Waldemar Januszczak: Caravaggio's influence | Beyond Caravaggio | National Gallery

I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome Valdemar young news check tonight who we're going to be talking about Caravaggio's influence my name is Leticia Travis I'm the curator of Italian Spanish and French paintings here and the curator of beyond Caravaggio which I hope people seen I suppose why did we want to do this because I know yes tell us why I wanted ribs I loved your exhibition as I'm sure everybody has seen it also enjoyed it very much but I also thought there's a part of me that thought you didn't go far enough you didn't make a big enough claim for Caravaggio you could have gone much further and when you're talking about his influence it seems to me that there are sort of two types of influence at work in art there is the very sort of direct influence that can be almost sort of quantified and certainly examined carefully by incredibly intelligent art historians like you and there's another sort of influence which is more inchoate it's bigger it's float here it's much less specific and people like me art critics so we can go for that so I just thought that there's an argument for for for saying that Caravaggio was a real game changer and although he undoubtedly his influence could be traced in the way you have done very carefully in your show there are these sort of bigger waves floating out from him which in my view amounts to one of the most radical changes in art that we've ever seen and it's up there with the Impressionists you know with cubism it's an absolutely it's an absolutely momentous change in approach to storytelling approach to painting and I think it can be tracked trap tracked traced back to him so that's why I'd like to discuss that because i'm you know i i i i think that um i don't want to be as modest about his claims as you've been but i think i mean we are in agreement that all those Caravaggio's infants and sort caravan jism as a movement was pretty much over by the middle of the 17th century i mean he really did change out forever but we're gonna look at different aspects of him so we're going to perhaps begin just by looking at one the kind of most innovative aspects of his art were these genre subjects the two of his subject matter he's very everyday subject of fortune tellers and you know young boys and remembering that these were painted for the open market so not with any specific patron in mind but he clearly knew there was a market for them and that there would be a market for them and I just thought we'd start with the boy bitten vial is no it's picture that you know well and you've thought about it is and it's in your show and I remember when the National Gallery bought it or got it it's an important moment yeah these were sort of first these are the early Caravaggio's this is what he first became known for and they've I mean they were already remarkable in their own time but it's also been remarkable how subsequent generations have taken to them and how they've read them so this is this is one but there are there half a dozen more ten of these self-portraits as Bacchus now they're not all self-portraits but they used to be called that I mean when I first started studying Caravaggio they were all meant to be self-portraits and then as always happens in in contemporary art history they sort of got ticked off and no that's not that's not that's not and you end up with sort of one or two but I'd like to think of them all as spiritual self portraits and certainly in this case I think this is a self portrait specifically a self portrait of him so what's going on in these pictures that's the big question they've been presented most recently as as as what as as a typical care of a Jeschke explorations of perhaps his own sexuality there they're thought of often as as these rather effeminate young men with the robes slipping off their shoulders there's a sort of sort of in ways that we understand today they could be thought of as homoerotic so that those are the sorts of explorations that tended to have been lumped on them in recent times and although I think there's undoubtedly an element of that in Caravaggio there always will be and always is I think that these are actually need to be understood in a different way I think they're very very Sarki that's what I think they are I think they're part of that tradition of North Italian art so it was it was it called pictorial radicular well I think that was the right where these humorous points and moral messages were made in ways that people on the open market would have understood and they're quite lowbrow in their meanings and this particular one I think especially so why would a boy who is basically back as we know sort of effeminate flower in his hair is the thing falling off his shoulder were why would he be being bitten by a lizard what does it mean I mean I've read your explanation and I believe told us what you think I'll tell you what I think I mean I I think a lot has been made about the kind of eroticism of these early pictures perhaps too much and now I think there's a general tendency not just mine to kind of pull back a bit from that and I think a lot has been written about this whether it represents the senses or I mean there's certainly the flag behind the ear there is something very sensual about it the way he painted it he's sort of reaching for the forbidden fruit and gets bitten by this lizard but I know you have a very specific idea about well related to which finger he's biting and indeed yes I'm a lizard we know is a symbol of kind of evil and pain well lizards are standing for snakes wherever you see lizards in our days we've got a couple of examples and we um yes lizards or anything that creeps and crawls on the bottom of the of the forest that's thought of as a standing for a snake so they're sort of Satan satanic figures poor frogs poor lizards poor newts they all got lumped in as these dark creatures at the bottom of the forest and what they represent is as it were the expulsion from paradise therefore that the the the passing inevitable passing of time because when we are in paradise we could have live forever but as soon as we got chucked out and and and we fell our lives became circumscribed and we all died so lizards in art are always sort of bad news certainly up until the 20th century and Bill Woodrow started doing them so not only do you see them crawling around on the floor like that this is this is a marvelous painting by Lorenzo lotto in the Accademia in Venice where you can see again there's a kind of is it visible from there's a lizard on the table girl looking up at this young man and what's he doing well the young man is thinking about his future or whatever purpose all these things have a slight sort of an itch has connotation but the lizard I think is undoubtedly meant to be this reminder of old age it's a reminder of the fact that things don't go well for you that in the end man's ultimate and first sin will always follow you around and condemn you so lizards are there sort of track you down it represent time so back at our boy bitten being bitten by a lizard he's being bitten in that finger there which if you go to interview today it's still the same finger they wag at you I'm not going to do it here but I think it's a great line in in a school of rock isn't there read between the lines but it's it was it has been from from from medieval times it's been a sort of the finger of sex if you're call it that and and in this jokey sake picture this slightly effeminate young man is being warned of what's going to