and mate in Milan ways from he screwed it up there's a mangled difficult to read margin a liam of a manuscript copy of one of the early biographies which is in a library in Venice it's the unexpurgated version of an early biography written by a Sienese physician called Julia Mancini in the margin it gives us some sense it says he it's very hard to read it says something like policeman stabbed prostitute badly wounded Caravaggio a year in prison and then he runs away to Rome so that's that's I think probably the most reliable piece of chiaroscuro that we have for Caravaggio's leaving from Milan to go to Rome in his childhood just quickly because I only have 40 minutes in this presentation if I do the whole thing it's actually three and a half hours so so I split it up into pieces but yeah yeah so he he he was brought up in this little village called Caravaggio which is a pilgrimage site his father was a stonemason his mother was not of particularly high birth but she was slightly higher than him and her aunt her sister carriages aren't was the wet nurse to a great lady of the of the area Costanza Colonna who had a desperate time in early life she was married at the age of 12 and had conceived five children by the time she was team she apparently tried to commit suicide several times Caravaggio's aren't is her wetness now this lady Costanza Colonna will look after Caravaggio throughout his life I mean he's from nowhere and she's up she's one of the most powerful women in Italy she never gets a painting from him she never wants anything from him throughout his troubled life she'll always is there and I think it's possibly because of this armed connection maybe this aren't saved her during those difficult years don't know anyway that's that's a little piece of background another important very important piece of background see you look in his eyes I think Leone catches something you know people say you know was Caravaggio gay it's not interesting he slept with man he slept with women he slept with Philidor Martha Mary I mean but he never settled with anybody there's an abandonment about him there's something about him that can't be helped when he was five his entire male family was killed by the plague he lost every man in his life his father his uncle his grandfather or everyone all the men only his mother survived his sister and his brother who went on to become a Jesuit priest but Caravaggio never spoke to him again after he was after Caravaggio ran away to Rome his brother came to find him but Caravaggio wouldn't speak to him so he cut everything so he's in Rome he's got this fantastically powerful protectress but he's not arriving like Raphael he's not arriving like Michelangelo he doesn't have the protection doesn't extend to more than just looking after him so he's not got no introductions he's not being taken straight to meet this or that notable he's just a kid who's desperate and he's on the run and he's got nothing except talent and he's gone to Hollywood basically Rome is Hollywood it's the counter-reformation the church is going to spend whatever it takes to make Rome the most magna nificent city in the world it's quite possible some believe reading the book of revelations that as the end of the century approaches perhaps the end of the world is approaching so all the more important that we build great churches that we decorate them there's a whole quarter of artists something like a seventh of the population of the city is artists nearly everyone in the city is men there are no married women there are priests there are artists sculptors architects soldiers mercenaries and prostitutes who live in a special place in the city called the odd touch here the evil garden that's where falada lives so Caravaggio paints is trying to paint his way up sorry I'm gonna flip through it's not okay he's painting you'll see this is one of his earliest pictures this is a good argument for the idea that his apprenticeship was a botch because he's such a great artist you know if you think of the other great Italian artists Raphael by the age of 17 I mean he's just one of the great artists already Michelangelo also if Caravaggio dedicated himself to art he would have been fantastic by the time he's 20 but now he's really bad gets a bit better I'm not going to go into these paintings in detail this picture is worth mentioning so this kid who's struggling and who's been given a he's been given a few jobs as assistant to other artists but he can't get the work he really wants we know again from a document if you want all the details are in my book but basically he meets a guy called costantino spatter who's a bit of a character he drinks with Caravaggio he also gets into a bit of trouble he gets up in front of the judge at some point and he says Oh judge you know I'm just a poor picture dealer I've got two kids they both go to the local Grammar School they're my daughter's I need the money you know this is why it happened you know it's not such a big deal he gets off but he and Caravaggio get together and they have a little plan and I've chosen this picture cause obviously it's it's yours it's here isn't it in your wonderful Kimball so basically it goes like this spatter says you know who I live opposite you know whose opposite my shop and Caravaggio yeah a cardinal de Monte a cuddle del Monte he's quite cool guys I want God taste in music well his friends invents opera that well-known art form he has totally new tastes in in music he completely reforms the papal musical chamber introduces new kinds of music involving the single voice he's interested in ideas about passion and the expression of emotion and he promotes new kinds of theatre he's the paid Cardinal of the Medici so he organizes the marriage festivities of Ferdinando de Medici in Florence and as part of that he introduces some new theatrical entertainments in which interestingly we find modern characters rather as in a Shakespeare play and so Spicer says to Caravaggio I think they've done a bit of research he says you know what I think if you painted a new kind of picture something that might make the Cardinal laugh like the theatres that he's been doing something that shows the kind of dodgy characters that are on the streets in Rome today been a century of wars but now the wars are over so the streets of Rome are full of soldiers who no longer have work soldiers who how we going to make a living they become con men Rome is