This ambition, which seems admirably natural today, earned him much finger-wagging: he was called an “anti-Michelangelo,” as though that meant “anti-Christ”; an evil genius, a concocter of overpeppered stews, and so forth. But Caravaggio’s work really did turn the history of European painting around. For a time, one had practically no choice but to be a Caravaggista. France, Holland, Spain, Germany, and of course Italy itself were all subject to his influence. When he was born, almost all painters in Europe worked under the classicizing idealism of Michelangelo. Forty years later, after his early death, their descendants with equal unanimity were painting Caravaggios, neither classical nor idealistic. Scratch almost any seventeenth-century artist and you will find traces of Caravaggio: Rembrandt, Seghers, and Honthorst in the Netherlands: Velázquez and Ribera in Spain; Georges de La Tour and Valentin de Boulogne in France; and a dozen more, omitting the scores of mere imitators.
There are two reasons why the hunger in Caravaggio’s eye, the desire for complete and unidealized human truth, had such a powerful effect in its time, the early seventeenth century.
The first was a general one: all over Europe, people were getting tired of the euphemism that tends to accompany abstraction. One sees this, for instance, in theater: how the powerful and wrenching scenes of the Jacobean “revenge” dramatists entranced their audiences:
Tear up his lids,
And make his eyes like comets shine through blood;
When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good.
Or think of the fearful scenes in Lear—cold Goneril insisting that her father be blinded, not just put out of his misery by hanging—or in Titus Andronicus. Obviously, the language of horror and dramatic extremity was not invented by seventeenth-century artists and writers, but it moved to the forefront of their imaginations, whether for titillation or for religious revelation, and thus became one of the main ingredients of Baroque art. Then one must add the fact that, horror or not, seventeenth-century Europeans were getting a lot more interested in the pragmatic and the factual. Fewer angels with gauzy wings; not so much disembodied spirituality. Instead, direct appeals to the senses of smell, touch, hearing, and to the actual look and feel of a world which, after all, God had created. If a painter set before a viewer an image of high, transcendent artificiality, it might not affect his beliefs. But an image which came out of the real world and referred dramatically back to it, one which inhabited the same kind of space as the viewer, which was subject to the same kind of feelings—that was more convincing. Such was the opinion of the Council of Trent, which resolved to find ways of making the doctrines of Roman Catholicism more vivid and direct to an unsophisticated public. The object of art would be not to out-argue Luther, not to win theological debates, but to assure the faithful of the Truth by means of a superior intensity, a more palpable truth of events and emotions. And that, his patrons soon realized, was where Caravaggio came in.
He certainly did not please everyone, but nobody could say he went unrecognized. “In our times, during the pontificate of Pope Clement VIII,” begins a diatribe by the sixteenth-century painter and theorist Vicente Carducho (1570–1638), an Italian who had moved to Madrid,
Michelangelo Caravaggio rose in Rome. His new dish is cooked with such condiments, with so much flavor, appetite, and relish, that he has surpassed everybody.… Did anyone ever paint, and with as much success, as this monster of genius and talent, almost without rules, without theory, without learning and meditation, solely by the power of his genius and the model in front of him? I heard a zealot of our profession say that the appearance of this man meant a foreboding of ruin and an end to painting.…
Though he finished as a sublime religious dramatist, Caravaggio began as a painter of benign nature. Granted, the worm is in the bud sometimes—Caravaggio’s early still-lifes often show overripe, embrowned fruit—but the Caravaggian cave of darkness was not invented overnight. His early Roman works, such as the exquisite Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1594–95), are evenly and crisply lit, in a way recalling the High Renaissance painters Lorenzo Lotto and (more distantly) Giorgione. Mary, bent sleepily over her infant, is a beautiful redhead (presumably Caravaggio’s girlfriend at the time), and the elderly Saint Joseph holds up a score, from which the angel is playing soothing music on his fiddle as the mother and child doze.
Such works made him popular with the upper ranks of Roman collectors. They included Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who owned eight of his paintings, and the discerning and deep-pocketed Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, who had fifteen.
Because of their even lighting and elegant variety of color, we are apt to think of these early works as “untypical.” By his early thirties, though, Caravaggio’s essential character as an artist was formed. Its prime element was his mastery of gesture. Caravaggio saw things and set them down with uncanny accuracy: how people move, slump, sit up, point, and shrug; how they writhe in pain; how the dead sprawl. Hence the vividness of Abraham’s gesture in The Sacrifice of Isaac, as he pins his wailing son down on a rock like a man about to gut a fish. In The Supper at Emmaus, the characters seem ready to come off the canvas as Christ makes his sacramental gesture over the food (an ordinary Roman loaf); and the basket of fruit, perched on the very edge of the painted table, is ready to spill its contents at one’s feet. And the cramped little Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo, for which Caravaggio painted a Conversion of Saint Paul and a Crucifixion of Saint Peter (1600–1601), is so small that it is impossible to get a distance from the paintings: they are almost pressed against you, like bodies in a crowded room, and you cannot believe this effect is not deliberate. This is particularly true of the figures of Peter and his three executioners; they form a powerful X of flesh and dun-colored cloth, the faces of two executioners hidden from us completely, and the third turned away in shadow. Only Peter (who was crucified upside down, according to pious legend, because he did not think himself worthy to die in the same way as the Messiah) is fully visible—that strong old man’s body reflecting the light, those eyes staring in anguish at the iron nail driven through his hand and into the wood. These are not invented or imagined figures; they have a tremendous physical presence, and one is left in no doubt that the stories about Caravaggio’s way of working—that he found his models among the people on the streets, and painted them just as they were—are basically true. He clearly went to great lengths to arrange the directional lighting in his dark studio. But not much else is known about his way of working, because not a single attributable drawing by Caravaggio has survived. Perhaps he destroyed them all, or they were lost in one of his many moves between one improvised studio and the next, one city and another. But there is also the possibility, which one cannot reject out of hand, that he did not make any: that he drew directly on the canvas, without planning things first.