happen to him because I think the fading fruit the blotchy fruit the cherries that are going off the apples that are going off the leaves that are going off all these things are reminders of the transience of earthly pleasures of earthly joy and of course the reflection in the glass is a classic symbol of something that's going to pass it's only there for a moment it's beautiful for a moment then it's gone and it all adds up to this reminder to this poor old Bacchus who spent his life boozing and being eroticized but it's not going to last very long particularly in places where you need it to last a long time so I would say that although broadly speaking we're in agreement about it being a sort of lament upon the passing of the things I think there is this Sarki undercurrent of sexual innuendo to it which i think is also very typical of Caravaggio and would have been appreciated by the people who collected these pictures as well I mean these would have been talking points in these palazzi of the wealthy and the elite so to read them not just a straightforward you know face value pictures is absolutely the right way I mean even in Lorenzo lotto the Vanitas aspect is emphasized by these petals sort of sprinkled on the table so he's making even more obvious for this this underlying mean yes they would have been points of conversation yeah of course what's also fascinating is that this is a self-portrait this is a caravan in the terrible trip so he must have painted it too looking in a mirror or some practicing great grimace like mad and this involvement by him in his own art yeah that's also that's new I mean of course other people had popped up in their pictures but not not not with the same kind of ambition to star in their own art in this in this very flamboyant and outrageous way and that leads us on in fact to these pictures where we know these are self-portraits and well that's not I don't think no but this is this son is yes yeah yeah sick bacchus sick backers cuz his men to have been trampled by horse and ended up in the hospital a lost bird a leader console let's see on a where he used himself and the biographers say he couldn't afford models at this point is destitute and he's using his own image and um but your point about the kind of satirical content to these Victor I think it's really obvious in these and even in this one in the musicians where he's taking sort of classical subject but really thinly veiling it it's classical I mean they've got these sort of generic you know classical robes but these are contemporary boys you know and and I think they always gonna take them seriously as Bacchus figures ever were they they're often the beginning meant to be a kind of parody of a certain type of Roman youth I imagine who devotes their life to the pursuit of pleasure and drinking too much and the sick Bacchus is definitely a self-portrait and you know a lot so much of the storytelling is done in these brilliant still lives isn't it because when you get to see these in the fresh you know you'll see the blotches on the on the leaves and they're sort of fantastic detailing of things all going off well the ripe fruit going off that's the storyline and you see it even more in what I think is the greatest of these backus's which isn't I think a self-portrait since it's his friend isn't it min min AO who who was supposed to have worked with him but the thing I notice about this picture which I didn't really realize more any of the reproductions you have to go and see the real thing is what's happening in the wineglass now if you go up to that wineglass you'll see that it's rippling with these strange rippling currents which it clearly meant to represent a shaking hand so you know that's what's happening in his picture he's sort of standing there trying to pose for us as a serious Bacchus but he's been boozing too much the night before and it's hand is shaking and I still just poured because in this one everybody can see the frothy exactly he's just pour the thing his cheeks are red you know and it's like somebody who's been called upon to do some official duty the morning after a very very bad night and also this I mean there's very very carefully placed leaf right over his groin which is something actually that check or imitates as well it's something you see in some of the followers they take up on this I mean they're all sort of jokes basically they are jokes yes and it's so important because it's just not said often enough about Caravaggio there is it that he had this wonderful cheeky outrageous sense of humor and that this must have been of course what appealed to people because there was a market as we know that for this kind of art it was something else couple things are going to come on to but but but you know putting all that aside look at the still life painting I mean that's what would have smacked people around the face isn't it at the time that degree of realism that you get in these bowls of fruit and of course his his standalone bowls of fruit in Milan you know that's that hadn't been seen in Italian art before had it to that to that degree and it carried a conviction with it it carried a kind of magic conviction that you're not just talking about some sort of fantasy that takes place out there in the worlds of the gods this is happening right in front of us under our noses I think the truthfulness is not just in the celebrity he's recognizable in it as well and there's the fact of using real people and all his own image that makes these pictures feel very tangible very real yeah I think it plucks them out of the clouds brings them down to earth where they speak to us in a different way a more direct way and on another level a kind of human tangible level even the humor you know that that works in a way that that is new certainly in Italian art yeah the the backers in particular oh no did you want to talk did a partly because I'll any excuse I care to show this picture I'll take it's one of my favorite gotten masterpieces of the the late Renaissance yeah Vincenzo campy was from Cremona and he was a predecessor of Caravaggio and in some footnotes way down you sometimes he'd see him mentioned as a possible influence this is called the ricotta eaters and it's it's a wicked painting on many levels I mean basically the peasants at the time were known for eating lots of ricotta ricotta was cheap and also was made from a kind of the waste product of cheese making because when you make cheese you get the big good bit of the cheese and you have all the way which you know curds and whey you normally might throw it away but peasants would refine it some more and get ricotta out of it so as well known that peasants gorged themselves on ricotta and it was also well known there's not particularly healthy stuff because it's it's the waste produce of making cheese so if you look at the pile at the big pile of ricotta in front of them there it actually takes the form of a skull so it has a kind of van attached to eyeballs and a nose it has a kind of vanished ass meaning and look at these wonderful bloke above with a ricotta dribbling out of his mouth and they'd say although it's it's by no means omen they do say that the figure on the second from the right is a self-portrait of campy and certainly it was said to be that whether it is or isn't the very fact that someone would suggest it is interesting because it's also yourself in the picture well and also a picture which is mocking he's mocking the peasants you know he buddies also at the same time sort of siding with them in this kind of knowing way as if it's be a we all love ricotta