known as a city full of calm man full of people scamming other people why don't you paint a picture a few pictures about this so Caravaggio paints a famous picture that's in Paris called the gypsy fortune-teller budget of a young man possibly being pulled out of his money by a beautiful gypsy fortune-teller and he paints this picture which is great because the picture dramatizes the strategy which it actually represents because spatter and Caravaggio these two dodgy guys they are trying to get Cardinal Del Monte's money with a painting of two dodgy guys getting the young man's money and it's be a wonderful example of Caravaggio you know realism is his thing making it real and there's a long well I I would have explained it if I wasn't if I was doing the 3-hour version but the there's a long tradition in northern Italy of this fantastic heightened realism which goes back very much to the terracotta sculptures of the Lombard tradition where it's almost Madame Tussauds like realism so he's got that already in his armoury he's kind of almost expected as a northern Italian artist from Milan with it's because Milan is actually Spanish and it's also Dutch because the Spanish control Holland so there's a lot of Dutch paintings so artists from Milan or expect to be kind of Dutch a little bit Dutch a little bit realist you know that's why when he paints those earlier pictures of the boy with the lizard there's the the vars with all the reflections it's like it's a little bit of a sales pitch you know hey I'm Caravaggio that the new guy on the block who's gone but I've got those skills of the Dutch a Milanese but anyway here he's doing it and it's you know there there's the guy at the back it's a pantomime I mean it's not a masterpiece but it's an interesting picture it's a pantomime with this young boy being fooled and the guys gonna pull the cards he's waiting to be told which of the cards that he should pull from his belt to win the hand by the other guy who's saying no take the two takes it and I remember when I was researching my book those you see that there's a hole in the glove of the guy holding up he's got holes in his gloves and when I was researching my book I found a really interesting um text which is which is good remember the Italian discourse of a discourse for the judges so in other words assistance in your problems as a judge and this guy who's that who's a judge writes this text in Caravaggio's time saying if somebody comes up to you and he you know he's he's a card shop he may say to you oh I've got no money your honor I'm up just a poor beggar look I've got no my fingers my gloves have no fingers even don't believe him the reason his his is the reason he's got holes in his gloves is said that he can feel the marks he's made on the cards so anyway these I like the way that they're like wasps buzzing around the pots of honey with their stripy clothing and it worked it worked Delmonte liked it he bought it he gave Caravaggio board and lodging in his house which means Caravaggio had dinner with people like Galileo although he didn't because he wasn't interested in that stuff he liked going out with his sword and his pageboy sometimes they say just going out doing bad stuff but the bad stuff was I'm not going to talk too much about these done no that's that's this is fantastic this is a missus painted for the Medici and it's actually a self-portrait believe it or not he's used the same convex mirror which is listed in an inventory of his possessions made by a landlady who was evicting him for non-payment of rent we know that he had a convex mirror and it's a self-portrait and he's gone down to the Tiber and he's gone to the fishmonger and he's bought river snakes which you can still eat they're quite good and he's bought the river snakes and he's their dad and he's kind of put them on his head and he's painted himself so that he is the Medusa fantastic conceit it's great the to understand the meaning of it's one of the world's first performance works of art if you like given to the Medici the Duke of Medici the Medici at this point in history are in their absolutist phase they're Stalin they're not they're not Republicans put it that way so it's the absolutist phase and they identify with Perseus there's this great statue by benvenuto cellini in the in the Piazza Signoria scimitar head of the Medusa what does it mean it means right people of Florence you screw with us this is what's going to happen I rule you Perseus is the symbol of that power Caravaggio is gone one better he's saying well I can actually I can actually make you be Perseus you can be Perseus with this painting and if anybody wants to understand that properly you just go some room 603 of the you fitzy and you give the guy in the corner a hundred euros and he'll open the case and let you take the painting out and when you take the painting out you'll find that it's got a strap on the back of it that it's actually a shield it really is a shield and you strap it to your arm and then you understand the meaning of the painting because that's how Perseus killed the Medusa he crept up on her backwards I still never understand quite how he did this but he crept up on our backwards because you can't look at her or you turn to stone so he looks at her in his shiny mirror distant objects may be closer than they appear including the Medusa and then he and he cuts her head off and this is the moment as her head is still in midair it's there you see it as her head is still in midair as she gurgles her death blood she sees herself dying and you watch her see herself dying in those 23 seconds so they say of life that are still granted to those who have lost their heads Wow and as if to prove that this is not mere hypothesis on my part I found a wonderful document in the archives of Florence which tells us where this painting was kept okay five years after caravans death 16:35 where was this painting was it in the you fitzy ah it was in the armory where was it in the armory it was strapped to the arm of the armor erected ceremonially like a man of the Grand Duke of Tuscany so there he was in effigy as it were Perseus good stuff Philidor again Philidor how beautiful as st. Catherine of Alexandria patron saint of scholars this picture was painted for Cardinal del Monte himself it's in the Titian bonum as a collection in Spain it's a wonderful example of psychosexual Catholic counter-reformation it's the closest thing in