A matter of posture and light: why this tense G7 photo is modern-day Baroque masterpiece
Melissa Gronlund on the choreography and chiaroscuro of the viral photo of the week, starring the world’s statesmen
If you’ve logged on to Twitter recently, read a newspaper, or even just opened your eyes, you might have seen this photograph from the recent G7 conference, showing an intense face-off between Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Donald Trump, president, to much of the world’s dismay, of the United States.
Many Twitter wags are likening it to a Caravaggio, or saying it’s a Renaissance painting. Neither claim is strictly accurate – but why? Well, Caravaggio was active about 50 years after the end of the Renaissance, and his work is mostly seen as a precursor to Baroque painting – the wild styling of psychological states that reacted to the cool, serene images of Renaissance work.
But they both feature extraordinary verisimilitude: key to Renaissance work was perspective, and European work from the Renaissance until the 19th century is characterised by extreme realism, as if the paintings were photographs.
But lots of artists painted realistically, so why refer to Caravaggio, the enfant terrible of 1590s Italy? The reasons are threefold: the moment of high tension; the shock of Merkel’s blue suit; and the use of strong lighting.
In the G7 photograph, taken by the German government photographer Jesco Denzel, Merkel is in the spotlight, her blue suit nearly radiating in the light. This may be taking the argument a step too far, but for the record, blue was traditionally the colour of the Virgin Mary’s clothing in Renaissance painting, making Merkel’s suit colour a typical shade.
The positioning of the statesmen around the pair looks choreographed, visually emphasising Trump’s isolation. And his expression – well, it’s a face that launched a thousand memes: defiant, petulant, uncomprehending.
All these dramatic effects add up to create a moment that looks almost fake or posed – like, I suppose, a painting. In art the strong lighting is called chiaroscuro, and Caravaggio deployed it to extraordinarily dramatic effect. Indeed he used it so well and so intently that art historians have given it a separate term, a kind of Chiaroscuro Mach II, of “tenebrism”. He would set the important parts of the painting – here, Merkel and Trump – in brightness, and others in shadow, with little intermediate shading between light and dark.
As an example, look at The Calling
of Saint Matthew, which depicts the moment in which Jesus enters a customs house and directs Matthew, inexplicably garbed in 16th-century Italian style, to follow him. As in the G7 photo, the central tension between Jesus and Matthew is deepened by the onlookers, whose faces are illuminated brightly, as is Jesus’s beckoning hand.
Darkness is here intended symbolically as well as literally: Matthew, at that point still a tax collector, is mostly in shadow.
Similarly, in The Taking of Christ, the anguished faces of Christ and the disciples seem spotlit, while those of the guards remain in shadow.