really you know and then this slice ensue ality of the girl so that the point is that in in northern Italy at the time in you know the Lombard areas and increment Cremona this was going on so this was 20 years or so before Caravaggio and there was a tradition of it and I think as you as you as you know it originally came from Flanders didn't it it's a kind of Italian version of that Flemish tradition of still lives so you've got a fantastic room with them upstairs boy color there's four magnificent pictures of sort of wenches manning fish stalls and fruit markets and things and again all those pictures have this slightly naughty meaning well though never with this kind of wicked sophistication I think the Flemish were never quite as cruel as the Italians when it came to mocking the peasants but yeah so so there this is a true that was inherited from the north so it's it's the relational sort of flooding out then coming back in in this new wave of Flemish art Flemish still-life art but what makes what makes the Italian version different is that it has this photorealist quality to it you know this incredible particular Caravaggio but even here I think you're beginning to get it in the way the ricotta is painted this this is sense that if you can paint reality to look really real you know that's an extra big quiver in your bow arrow in your quiver yeah set of clothes and the fact also of them just going back to the Bacchus of Caravaggio using his own image that was obviously something that um you you wanted to briefly talk about the senator Sherman justice she clearly saw the kind of funny side of that and yeah parodies it in Sidney Sherman who I think is one of the most significant artists of the past 30 40 years yes here she's explicitly copying Caravaggio but you could say that her whole career is copying Caravaggio because all she's ever done really is put herself in an art in these various guises as an exploration both of her identity but also as a kind of actor in in these fantasies that she's thought up and this this kind of art which has been you know it's a big big role that kind of identity artist played in in contemporary art in the recent in recent decades you know that the first person to do it was Caravaggio the first person who started to play this role in his own work as both a sort of character but also as someone who sees have a narcissistic interest in himself was him I mean they're been obviously artists who put themselves in their own pictures before Caravaggio I think we were talking the other day the most obvious example being Michelangelo in in the Sistine Chapel in the Last Judgement way he becomes the skin of st. Bartholomew hanging from from the hand you know so he's sort of corpse but he only did that once and well he didn't lick Adiemus as well but it's not something that we came obsessing with and also there wasn't this distance to it that you feel is just literally a kind of presentation of himself as a kind of witness at the this is something else this is haha I am Caravaggio I am this new type of artist I am a master of a different sort and I can be in my own art in a different way and I got a and and he can put himself down in his art he can be sick he can be funny he can be ridiculous you can be drunk it doesn't matter to him there's a kind of artistic confidence at work here that he is important in his own art and he should appear in it and and that passed on has led to innumerable examples of people doing the same a movie you know we could sit here all night long listening artists who after Caravaggio began to put themselves into their own art not just as a sort of realistic versions of themselves looking into a mirror but as characters in this fantasy of their own art yeah role playing of course it also in the taking of Christ he puts himself and it's partly to bring this event into his own time but he has a function there as well you know it's a manifesto he's holding the light he's kind of paving the way for artists to follow and I think it's a very kind of careful placement very close to Christ in a very cramped composition I mean that's the unusual thing you know you'd be sort of an artist placed quite far from the main core part of the the narrative but um an important position I'm important enough to be here so I need a light on Jesus you're having a light on you know it was amazing new way of painting and it's a his height of his fame in that picture so instantly recognizable white people and he's in the st. Lawrence as well isn't he put himself in the st. Lawrence picture or the griddling and I saw one which is a very rarely seen it was in a bank in Naples it's a tiller that the killing of Attila the Hun and he's in the corner of one of those as well amongst the soldiers who are shooting a tiller so yes it's it's it's it's it's something that Rembrandt went on to do you know to adopt all these roles in the future later position himself in his art yeah um we want to talk bit about Mary Magdalene because this is someone you've you're very interested in and you're working on a great deal right now am I allowed a plug here you are okay yes I'm doing a film for the BBC about Mary which should be out sometime early next year and we're going to come to to a fabulous painting that's coming here at the time as well to the National Gallery which is a Mary Magdalene but yeah I'm fascinated in the creation of the Mary Magdalene myth and and in Caravaggio's role in that and it's perfect that I'm talking to you right now about this because as everybody here can see we have here a wonderful image of fertile female hood not long to go and it's very exciting we're all but a bit with the met the Magdalene myth is extraordinary I mean she's mentioned just a handful of times in the Bible she was there at the crucifixion she was there at the resurrection and she was supposedly the first witness of Christ after the resurrection so she's the first person that saw that he hadn't actually died but that's it that is it you know all the rest all The Da Vinci Code all the Jesus Christ Superstar stuff all of that has been invented in the past 2,000 years actually so she's been turned into this the nearest thing in the Bible to a kind of femme fatale you know this this this the Bible had to have at least one erotic character in there to satisfy all those male artists for the next 2,000 years hungry for some sort of you know sensual delight of that kind so poor old Mary Magdalene first of all she was saddled she became this woman who was an unnamed character in the Bible who comes to the house of Simon the Pharisee and washes Christ's feet with with oil of precious oils that she'd use and it dries it with her hair but she's not named in the Bible it she quickly became mary magdalene mary egypt who was a famous harlot of the Middle Ages who made her way to the Holy Land by selling her body to the captain she became Mary Magdalene and every Mary pretty much except for the Holy Mary herself that became part of the Mary Magdalene myth and of course what really excited them was this possibility that she was Christ's lover and this was not only the reason why we got the da vinci code or n indeed Jesus Christ Superstar but but it's it's it's led to a very interesting genre in art of I'm calling it the pregnant Magdalene but she she's not really pregnant I don't think that Caravaggio in this incidence has set out to paint a pregnant Magdalene because she has had a sexual relationship with Jesus I think we're talking about another kind of understanding of pregnancy and it's as pregnancy as a spiritual stage pregnancy what she