painting to the confessions of Teresa of Avila where she says my heart was by the spear of Christ and I became his bride Catherine caresses the sword that is the phallic weapon by which she is martyred and therefore made a bride to Christ it's an orgasm as well as a death at the same time very much I suppose in a way anticipating an artist who's terribly different bear Nene's martyrdom of ecstasy of San Teresa in in Rome at what a wonderful picture who was fitted Ameland roni well her presence in his arts important because Caravaggio's thing is to make it real that's what he does so he paints from models and there's no drawing so he paints what really there and it has to be really there for him to paint to an extent not later on when he's on the run he can't get models anyway but it's against the law to paint a woman it's against the law so what kind of a woman can you get to pay a woman that you pay to break the law by being with you and she's probably happy because I would imagine I'm sure it's preferable to be paid for your body to be painted than to be sexually exploited so Caravaggio and I think Caravaggio and I there's strong evidence to suggest that Caravaggio has a very very close relationship with Philip but initially I think he's he gets her to pose for him because he can pay her to pose for him and he needs to paint somebody who's real this picture was lost in the flames that engulfed Berlin at the end of the Second World War it's a very touching picture filler does life we know filler does life it's it's it's very much she's she's a main character in my book but I saw a side character but she's very vivid because she appears in a number of documents she it's a bad bad story when she was 13 her father died in Siena so her mother and her aunt there was no money they went to Rome and her mother and her aunt put young falada who was their meal ticket put her into prostitution and she's arrested aged 13 by the police for being outside the autopsy which is the evil garden you're not allowed to be outside there after 7:00 p.m. so she gets arrested that's one just does it's you know 13 at the time Caravaggio knows so she's 18 but she's still not yet become the celebrated cortisone described by Julian she's still a working girl and she's part of eight girls who work for a pimp called Renu Chiyo tomassoni who's a guy nasty piece of work well-connected his brothers of Kappa rioni it's like kind of mayor of the district and he's a pimp and there's this she's Philidor is taken to court by a girl called prudence here's a key why because prudency exactly is another of the girls brood NZ exactly has been sleeping with Renu Chiyo tomassoni in his house next to the Pantheon Philidor storms in past his two friends who are warming their asses in front of the fire she runs upstairs and finds Prudential in bed with Renu cheer and she says what the are you doing in bed with him and she pulls her out by the hair pulls her out of the bed naked drags her down the stairs she has a knife in her hand and she pulls her down the street and they get to the front steps of the monastery for the conversion of prostitutes back to the true faith established by the wealthy ladies of Rome like Olympia brandini they get to the steps and she still got poor naked pretends use a key by the hair and she's screaming and she's saying if you touch him again if you touch him again on the steps of the monastery for the conversion of prostitutes if you touch him again he's mine I will cut your face off they resolve their differences but it's but there's one other document which concerns this picture that and it's it's fella does well fella that dies at exactly the same age as Caravaggio which is 39 and she makes her will her last will and testament by this time she is one of the great notable courtesans in fact he's not even a courtesan she is the kept woman of a member of the strata family one of the great banking families of Florence and she has a grand house in Rome and her possessions are described in the will she has gilt tooled leather wallpaper which as you may or may not know is the latest thing it's the Jenny for Sachi interior design feature of a baroque house and she's got several paintings of the penitent Magdalene and she's got this picture of her by Caravaggio and this is the only thing that she wants to bequeath to a person in her well Sheba Queens this painting - Giulio strut see her lover so she must have loved him and she must have wanted him to remember her and boy is that a picture to remember somebody by and then the the final thing in her will which is very sad but but I think very suggestive of the link between her and Caravaggio a kind of dodgy character who has actually got a deep spiritual sense she's dying of syphilis and all of her possessions where are they going to go I'm sure you can guess - the monastery for the conversion of prostitutes on which on the steps of which she had held prudence so that masses may be said forever to save her soul and there she is again the heading of La Fenice her nipples erect get very good example of Caravaggio making it real making it now you know the 10th of an Assyrian tyrant who wishes to destroy the chosen people has been turned into the interior of our modern Roman bordello and Judas as it were a female assistant is like the the Prok us in facts this character enters European painting partly through the agency of this picture and will survive as late as Hogarth's harlots progress in which we see her gasps harlot accompanied by just such a wizened ground couldn't be more different from Michelangelo's treatment but anyway so this wonderful picture this is Caravaggio's first Great Commission it's a commission for the French Church it's the contour le Chapel which is slightly a misnomer he was it was I think Cointreau he was a he was a French Cardinal and his Chapel had never been painted it was a sort of terrible version of the story where the builders never turn up numerous artists have been commissioned to decorate the chapel but none of them had done it and Cardinal del Monte eventually told the family well I've got a guy who can do it and boy did he do it conversion of matthew it's a very terse passage in the Bible Christ went to the house of Matthew the tax collector and he called him that's it the first person who wrote about this picture I think pretty much the first is a Flemish writer called gherkin Sundra and he said I don't understand I