Mad, bad and one of a kind
MAD, bad and dangerous to know. That was Caravaggio. Bisexual and a murderer, he was on the run for most of his short life.
In 1592, at the age of 21, he wounded a policeman in Milan and fled to Rome, where his 14 tumultuous years were spent in and out of jail. Finally, in 1606, he killed a man in a quarrel over a game of tennis.
He escaped to Naples. In trouble again, he hurried off to Malta. Back in jail, he escaped once more and fled to Sicily, where he wounded a schoolteacher. He went back to Naples, where he survived an assassination attempt and died in a sickly fury at Porto Ercole, after missing the boat that could have carried him to Genoa.
Along this trail of madness and destruction, Caravaggio left paintings of supreme originality, drama and beauty that captivated patrons and fellow painters alike. He was one of the greatest and most influential artists the world has ever seen.
When Caravaggio arrived in Rome, he scorned the decorous ingenuity of late-Renaissance and Mannerist art and replaced it with epic realism, while his unprecedented dramatic lighting, with its deep shadows, anticipates the cinema.
His models were boyfriends, beggars, workmen and girlfriends, including one who was a prostitute in Campo de’ Fiori.
On one scandalous occasion, he modelled the dead Virgin Mary on the bloated corpse of a prostitute fished out of the Tiber.
His bitterest enemy among Roman artists was Giovanni Baglione — yet his Ecstasy of St Francis was the first to imitate Caravaggio’s effects.
Then, everyone wanted to paint like Caravaggio: the Italians, such as Orazio Gentileschi; the French, including Georges de la Tour; and Dutch painters such as Hendrick ter Brugghen and Dirck van Baburen.
We see many great paintings in this show by these followers. But the final room delivers a knock-out blow in the form of Caravaggio’s vast, brooding and effortlessly perfect Saint John The Baptist, on loan from Kansas City.
No one could paint like Caravaggio.