pregnant with she's pregnant with the knowledge of Jesus she's pregnant with Christianity because another of the great fantasies of Mary Magdalene is that when they when she was thrown out of the Holy Land she ended up in France in Provence landed on a beach in a town called San Miguel Amer where she converted the French and from the from France of course up to Flanders across to Spain the rest of Europe was converted from that moment so there's a by the time Caravaggio came to paint her there would have been a complete understanding of her as this figure who had brought Christianity birthed Christianity in the pagan world around the Mediterranean so I mean what got me thinking about this picture which I think gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous early Caravaggio not much later than the backus's we've been looking at very early is this extraordinary pose of hers I mean I've but I haven't read as many books as you've read about Caravaggio but I've never ever found anybody explained to me what what what is she doing it's such a weird situation she's she's cradling her tummy but also where are her legs you know what she's sitting on and I didn't I the only things I've ever read have said things like it's a prayer chair but prayer chairs are the other way around you know you kneel on it and you pray over the edge of it but I was going into an antique shop in Italy a couple of decades ago and there's a very very low chair there and I asked what it was so it's a birthing chair in in the Renaissance but also all the way through the Middle Ages and anyway back to antiquity women gave birth in chairs and it was supposedly so the baby wouldn't have that far to drop but also their work you know we they didn't have a culture of hospital beds and you know so low on the ground legs apart as it were some chairs even had holes cut into them where the baby was theoretically dropped through so I think I think that's what it is I think I think this is a birthing chair and the implication is that she is cradling her pregnant tummy not with literally Jesus's baby although that Caravaggio you never know there might be a bit of that I mean a certain he wouldn't be the first person to believe that but but more more more importantly and more and more appropriately that she is pregnant with the future of Christianity and of course she's therefore discarded the symbols of her previous existence as a prostitute as a rich woman which she's meant to been in all the fantasies so the the pearls have been thrown away the gold has been thrown away but the beautiful vars full of spikenard which is with what she anointed Jesus with that's still there so I would like to present that as the meaning of this this image that it's it's not it's not just a penitent Magdalene but it's also a Magdalene who carries with her the future of the church when you're standing in front of this it's very hard to see in the in the slide but I'm your eyes drawn very much and right at the centre pictures her low which has the hole from which he's removed no an earring and you really notice it's just the hole left in her ear which is really an weight also has a revealing it and from the biographers and when the biographers early on says that Caravaggio what you know he just saw a prostitute drying her hair in the street she was sitting on a chair drying her hair and he just painted her and then added a few jewels and made her into Mary Magdalene but you can't is for obviously an anecdotal thing but he sort of feels slightly this this feels like a real woman you know sit kind of closed within her thoughts and but they loved saddling it with prostitutes in the way I mean all the barbers I mean oh he's always dragging about the river or painting them out in the market um yeah he paints Mary Magdalene again right at the end of his life and I'm watching that picture is almost certainly lost there are lots of contenders for it but it's known through various version and I'm sorry for this terrible slide this is the most recent one that's Ben's to proposed as his as his and there are lots of old copies of it but we know certainly this composition is Caravaggio's this invention is care about yes and it's interesting thinking about you know the pregnancy because that she does is very bloated um I rest my case yeah the way she said me that she's clearly meant to have some kind of implication of pregnancy and this is another moment in the story of Mary Magdalene because Magdalene and ecstasy she was in her cave by then so when she reaches France she lands at samory de la Mer she converts Europe and then she goes into a cave for thirty years and finally pays for having being a prostitute in her youth so thirty years of suffering so she's in this cave in in San bone which is still there so marvelous place to visit if you were ever in Provence thoroughly recommend looking up the cave of Mary Magdalene it's a sort of 50 minute walk up a hill into this enormous grotto that's been turned into a church and we were there filming that one of the stories is that is that that her tears turned into pearls which is always crying which is repenting turned into pearl so you often see when Suzanne painted her he put pearls above her head but we were there in the chapel it started raining and you know what there was so much water coming out of the roof we felt as if we were being drowned in tears and what was weird was when he walked out it's completely dry but inside the building was raining like hell you know it's amazing amazing place but um in this cave she has no food no drink so she survives because seven times a day the angels come down to her and fill her with ecstasy and she hears the celestial choir so the Celestials she's living on music and this is a common scene actually Caravaggio's is a more somber version than some usually she's done well to keep some clothes on usually she's got hair strategically placed her hair a speedo place but so this is the magma in ecstasy being fed as it were by divine grace and of course it's sexual ecstasy and religious ecstasy are very difficult to tell apart an art there's a play on it isn't there usually we think of Bernini and the great centuries are an ecstasy so again you can't totally dispel that little suggestion I think of that meaning too although the bigger meaning is of course this extraordinary moment when she's being kept alive by the divine choir singing to her and thrilling her I saw this painting by the way I sort of sorry but I did see this in Japan this is the the putative new one and I I liked it I thought it I mean I haven't seen the other one so I don't know but I think you can make a decent case for it being very close how many versions of this composition exists it just shows the popular I'm een absolutely contemporary copies you know they're all of the period it shows the demand clearly for it's among the most copied of Caravaggio's composite really very interesting yeah um he also paints her with her sister yes so being rebuked for her life is sin and this is quite interesting and we I thought we'd compare in a way this with the Kenya to which you mentioned before yeah which shows a similar scene and and Caravaggio brings you up very close to the figures you feel very much part of this conversation that's going on between them and can you actually paints it in a completely but very very sexual way well and this is you know figures like a man and this gallery February so I'm doing a little plug now yeah for ordinary picture it is extraordinary it's the same moment really it's it's Martha telling her you know to repent but done so