don't understand why Caravaggio painted a whole load of people playing cards in a church he didn't understand it was such a radical modern way of pursuit of of conceiving the subject that he couldn't see that it was actually a religious painting he was confused by the thought it was like a genre painting of some people playing cards which I suppose you can imagine it is because these are the people here they're paying their tax and the guy doing this he's raking in his change although he does look like a like a poker player in the World Series of Poker raking in a very small and disappointing pot so you can see how the mistake happened but what's the picture really about in a way it's a kind of piece of self-incrimination because you know in in the basement of a Roman tax gatherers office and it's it's modern I mean look at that there's oiled oiled paper instead of glass up there in the in the window and there are diagonals of string holding it in place it's got this wonderful you know he's a mean tax gatherer he could not even put glass in his window and this bunch what did they stand for they stand for glitter finery money now this world the things of this world they are Gucci fear roots Eve mobile phones the latest sneakers fancy sword they are this world money money money and they're all guys that's all we think about is money and always and our clothes and how do I look good in this huh it's my new Nike is it good do you think these are the gold sneakers they too much no ma'am right so that's what they are and into this world of the of them of absolute nowness erupts an astonishing presence of Immelt immortality eternity has entered as entered God has walked into the internet cafe and there he is and here is Peter and look they wear the clothes of eternity the clothes of no color they are like statues and Christ beckons Matthew and it's and it's at this point that the picture takes over in terms of what what Julian was saying about light you look at that that arc of light that's Matthew saying who me me really and this and it's the idea of the painting a friend of mine who's an artist said this to me as she said she said just look at it as a with half-closed eyes and look at it as a kind of construction of shape and what is it it's a huge lever the painting is a lever and it he is in darkness the darkness of Gucci and Fiorucci and money and that's all I can think about and he is about to be teamed up into eternal light and salvation and revelation and I thought about what she said and then I thought yeah of course because what's the medieval symbol of Matthew it's a similar to that thing that Archangel Michael holds the scale the medieval symbol of Matthew is a scale which is a kind of lever because it's how he measures the money you always had to weigh money you weighed money in order to just check that the coins really were what they said they were so the whole painting is a kind of mechanism it's a transcendental weighing device in which yes you can weigh money but that's not going to get you anywhere it's about your soul how much does your soul way and if your soul is if you have been chosen you will be sprung forever into eternity into revelation and it's very bold picture because this is another aspect of very important aspect of Caravaggio's the context for Caravaggio's revolution in painting is that see look at this kind of famous isn't it now you're 28 and you've put that in your painting and you said yeah there's a Southern Michelangelo I know about him I know about him but I don't really like what he does this is actually better and - and to make the point this is more this is really gonna get you to God better than his stuff because this stuff isn't really going to work because Caravaggio belongs and this is really important Caravaggio belongs to a moment of counter-reformation culture when people like coming Archbishop borromeo in his hometown in the land gabrielli paliotta who writes a technical discourse really imagining discourse on images they are asking themselves what up what did we do wrong look at England I mean England they've destroyed all the paintings in it they've they all calling themselves Protestants look at Germany look I mean the world is going mad what have we done wrong have we screwed up here and one theory is that maybe we just got too carried away with this hibernators [ __ ] you know the Sistine Chapel is that really going to get everybody in the world to believe no no no we got to get back to basics get back to basics remember Donatello he was good that was the real stuff right whereas this this this stuff I mean what is this you know Roman statues flying on the ceiling I mean ordinary people are not going to be brought to God by this so Caravaggio is actually part of a kind of primitive not primitive is these are a turn away a very self-conscious turn away from that kind of high Renaissance art everything that Vasari says everything that is is is implicit in the whole culture of humanist discourse about art the counter-reformation says let's just throw that in the bin we don't want artists to be ground we don't want artists to be philosophers we don't want artists to be like Michelangelo and Raphael and to wear fine clothes and to be superb conversationalist no we want them to talk to ordinary people and tell them that if they don't believe in God they will go to hell and they have to come and this is what we want and they've got to say it like it is and Caravaggio is the only artist who really gets in and at the moment that he really gets it which is part of his tragedy I mean this is another great painting it's Caravaggio this is the other painting it's this is the death of Matthew the martyrdom of Matthew which comes from the golden legend it's apocryphal it's not in the Bible he preaches to the people and the Ethiopian King who's a pagan says stop conversing and baptizing my people and sends a man to kill him Caravaggio thinks how do you do this how do you do how would this be I know it's an al-qaeda terrorist attack in the heart of modern Rome Matthew is baptizing people in a baptismal chapel these things existed they was forgotten about so art historians got confused by this picture this is a baptismal font this is like a full-body immersion little mini swimming pool in a chapel in a Roman Church but they existed they just got covered over but they did exist so people would recognize this so what's happening in the picture