This blog entry comes under the category of fascinating life stories. There are those among us who truly are compulsive and obsessive and others who think we might be. Whenever I start to go down this path, I remember the example of Caravaggio. There was a man who truly “lost his head” over a single idea. Nevertheless, he is the poster boy for how one can go seriously wrong in this life, but still leave a glorious legacy.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was the great Italian artist who was the bridge between the giants of the High Renaissance – Michelangelo (no relation), Da Vinci, Raphael and Titian – and the next wave of greatness in the Baroque period – Rubens, Rembrandt and Velázquez. There were other well-known artists around the same time frame, the early 1600s, but none had as long-lasting an impact.
His life was a muddled mess, but he produced works of genius. He was particularly renowned for his use of chiaroscuro effect, which consists of many shades of brown and black as background, with pools and puddles of light in the foreground highlighting what is most important in the painting. This technique has since been adopted throughout the centuries and has found its most modern expression in many of our best-known movies.
His other claim to fame was his subject matter. His depictions of the usual scenes from classical mythology and the gospels were much grittier than had been attempted up to that point in time. For example, his Bacchus (the god of pleasure) will include a tray of fruit on which the produce is rotting. This is to show the transitory nature of youth and beauty and the payoff that can lie behind a life of excess.
Another of his major themes concerned “losing one’s head” and this is where the story gets really interesting. Blessed with extraordinary good looks as a young man, Caravaggio was also a ruffian, a lout, a bully, definitely a trouble-maker and a borderline criminal. In other words, he was the original bad-boy artist.
All of his wayward activity came to a climax, however, in 1606, when he killed a man, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a brawl outside a tennis court in Rome. Nobody is sure whether it was over a bet, a girl or a funny look, but the upshot was that Caravaggio spent most of the rest of his life in exile, skipping from one temporary port of refuge to another. His longest stays were in Naples and Malta. He knew full well that the penalty for murder, should he return to Rome, was beheading.
What may have started out as a premonition turned into a full scale fixation. Throughout his life, Caravaggio painted one severed head after another, or someone about to get his head cut off. As if that wasn’t enough, the head in question was always his own. This was true even when the character depicted was female, as demonstrated by the serpent-coiled Head of Medusa, shown just after the Greek hero Perseus has taken care of business.
The masterpieces of his mature years are David with the Head of Goliath and The Beheading of St. John the Baptist. In each case, it is Caravaggio’s own visage that is contorted in pain or caught in a moment of incredulous surprise. The emotional impact of these works is formidable.
Caravaggio’s own eventual “leave-taking” was as remarkable as the rest of his life. He died in 1610 in only his 40th year after succumbing to the “vapours” while trekking through swampy land along the west coast of Italy. He had been chasing after a ship that left port without him. On board that ship, were several of his canvases promised to the church in Rome in order to secure his pardon. He was only a short distance and a matter of a day or two away from returning home.
Other great artists in other fields have made their mark by dealing with the macabre. Edgar Allan Poe in literature and Alfred Hitchcock in cinema are two of the most famous. But I’m not sure that anyone else has ever placed themselves so front and centre in their own gut-wrenching work.
If you are interested in reading more about Caravaggio’s singular journey, I recommend the opening chapter in Simon Sharma’s Power of Art as a primer.
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