different me anything but we go back to it to Caravaggio you see what's interesting over Lots it's a brilliant it's a wonderful painting lots of things are interesting about it but this is another Mary so this is Mary of Bethany than the sister of Lazarus and also the sister of Martha so that's a whole other story in the Bible where Christ goes around to the house of Mary and Martha and Martha rushes off to make him some food and in the kitchen she's busily cooking for him while Mary sits at his feet and listens to him and anoints his feet with oil again and so Martha comes back and says well you know I've been out there in the kitchen slaving and all she's been doing it here listening to you and crisis it was I'm paraphrasing the Bible sorry but crisis has something on the lines of Mary did the right thing that she should have listened to me contemplation is what you do so it gave rise to this genre of active and contemplative love so one one person loves by doing all this stuff for you the other one just by thinking about you but it's another Mary it's Mary of Bethany that she becomes Mary of Magdalene again as well so they're all all the mayor is get grouped into this one figure and she's giving up I mean she's fantastic details here like the the knit comb you know forgetting look about your hand which that but also she was meant to have been a rich rich woman Mary Magdalene so good again because because the richness was thought to be sinful so not only was she a prostitute who's a rich prostitute so that's piety and sin upon sin so when she gave it all up she gave up a lot but it's a it's a it's a beautiful painting and this model that you see here for Mary here he she appears in a lot of Caravaggio paintings it obviously a favor of his I mean stunning the face and so real such a real person right we're going to move a bit onto the influence I suppose these are some details yeah don't you know what has talked us through your Kenya cheese's it I can't do or don't have much time so I'd rather figure so everyone can come and see this in a couple of months it's it's an extraordinary painting um but let's talk a bit more about his influence because um I mean we've talked about the the kind of novelty of a subject like there's I mean Judith and Holofernes been painted a million times before him and there's been many precedents and violence in art had been done before but not quite as graphically as this these are life-size figures she's a real model I mean she was a recognizable figure again that he uses they want same same as the the Mary we've just seen and yet it's very in-your-face there's no there's no escaping the violence in this picture and of course it was to have a huge influence on artists in his day but also afterwards and most obviously Artemisia Gentileschi so I've got her picture up on the screen as well Jordan Leone they both of them yeah violence in art do you remember it in movies there was a at a moment about 20 years ago when when violence suddenly became you know Pulp Fiction where it became popular as as a competitive part achill of filmmaking you know it a component that always seemed to pop up there why because it it breaks down barriers doesn't it I mean it it's it's something you both recoil from but also that you've somehow find viscerally attractive but what attracted compelling is a much better word for it and that was true of moviemaking you know the Sam Peckinpah films and things and I think it's it's it's true of Caravaggio I think in in his revolution violence was one of the things he brought to the party he did it in a in a way that was so descriptive and tangible that it was new see when you look at Judith and Holofernes you know in the Sistine Chapel or something it's it's a story that happens but you don't feel any of it but with this you know these expressions of in a Holofernes poor old face the blood gushing out from his neck she's fantastic so so credible as a real human being even the old lady too you know so it's part of his revolution and they had different functions I suppose as well I mean in the Sistine you probably wouldn't have got away with something like this was very much a private person's picture I mean it wasn't it wasn't not seen or not known but it hung you know in a home it would actually belong to have your Koster who commissioned listen John the Baptist as that's in the show downstairs but it was a picture you know in his home that you would have been able to get very close to I loved her steel eyx but kind of determination in doing this and that I think Artemisia that must have really stocked with her because here I think she takes on a much more active role as does the maid you know that I mean the maid is sort of holding him down I'm normally the major stands there ready with the food bag to hide the head it's look at the blood on the stone up on the bed spreading across the pillow I mean absolutely she paints it again in this in in sort of and after a moment slightly afterwards it's after the event but here too you know she doesn't spare us the blood seeping from this basket and so on and you get this sort of furtive sense of what they've done in this picture but what violence does it it breaks down the barrier between you and the audience and I think that pretty much everything Caravaggio did was about that it was about removing all this middle distance that are existed previously between the artwork and the viewer and getting right up close to them you know get presenting them with violence they couldn't avoid that was so direct and and cramming the action to the front of the picture space you know your touch the taking of Christ and it's happening that far away from you yes all these things all they're all they're function always is the sister is to make things feel tangible and real and under your nose is and it's why the stories feel so the narratives are so strong yeah for that allied to this extraordinary realism of his those two things together you know that's what carried that the punch and just briefly touching on the kind of northern influence obviously a lot of artists came to Rome from various parts of Europe and then went back some stayed a few months I'm just stay even stayed a few years in the case of haunt host and you know it's always striking this picture just how different it is face value from Caravaggio but that you know he was on these artists who saw you know he painted this while he was living in the palazzo just in yarny in Rome just in yani own 15 paintings by Caravaggio so every day he was exposed to his picked was not just exposed really got a chance to get under their skin if you like and yet the style of this picture is very very different and I find that a very interesting I dare you reget the sense of the beyond with the picture like this you know someone who sort of really absorbed Caravaggio but took it in a very different direction taken in rather safe direction if I may say so I mean I was at you said in your in your beautiful catalogue introduction that there are no candles actually in Caravaggio no naked flames I've been asked correct okay yes no it's true but but that's how you think of him because he set so much of his action in the dark yeah which is again another thing that that makes things feel so so sort of tangible and fraught and up there and that darkness is is is what he exported it so by the time you get to Holland and these beautiful far more considered paintings you know what by hon host and tear broken you know you're you know you're in a slightly different world you're in a world where people have found poetry in