Matthew has decided to converse a bunch of people Jews Muslims non-believers and a gang of these non-believers have said yeah we'll convert but one of them was pretending he didn't have a bomb strapped to himself but he had a sword concealed within his loin cloth he having pretended to be oh yes I'm about to be converted to suddenly lept up and he stabbed Matthew who is bleeding to death into the baptismal font as the palm of martyrdom is thrust into his hand which is a reference again carriage is a seriously intellectual thinking painter yeah he's a barman he's difficult but he's really clever and he reads and he thinks and he's deeply profound and spiritual and he's read Gregory who says that martyrdom is a second baptism except whereas the first baptism just gets you kind of on the board martyrdom straight to heaven because you're baptized in the blood that you shed to die and that blood washes you to heaven it's Caravaggio's read this would he have helped himself where does he see there he is at the back that's Caravaggio running away into the street great painting Sherazi chapel santa maria del popolo how hard it is to kill a man Martin Scorsese looks at this picture when they once and he said that how hard it is to kill a man this is my favorite painting by Caravaggio all the early movies Caravaggio is their main street's taxi driver Caravaggio is always there but this is Goodfellas the whole of Goodfellas you know the scene they stabbed the guy they shoot the guy they put the guy in the boot of the car they have dinner with their mom on the way to bury the guy bom-bom-bom he's not dead out [ __ ] talk about so mom doesn't hear drive off shoot him again bury him then the cops find out they have to dig him up they're throwing up how hard it is to kill a man I got all of that from Caravaggio I'm not kidding I'm not kidding look at the feet look at the soles of the feet Peter wanted to be crucified upside down because he wasn't fit to die like Christ and look at the the grim men who have been given the job of killing him they probably don't want to kill him they are poor men their faces occluded their feet are dirty it's a dirty death it's a death the color of Earth color and painting at this point in history is really important and what's important in Caravaggio is the lack of the color why is it important because colors are money blue is money it's a lot of money and Caravaggio is painting from this counter-reformation perspective this boramae and Palio thien perspective the idea is that it's about poverty and if it's about poverty Jesus if I spend money on the painting I'm contradicting what I'm saying that's why Caravaggio has no color except red the color of blood which was cheap so the color is militant now Caravaggio has a lot of problems at this point in his life energy a tomassoni the pimp that he took fell over from there are fights on the street there are arguments he has fights with other artists he's other artists are dissing him they're saying like you know he's you know what he's a he's homosexual he should be arrested he has he's having fights it's all going difficult it's hard there's there's there are sword fights going on this it's bad stuff there's a gang on the other side of the street they run with these Spanish Caravaggio's a lot they run with the French they're all these two and there's the vision in art as there is always a division in the church Christianity let us not forget is the most hotly contested religion of all and the big argument of the center of Christianity which is kind of an argument do you know what that only really goes one way if you think about it if you read Jesus Christ is is it left wing or is it right wing is it left wing or is it right wing now the church has an inbuilt tendency to go right wing because the church is an institution and it has Authority and it has power and it has vested interest and it has the loads of money so the church does not generally except for little tiny moments really embrace Christ's idea that it is really really difficult to get to heaven if you're rich in fact it's as hard as squeezing a camel through the eye of a needle that message Believe It or Not tends to get forgotten now people like Francis of Assisi come and say it and they really say it and then before you know it guess what Francis of Assisi tiny little humble church has been surrounded by a baroque church nine times the size of the Capitol on Washington because we venerate humble Francis what anyway that argument between the right and the left is really really getting going in Caravaggio's room and for good reason so this is the Taurasi Chapel to bury Oh Charles II the papal banker to you knows a thing or two about money he's clever he Commission's Caravaggio any commissions only ballet kurachi and he I like that that's what karate pays right so that is the incipient Barak I call it the Barack that's my shorthand the Barack is is in my mind everything that Caravaggio is not the Barack is huge churches that establish the idea of hierarchy massive perspectives that make you very small and you you have this sense that God in heaven is a little bit like the Pope and his hierarchy and and you relate to that in the same way that you relate to that and it makes you tiny and so within within this idea see there are people in Rome they're saying yeah it's all very well this Caravaggio stuff and he is making the poor thing I mean and he is making the poor thing giovanni baglione says when these paintings go up in santa maria del popolo by leone says i tried to get in the church i couldn't get in the church there were 8,000 people poor people were in the church looking at Caravaggio's new pictures and they were making a buzzing sound that you could hear for a mile away like a swarm of bees that's giovanni baglione on these paintings by Caravaggio but in the middle of it is it's Karachi because people are saying in the upper hierarchy they're saying we got problems here those guys there's card shops I mean there are a lot of those card shops around there's a lot of sword fights at pilgrim time during the Jubilee year there two hundred thousand people in Rome there's the danger of a mob do we really want an art that tells all those poor people with their goiters and their dirty feet and their lack of clothing and their epilepsy do we want those people really believing that they own our churches do we want them to think that this is theirs because that's what Caravaggio is saying he's saying it's yours do you know what I think maybe we don't want that I think what we want is we yes we want the poor people to but paint marries the Queen of Heaven paint her disciples as noble Roman senators not peasants with wrinkled forits do this so this is a kind of religion war a political religion war going on in one chapel and the painting on the right has a very prominent horse's ass Caravaggio painted his pictures just after Annie Billy kurachi had put his altarpiece up that horse's ass but then having said that this is one of the most profoundly beautiful paintings in the history of Western art I mean what a picture what a picture the conversion of st. Paul on his way to do terrible things to the Christians he is suddenly struck from his horse by a bolt of lightning Michelangelo painted the same subject Caravaggio has an ongoing kind of contest with Michael Eisner he painted the same subject for the poor line Chapel which is the chapel next to the Sistine Chapel which hardly anyone ever gets to see it's the Pope's private chapel and it's huge wall conversion of Paul it's like a scene from Hollywood he's falling off his horse hundreds of figures God above with the lightning at the whole thing it's all Caravaggio it's like it's like a black hole of a painting but this is really a painting for the poor Santa Maria del Popolo even today you can sense it it it was in Caravaggio's time the northernmost church in all of Rome it's at the gate through which all of the poor peasants from Caravaggio's part of Italy the north through which they would arrive into the city so it's the first pilgrimage church and because Caravaggio was a cult among the poor you know that he I mean there were 8,000 people went to see these pictures so you see this picture you haven't seen anything like it in any other Church there is nothing like this and I think at first you're baffled you think what is this and then if you're a poor peasant you think hey this is like my house because livestock were kept on the ground floor of the house and people lived in peasant houses people lived above their livestock so this is the central heating so you would you almost come into the painting as a person you think gosh yes I am at home this church is my house it literally feels like my house then you look at it again I think and you find yourself I find myself feeling the echo of an ancient folk tradition of Italian art that goes back to francis of assisi the idea of the Nativity or the crib you make a crib you make these figures that's been going on for time immemorial and I think there's a very strong sense of that idea of the Christmas crib or the nativity scene you-you-you-you that's Joseph Shirley and that's is that the ox or the ass hang on what's going on but it and but of course that is the point because as st. Paul lies on the ground suffused he's blinded in the story he's blinded so he's only he's illuminated from within which Caravaggio expressed his beautifully in this figure with his closed eyes almost you can't tell is is he the source of the light or is he the receiver of the lighter is he's like a human lightbulb if you like and he is but he what he's receiving is the mystical message of Christ and he is experiencing in himself and it lasts for three days he is experiencing the whole life of Christ in all its miraculous intensity in this moment from alpha to Omega from birth to death and Caravaggio has made him resemble the baby Jesus helpless on the floor at the moment of his birth in the manger with that heavy animal breathing softly and in another wonderful just so profound and beautiful idea his arms are outspread so he is the baby Jesus but he is also Christ on the cross at the same moment all in this one single painting beautiful Picasso said to Salvador Dali when he was painting Guernica God I can't just I can't get my [ __ ] horse ride if only I could paint if only I could paint a horse like Caravaggio's horse a horse that you can smell suppertime at London wonderful picture as Julian says see no halos there are no halos but there is a halo you see the innkeeper has kept his cap on the lorry complained says it's lack of decorum academic 17th century theorists lack of decorum my ass he's got his hat on because he doesn't know it's Jesus Christ having dinner at his tavern the the man who cannot see is himself the involuntary mechanism by which God engineers the shadow play of a halo on the wall behind Jesus Christ so the innkeeper gives him a halo Caravaggio says to us very clearly he says the miraculous exists but what do you expect as you says do you really think God would behave like a baroque painter in woods what get there's gonna be a fricassee of angels and pointing a neon signage miracle happening here know if there's a miracle you have to see it there's some work involved and this picture is about those who see and those who don't see in Christ is about to disappear so suffered a mess at the moment that he blesses the bread he disappears the table the apple that the fruit bowl that teeters on the edge contains rotten fruit but it also contains grapes so it is in itself a microcosm of the idea that time will be redeemed death will be redeemed by the holy grapes the blood of Christ and the whole thing teeters on the edge on the edge of the table because are you going to believe or are you not going to believe where are you going to be and the teetering basket of fruit casts the shadow of a fish which is the ancient symbol of Christ going back to the similarity between Christos and ethos because if this being Greek for fish so the early the early Roman Christians had the sign of the fish on their door to say that they were Christians God shows you a shadowplay and again the colors matthew black and white why is it black and white rejected this was a complicated story but there was a really [ __ ] Flemish sculptor who just couldn't do their work for the contour le Chapel so in the end they said the sculpture hasn't worked so let's get Caravaggio to paint some Matthew the altarpiece as well so this was to go in between those two other paintings that I showed you before of Caravaggio of Matthew being brought by Christ into the faith and Matthew don't this was to go in the middle it's in black and white because it was destroyed in Berlin it was destroyed in Berlin because it was it was sold off it became a painting on the market because the