Caravaggio's darkness they found elegance in the sort of tonal variation of Caravaggio they found these beautiful painted candles that do for art what a beautiful candle does on and after dinner table you know they bring a kind of elegance to things and it's not it's not going against the grain of Caravaggio but it is taking this bottomless influence of his in in quite a in a slightly different direction and then obviously a lot of artists came if you like to Caravaggio through then so very much second hands yeah they were very important in that sense I want to talk about um a storm because and and this is a picture that was copied by a British artist William Dobson who I know you is not that you're very interested in as well so it shows that not only was this picture in Britain at an early point but there was clearly an admiration for Caravaggio at this date I mean we know Kara Verge esque pictures were being collected principally by the Duke of Buckingham I mean Charles the first had a few by accident but you know the Duke of Buckingham really went out to buy pictures in the early 17th century but it's interesting that the Dobson at this day you know Caravaggio's I mean in Italy and in mainland Europe is sort of really falling away but there's clearly this interest in this country in this kind of picture I think this is remarkable some of some of some of you I know because you follow me on Twitter I know you know how I feel about William Dobson I was put on earth to bring his name before the great British public to elevate him to the position he should be standing in which is Britain's finest baroque painter but who would have thought that an English painter in the 1640s at a time when Oliver Cromwell is looming on the horizon would have been painting Caravaggio scenes of John the Baptist being beheaded it's an extraordinary thing to haslam if you think of what Dobson's really sort of exactly what of and that's that's the great man himself William Dobson in the middle there in a very care of a Jessica moment presenting himself at the center of the action and this is a this is a painting actually that it's a it's a parody of a very nazy hercules choice between virtue and vice so of course he's choosing virtue and Dobson chooses virtue as well but these are I just find it extraordinary that um so to me is for you because your um so learn it on the the details of Caravaggio's expansion you know you know that by 1640 in Italy Cara veggies and was old hat but for me it remains miraculous that in 1640 Caravaggio's and was in Britain yes you know to me that is testament to just how widely spread this influence was I mean he'd only been dead for 20 years you know I think it's absolutely remarkable this wildfire had spread across Europe this this moment went when when art suddenly became kind of realistic and set in the dark and grabbed you by the lapels and pulled you in you know this counter-reformation moment um this that happened in England as well I think is amazing yeah I mean this is actually the first Caravaggio to come to England I say slightly by accident because it was bought by Charles the first sort of in blog with for the whole Gonzaga collection in 1627 so this is in England very early it's hung in a very prominent place in the picture gallery and it's but it's a picture that was very contentious when it was painted you know in Rome um you know this is one of the myths of that you know the Drowned prostitute that who posed for the for the figure of the Virgin she was pulled out of the Tiber I mean actually it's there's there's nothing anywhere that actually says he has bloated and white there's no nothing that she says that but this is one of the myths that sort of carried through it is a remarkable pitch today in the Louvre but um it's interesting to think this picture is in Britain from 1627 obviously until Charles the first paintings are sold you know 20 years later but interesting when this picture comes on the market in Rome because it's rejected its Rubens who happens to be initially at that in Rome who brokers the deal for the Gonzaga and and gets the picture for him and is extremely proud of this and before it leaves Rome he Rubens organizers for it to go on view for a week so that all the artists can go and pay homage to it before it leaves Rome forever and that this leads us beautifully well it links both Britain but also leads us on to Rubens because Rubens is in Italy between 1600 and 1608 so absolutely at the height of Caravaggio is Fame and it's clearly utterly bowled over by him and this is one of Caravaggio as few altar pieces that actually pan was universally admired even the biographers who are quite sort of against him really can't claim that there's anything wrong with this picture it's now in the Vatican and there's a copy of it on the original site if you like which is in the church where Rubens painted the main altarpiece and this sword a free copy of it which is much smaller and on panel I mean you can see how much you must have much Rubens must have got from for a picture like that from Caravaggio yes absolutely um Rubens isn't in your show not if I was putting on the show I put him in because I think Caravaggio's influence on him was was nuclear Rubens went to Italy is one kind of painter came back as another kind of painter I mean this is this is your your Sabbath on and Delila which is there your and after the before and after Italy yes um Brooke I think I don't need to say anything it's absolutely obvious isn't it I mean he goes there as this poetic Flemish painter with no real sense of sort of the darkness or the Pasha really just passion and and really visceral sense of how to paint pictures and he comes back doing this you know a painting that has many hallmarks of Caravaggio about it notably the mood and the and that neurotic tension so I think grubens was changed at a nuclear level by contact with Caravaggio and I think that all his career from then on you know through all the changes that lesson was something that would never be totally eradicated I mean we could just tick off any number of things here there are Caravaggio like but what isn't of course is is Rubens is incapable of that kind of cinematic realism well it came probably capable of it you know it chose never to employ it which is why I think it's possible to miss the influence because you don't ever really find bits of Rubens that you think wow that is so real you takes more pleasure in the actual painting I was going to say I think he exploits the material of oil much more than Caravaggio he does Caravaggio is Rachel flattened illusionistic Rubens has such great pleasure in the mark making wasn't he yes he loves all that and that can blind us I think a little bit so that's one percent of so that's that's one level of of his achievement but there's all these other levels where I think in terms of the mood in terms of the type of storytelling in terms of the kinds of figures he used the kinds of women he put in the pictures you know all that could be traced back to this extraordinary confrontation with with Caravaggio and that it's beautiful his copy of the internment is beautiful and it's it's it's you can sort of see from that really how he kind of brings a lyrical aspect to it but Rubens I think was massively influenced by Caravaggio and of course is often said he obviously looked at Titian a lot but it's not said enough actually how much he he he must have looked and admired Caravaggio and admiring him in Rome so seeing these pictures inset you in the church as for which they were painted I mean this was the kind of Caravaggio