church rejected it why did they reject it because he'd made Matthew look too much like a peasant not dignified enough this is a good example of the pre in these in this picture and the next one the next one is the painting that actually is in the chapel which Caravaggio was commissioned to replace his own picture so in other words this is a good way to see him under pressure he's being told that's too much for the poor can you do something that's less a little bit less left-wing a little bit more right-wing so that's what he produced so you see that he still got bare feet he's still got a grey and not very well manicured you know kept beard but he's he's more the dignified scholar st. and he's not he is the moment when he writes the first gospel so it's it's the miracle of God giving the gospel to a man to rise and in in the first painting he's a peasant who can't read or write and the angel is which is kind of an a critic because actually he's a tax gatherer so Caravaggio done a bit of you know massaging of the biblical truth if you like but to make him really into a peasant but here know he can now rise and the angel is instead of guiding his hand so it's just make it all a bit more dignified well picture after picture gets rejected just pictures in the Louvre very badly lit very badly hung not a big fan of the Louvre but why is it in the Louvre because Ruben's made a case for it for it so that it could be transported to Mantua where it was purchased by the Duke of Mantua who then had a descendant several generations later who was sexually obsessed by female dwarves and who accepted a very large offer from Charles the first the king of England's agent for this painting so that he could buy a female dwarf at auction in Hungary and then the painting was sold by Charles the First's well the Cromwell government after Charles the first head was cut off and it was bought by the French King so it's in the Louvre but why this great painting why is it not in the church for which it was commissioned Roberto longi who was very much instrumental in in the sort of rehabilitation of Caravaggio's reputation in the 1950s and who passed on Caravaggio to Pasolini and via Pasolini aquent to Scorsese and into cinema anyway Roberto longi said this he said death of the virgin death in a night refuge you know she's got this amazing it's just such a beautiful picture but it's so tragic you know she's got she's Motors she's dead she's a dead woman and when people die their stomachs bloat that is what happens it is like a scene in a in a hospital death room and and there are the family it's kind of it could be now almost but there's Mary Magdalene weeping and where's the miracle I mean what the church again they say they replaced the picture partly because they didn't like the fact that there weren't the fricassee of angels and the painter who they got to replace the picture - Carla dulcis they even said to him you've only got a hundred angels we need 200 so you did get a literal fricassee of [ __ ] whereas in Caravaggio he's just saying what you know there is the miracle the miracle is that Jesus Christ God himself mingled his blood with the blood of a woman and in that stomach God lived God's blood was her blood and that's why it's red and her soul is going to heaven and it's going to heaven as a rag covered in blood and that's her soul going to heaven but you have to see it and the painting gets rejected the painting gets rejected why do we don't know why it gets rejected probably I suspect because of some ass like Bali Oni saying I think Bali only probably said you know the woman in that painting that's Lina who walks on the street in the Piazza Navona she's a pro do you want that painting on your I think that's probably what happened anyway this sent Caravaggio over the edge so a couple of days after this painting well maybe a month after this painting is rejected we find that the whole stuff was renewed tomassoni finally bubbles up and we find him on the French ambassador's tennis court fighting a duel that vernuccio tomassoni he stuck a virgin never loses a sword fight the fight goes on about 15 seconds he stabs tomassoni in the femoral artery tomassoni falls backwards and turns into a human fountain everyone says that the amount of blood is unbelievable his entire life blood leaves his body in eighteen seconds everybody is covered in blood he is dead he has no blood left Caravaggio gets attacked by one of his guys the Balinese captain gets attacked blah-blah-blah-blah-blah tomassoni gets taken to the mortuary Caravaggio runs to cross tons of colonist house and should be only borghese the head of the papal justice system puts a Banda Kappa tally on his head says anybody you can get the reward you don't have to bring me his body his body would be fine but all I really need is their head Caravaggio runs away into the album hills Colonna territory big palaces a gorilla probably holed up there painting comes down the hill it's in the book AZ gallery today down to ship yoni Borghese who's obsessed by Caravaggio art even though he's just sentenced into death all kinds of nonsense postmodern bollocks has been written about this painting in which we see Cecco the boy with whom Caravaggio lay playing the part of David with the head of Goliath and the head of Goliath as the head of Caravaggio this is the head of Caravaggio it is a self-portrait so what is the painting coming down the hill in the book a Z Gallerie painted in 1606 artist Roy and so some of those painted at the end of his life bollocks 16:06 what's it say it's saying I hear your honor that you have asked for my head I also heard that you like my paintings here's my head in a painting please be satisfied with that and they'll be more paintings on the way it's a plea bargain alright that is the end of my talk thank you [Applause] rumor that you working on another book Vermeer perhaps what could you tell us about it oh yes I'm trying to write a book about fermier yeah I can't say I mean I I've been working on it for a kind of thinking about it for a long time but the crux of it is the idea that Vermeer's paintings are not about what they seem to be about and that they're not perhaps they're not works of art in the way that they are generally written about being I think they are they represent some kind of new form of painting or thinking about painting in Holland I think they are philosophy and I think they are contemplation I'm very interested by the a lot of facts that have come out about Vermeer but I don't feel that they've been properly made sense of and there's a mass of documentary evidence that touches everything except him I'm interested in the fact that 26 of his 30 like 26 of the 36 paintings that we know about were owned by one person he never tried to sell paintings he never tried to make a reputation for himself he just did this thing that he did I think the view of Delft is a painting about war for example and it's about that it's about love and about how love is better than war but it's not a painting about bricks regardless I thought I Proust kind of got it but he didn't get the same things that I get but yeah so it's it's it's an attempt to you know that painting that for yourselves the storm has passed it's a city gate city gates the places that you get breaking into that's that's the most vulnerable point why did you paint that why is the storm passed what was the storm he had secret Chapel in Israel in his house is something I found out recently so it's yeah it's a book about perhaps what haven't what hasn't yet properly been said it's highly speculative more speculative perhaps than the Caravaggio I hope that half answers your question so a question about maybe circumstance or coincidence about how st. Paul's shipwreck and Caravaggio all ended up in Malta and if you have any information about how and what that situation was about with him being imprisoned in Malta do you know which oh yeah I've got yeah there's an awful lot of information about how he got imprisoned in Malta a friend of mine called Keith Shiva Russ took the unusual step of x-raying the book of crimes on Malta because the book of crimes clearly referred or seemed to refer to Caravaggio his sentence but everything else was tippex tout in this sort of bizarre was covered over and he x-rayed it and found enough to trace a copy of the document to another archive in Malta and in that archive he found what Caravaggio had done which was to shoot an honorable knight of Malta in the groin two days before the reception of his great painting the beheading of st. John the Baptist which would also have been his investiture as a knight of Malta he was confined in a rock-cut cell at the top of the Castel Sant'Angelo from which no one has ever escaped and in which I have myself been confined as a joke by a knight of Malta for half an hour but Caravaggio escaped from it evaded capture within the precincts of the fortress climbed down a 300-foot precipice to a berry swam round three miles to another Bay got into a boat and screwed off to Sicily and and it was probably robbed on Monte ruero the knight of Malta whom he shot in the groin during a fracture or argument it was probably robber Monte ruero who was the man who cut Caravaggio's face off outside a house of ill-repute in Naples in 1609 we know that it was four men three of them holding him down and one of them cutting his face with a knife and it was probably row arrow by Leone says it was Rivera he says it was the night and by Leone who hated Caravaggio but wrote the most objective and impartial life of him of any contemporary is nearly always right about Caravaggio so I I suspect that that's the truth and that it was Romero who did that Caravaggio didn't die immediately it took him a year to die I hope that that sort of you have to buy my book as you finish the book what questions or question remains unanswered well for me none really I mean nothing but no questions that I want to us the only thing that annoys me and this annoys me in the case of Vermeer as well is that 17th century in Ventress are insufficiently detailed so that there's this tantalizing bloody description that Caravaggio is you probably know the Caravaggio has 12 books which bloody books it's like Vermeer's got a load of books - but which books is it heuk struttin is it you know is it Leonardo's treatise which was published in Dutch the first time were published in Holland for the first time in 1651 you know why did they not write down more but yeah I don't know it's such a sad it is a very sad tale his life I was just fascinated by your talk I my wife is the person no he knows all about Caravaggio and everyone else but what is it you want us to take away from your book I mean I've learned 10 times as much as I thought I'd ever get out of this and I really want to know because you're a fascinating fellow when I read the book what is it you want me to absorb I think that the core of it is that that this guy there are just so much against him had so much beauty inside him and so much creativity and ingenious that somehow he he transcended all of his bad stuff you know everyone has bad stuff but but he somehow rose above it and even though he lived what might see mom and I and I would like very much to correct the idea that he was just like some creep or weirdo they're all in fact all of his arguments which I go into in great detail even the artichoke thing you know there's a very good reason for it it was a Roman guy and he was selling him artichokes cooked in butter because Caravaggio was from Lombardi and Romans liked that olive oil and this Roman guy thought were you just a cheese eating Lombard I'm not going to give you my best olive oil I'm going to give you butter it's like an insult dressed up as a plate of food so Caravaggio sees it and smashes the guy in the face with the plate because that's what you do you insult my face it's in Italian to affront somebody is to attack their face from to his face so that's why you know like Renu Chiyo tomassoni is having sex with fellow double and Rhoni or had done and say Caravaggio so it's an argument over a woman so Caravaggio he died stabs him in the femoral artery because he's trying to cut his balls off he's not trying to kill him it's he just missed it's like a it's like a loose brushstroke one of him one of his very few and the result there's a lot of red paint which he liked anyway sorry whit not yeah I did I answer the question a bit thank you [Applause]

Channel: artthisweek

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Keywords: Art This Week Productions, Voices on Art, Julien Domercq, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, Caravaggio: Martha and Mary Magdalene, Dallas Museum of Art, Arts & Letters Live, Martha and Mary Magdalene, Caravaggio

Id: BikJXYpEvD0

Length: 90min 45sec (5445 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019