he was seeing I think more than the early pictures in the oh of course no he was seeing you would've seen the contrary chapel he would he would have seen you know the conversion of st. Paul he would have seen those big Church moments when you know the outside world pours into the church through the sort of window of Caravaggio's art and they're not many in number those altar pieces but I think for him must have had a profound yeah there aren't forgettable even today um it's interesting this sort of leads you know when we talked about this it got me thinking about what what Caravaggio's are actually accessible in Northern Europe to artists I mean obviously Rubens goes to Italy but what would have been seen and we know that there are three that made their way to northern Europe one is we know there's a lost Judith and Holofernes that makes its way to and that's been recently identified with this newly found which we're not going to discuss the attribution of it the picture that was found in Toulouse earlier this year and this may reflect the will in our Chairman exactly oh yeah and this might reflect the picture what the picture looked like indeed there's a copy by Luis Vince on who's a very important figure because he's he's a Flemish dealer art dealer but also artist in Naples and he's the one who copies a lot of the late carriages including Leah Magdalene in ecstasy also we know that this picture which is now in Vienna this was on the art market in Naples so FinCEN had it was handling it they couldn't sell it so they sent it up north and it was on sale in Amsterdam and by 1620 is hanging in Antwerp Cathedral so Flemish painters can see this picture from 1620 onwards in their you know their own Cathedral which i think is extraordinary Burns's descent from the cross department exactly would have been there exactly very good what a moment that would have been yeah just painted a few years earlier but they would have hung next each other and then um well there's a copy of the late crucifixion son Andrew we know a copy of that was sent in was on the art market in Amsterdam so my question to you is because I know we're not totally in agreement on this but would Rembrandt have seen care about you what would he have you know been influenced like Rubens was in a way I know that today is very different from 1600 but have you noticed how art fads work today because I know I spend my life trying to find the latest art fad and they have this they have this extraordinary ability to break their their borders you know suddenly becomes popular a way of making art in a way of painting or a way of making installations you know you read about it on Monday by by Wednesday it's in the Venice Biennale you know these things just spread and is extraordinary way and I don't have any doubt at all that this was true of Caravaggio some that for all the concrete examples that remain that you can count that there was something else going on you know a whisper in the churches a priest talking to another priest you know a rich man talking to another rich man it was in the air and we all know that by then we've got a sort of printing industry that can hint at it but I am in no position to tell you if Rembrandt saw some actual Caravaggio's I'm absolutely absolutely convinced he knew about him I knew what Caravaggio had brought to art I'm convinced of that and that it and that around him he saw the influence happening and he picked it up and ran with it and some of the things that he took from Caravaggio are quoi are straightforward Caravaggio's ideas I mean the framing of these figures I think you can certainly argue the way he frames his compositions and that kind of height index you know the expressions and it's it's very much about expression and emotion it's just on the right you know pushed right up to the front of the picture picture surface that the figure at the back you know with her very real kind of expression on her face these kind of people leering and grimacing and lurching this year darkness of it all the trompe l'oeil aspect they're all they're all things that I mean we'll it weren't in Flemish art before it's that simple isn't it though they were not there in the 16th century you know in the time of you sort of your Brueghel's and your bur colors that's not what art was like and in Holland there was nobody painting like this this is something that became true in the Baroque era and in a way though these two geniuses were sort of working in parallel obviously not you know not necessarily it's a bit of course Rembrandt uses his own image a lot and well I mean that's right well dressed up and role playing we talked about at the beginning you know as trainees and kind of these fantastic costumes and here he's showing himself his wife I love this painting it's in Dresden yeah it's it's Rembrandt and Saskia it's always said to be you know when he was at the height of his success and Here I am you know Rembrandt with my beautiful wife but it's it's its sake as well you know it's got his back turned to us he's holding up his big glass we've got a ludicrous expression on his face and he's dressed up or somebody you know this is not contemporary costume this is some sort of fantasy costume he's put on and all those Rembrandt's self-portraits there's a wonderful show here and a few decades ago about Rembrandt's self-portraits where it pointed out that you know we tend to think of them as on poor Rembrandt suffering painting himself in agony but actually putting it on you know he's presenting himself as a biblical hero or something and it's an act you know that the pained face is a role that he's playing in his art and that as we said earlier you know that can be traced back to Caravaggio and these these excellent bits of sorry we this is this is sort of Rembrandt's Bacchus you know this is this is the same kind of mood this is this is something playful about it something delightful but it's also a great sense of his own Worth and which you know this is totally deserved and then also in this picture where he yeah what's himself anymore yeah this is the the raising of the Cross in in Munich yeah that's Rembrandt at the foot of the cross there there is putting himself in what's usually the Mary Magdalene positions at Christ's feet but we have the crucifixion he wasn't really there why on earth would he why on earth like Caravan join the taking of Christ wasn't in the Garden of Gethsemane but yes it's like what does that thing we bomb people selfies is that is that what it's called you know he's forming the crucifixion and that's something that he would have learned he wouldn't have learned from any other Dutch predecessors he would have learned that from the whispers the rumors the the gossip was of course the other thing about Caravaggio is you're so notorious you know all those things would have would have would have transferred themselves sooner or later to Amsterdam and he would have heard it and for me this is I mean this is unimaginable without the Caravaggio as a predecessor this kind of playful and inclusion of himself in his own art and we've talked about the greats as it were the great baroque greens we've talked about Rubens Rembrandt obviously Caravaggio and um and Velazquez we should talk about because purely from a kind of you know Caravaggio scholarship point of view we know this picture made its way to Spain it was painted in Naples for the Spanish Viceroy and then made its way to Spain so it was known to Spanish artists but when you think of Spanish followers of Caravaggio you think of you know Ribera and I'm sorry flick forward a bit and then I got it so you think of Ribera who's very well featured in the exhibition you know he's Spanish by birth but of course comes to Italy and spends most of his life working in Rome for 10 years and then in Naples so it's a sort of adopted Italian and also my Ino and these two are on display in room 1 if you haven't seen them I mean he is these are among the very first Spanish care of the desk painters that there are but you know it's questionable really I think whether Velasquez well I don't think he should be considered a care of a Jess Carter's but you know neither why neither do i but I also but I think he should be considered as one of the artists whose whose work was changed by having Caravaggio's his predecessor that's convoluted but you know what I mean yeah and without Caravaggio he wouldn't have got to this and so this is house of Mary and Martha so again it's one of our Mary Magdalene stories but of the that it's the still life at the front is what it's not extraordinary by this picture and when it comes to these kind of amazing realistic still lives again I mean in a Caravaggio as the man who invented them the only that the first freestanding still life we know about is Caravaggio's bowl of fruit you know and and the real people the sense that these are not gods and goddesses this is someone who worked on the market and he's got them in to pose for him you know amazing face of the boy in the know this is all new in art and the Spain I think is I mean it got it from two sides you know you've got the whole that Caravaggio went to Naples Ribera I believe possibly even have met him but certainly was influenced massively by him so you've got the Ribeiro influence coming in because Naples was part of the King man Spanish Kingdom but also from the north because the Spanish Netherlands were there and you know the Bourbons ruled the Netherlands so you had that coming in the Hieronymus Bosch pictures in Madrid weren't there so from a lot of angles the whispers could have come in yeah and this is this setting of it in this darkness this Hitchcockian shadow thing you know these are all tricks that Caravaggio introduced to Baroque art and although I like you would never call Velasquez a care of a Geist II or carriages tow uh to me he would have been a different painter had he not had Caravaggio as a predecessor so that's really my point is that is that this this this revolution was was on a nuclear level this this was a massive change in what art should do art should no longer sit there in the distance and and be politely looked at this is art that goes for you you know the violence goes for you the realism goes for you the darkness goes for you this is stuff that steps off the stage and gets in amongst the audience and it just pulls you closer and closer and everybody in every major figure of the Baroque I think in some way or other learnt from that thank you so much for those there's my no paintings which are that's new to me I didn't I wasn't aware of him but if anybody here has not seen them that they're on show at the moment upstairs I mean remarkable paintings by another of these characters that by enlarge we know very little about and and it just shows you that on every level this message filtered through you know and the influence of the fad the fad because where it was the fat for Caravaggio had this impact and just I know I'm conscious of time although we have gone for hours just that the late pictures are the least were the least well-known in a way and I think that is perhaps quite a nice place to end I mean about 10 years ago we did a big show here on the final years which focus very much on this late period they're only 16 pictures in it but these are the last four years of his life where he's on the run from Naples then it goes to Malta and Sicily and they're different again and these pictures are not not known very much by contemporaries because they're not discussed by the biographers because none the biographers bothered to go to Malta and Sicily so there's not much known about them at the time and and I suppose these this late style is quite different from the earlier pictures and but this is undoubtedly if not his greatest masterpiece one of his greatest masterpiece and so I mean it's what you said the sort of darkness and this it's a completely visit this is why this artist is so revolution you know on ad ever paint I mean this picture is enormous it's about six meters while if not more a trickling water yes it's about this big as a screen most of which is empty you know beside himself in the blood and he did that's what it yes I mean what what we shouldn't forget is that Caravaggio was forgotten yeah this is the other part of the story when I when I was born you know in 1954 no one would have known who Caravaggio was it was only then that was long he wasn't it Robert long ret along he that this this corpus started to emerge in the early baroque and his figure had been forgotten began to be recognized until then art had been seen in terms of Raphael Michelangelo Leonardo for the Renaissance great threesome and the Baroque was looked down on in general Caravaggio was specifically ignored forgotten so let alone a Caravaggio that's in the cathedral in Malta you know who the hell's gonna go and see that you know I remember going to interview your your previous director here the the absolutely marvelous Neil MacGregor about Caravaggio and it's code is lit at me and he said oh no no no no no no Raphael is who you should be looking at because he is from a generation still that had been brought up to admire different qualities in art we live in a media world we know what cinematic means we know the value of a certain kind of realism a certain kind of drama and in our world our culture I think we are more open to what Caravaggio brought to the storyline and he was forgotten completely almost you know for for 400 years and then he was rediscovered in this amazing a moment in the post-war era so so so the the greatness of late Caravaggio is as it were the last bit to be discovered of a figure has already been forgotten yes so it's what we should all come to at the end and I thoroughly recommend a visit to Malta yeah everybody here to see this great great painter because actually one of the other really wonderful things about Caravaggio is that some of his best work is still in situ and you still have to go there and find it so you go to Naples to see the seven acts of mercy which is my favorite Caravaggio you know you go to Rome to Santa Maria del Popolo or send a Ouija dear friend cheesy or st. Augustine oh and they're still there you go to walk into the letter and you know yet more turn the letter so um you know it's a it's it were privileged with privilege because in a funny kind of way we're still at the early days of appreciating Caravaggio all we've really learnt from him I think that is indisputable is that he changed art on a nuclear level your exhibition makes that I think very evident and I hope that things we've talked about they've added a bit more to that story line well thank you very very much [Applause]

Channel: The National Gallery

Views: 161,345

Rating: 4.895123 out of 5

Keywords: Caravaggio, Letizia Treves, Waldemar Januszczak, art history, exhibition, Caravaggio paintings, Art, fine art, museum, National Gallery, London, Trafalgar Square, Inspired by Caravaggio, Boy Bitten By a Lizard, Paintings, National Gallery London, Contemporary art, Caravaggesque, Caravaggism, still life, Rome, nature, use of light

Id: 2EbN-gP21T8

Length: 60min 30sec (3630 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2016