Sacred Art II: Sacred Art and Modernism by Cornelius Sullivan

Pietà, Michelangelo, marble, Saint Peter's Basilica, Rome, 1499. 

Sacred Art II, Sacred Art and Modernism

Cornelius Sullivan

Presented at Honors Colloquium, Perspectives on Modern Art,

March 19, 2014, Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, FL  

How did we get from Renaissance Art, faith embodied, to Abstract Art, art without recognizable content, and to Conceptual Art, art which is completely disembodied?  

The Renaissance

As you enter Saint Peter's Basilica the first chapel on the right is graced by Michelangelo's marble Pietà. There is always a small crowd, and the silence there rises above the distant din. No-one speaks.  Pilgrims are not disappointed, they will remember seeing something that looked like a vision. 

The artist in the Renaissance began training with a master in a guild at age twelve because talent was seen as a gift from God. They learned by copying, as their masters had done before them. Unlike in Modern Art, there was no pressure to always do the newest thing or to shock. 

Authority in art went from the guild to the university, from those who do, to the experts who judge. For example, in the United States, with its Puritanical beginnings, Harvard University has always deemed that the study of making art is not a suitable occupation for a gentleman, whereas the study of art history has been acceptable. 

There are some places connected with the Church today that promote Eastern like icons as the only valid form of religious art today. That's too easy, it acts as if the great Western tradition of art never existed. Go find the next Caravaggio!

Those who critique rule. Those who make, still make, but at the margins of society. 

Artists from another time had a significant place in society, Columbia Art Historian James Beck said, "The most remarkable meeting of Renaissance artists ever recorded, and arguably the most extraordinary encounter of its kind in history, occurred on January 25, 1504 (in Florence) when some two dozen painters, sculptors, artisans, and architects were convened to take up the question of the appropriate location for Michelangelo's all but finished marble David."-1. 

The group included: the painters, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, the architect Guilano da Sangallo, the sculptor, Andrea della Robbia, and more artists and artisans. A group of two dozen and no theorists, no critics, no politicians, no lawyers, no lobbyists, only those who do, those who make. 

Art Historian Kenneth Clark, from his classic book Civilization from 1969, says this about the Renaissance, and more specifically about Michelangelo's David:

" Seen by itself the David's body might be some unusually taut and vivid work of antiquity; it is only when we look at the head that we are aware of a spiritual force that the ancient world never knew. I suppose that this quality, which I may call heroic, is not part of most people's idea of civilization. It involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilized life. It is the enemy of happiness. And yet we recognize that to despise material obstacles, and even to despise the blind forces of fate, is man's supreme achievement; and since, in the end, civilization depends on man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost, we must reckon the emergence of Michelangelo as one of the great events in the history of western man." -2

David, detail, Michelangelo, marble, 1504, Academia, Florence. 

Protestants may insist that the faith is about the word and that the fact that Christianity began in the Hellenistic cultural world is not important. Pope Benedict said that the wisdom of Athens, along with the wisdom of Jerusalem, must be considered in understanding the early church. Greek sculptors made the gods as beautiful men with bodies. Then God became man, not as an idea, not as a theory, but with a body. 

Pope Blessed John Paul II has privileged representational figurative art in his "Letter to Artists of 1999"."The Church has need especially of those who can do this on the literary and figurative level, using the endless possibilities of images and their symbolic force. Christ himself made extensive use of images in his preaching, fully in keeping with his willingness to become, in the Incarnation, the icon of the unseen God." 3. 

Modern Art and Modernism

How did we get to Abstract Art? In 1619 rationalist philosopher Rene Descartes split body and spirit. Then Immanuel Kant with a new kind of subjectivity laid the foundation for Modern aesthetics, in his "Critique of Judgment", where human consciousness sets the terms for reality itself. -4. 

Modern Art is a product of Modernism the philosophy, the world view, that influenced all aspects of life and culture and still holds sway today. The characteristics of Modernism that come into play with regard to art are: 1. Subjectivism, (everyone is an artist) 2. Rationalism, science is prized over artistic knowledge, 3. Dualism, privilege of mind over body, separation of mind and body 4. Anti-Traditionalism, let’s tear tradition down and start over. 

Art is both form and content. In Late Modern Art, form and content were split asunder, in a way similar to the way that Descartes split body and spirit, and it was like Reformation Iconoclasm taking the body off of the cross.  Content alone, Conceptual Art, devolved into trite jokes. Form alone,  Abstract Art, a painting about paint, is as inane as a poem being solely about the alphabet.  

When form and content were partners vying for supremacy in Early Modern Art, exciting things happened. The push and pull of form and content, the interaction, is what can give art depth. Eventually, the forces, some theoretical and some financial, to separate form and content prevailed. The energy of the Early Modern era faded after a while.  

Note how form and content worked together in Early Modern Art:

 

Monet's Impression Sunrise, from which Impressionism gets its name. 

 

Van Gogh's Starry Night, We believe the sky is sky and yet we know it is paint.

 

Rodin has understood Michelangelo's Neo-Platonist idea of the figure in the marble block. We are aware of the "uncovering" process. 

In Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky we recognize the Modern composer but we also see how the line asserts itself. There is a good tug of war between form and content. 

Descartes' attack on the body and taking the body off of the cross led to disembodied art. The contrast is between what is real and what is a mere symbol. It reminds me of what Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor said at a distinguished literary dinner, at which she remained too shy to speak, until a woman, knowing Flannery was Catholic, said, "The Eucharist, what a nice symbol." O'Connor said, "Well if it's a symbol, then, to hell with it".

Critique of Modernism, ink, 1982, by the author 

Theory Rules the Art World (from marble to drips)

Tom Wolfe says in his book The Painted Word  from 1975, that he realized that "Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text."-5. Finally Wolfe proposes that the museum of the future will have, taking up a whole wall, in large block letters, Critic Clement Greenberg's "Theory of Flatness". Flanking it will be a postcard size image of a Jackson Pollock painting illustrating the theory.  

.   Number 8, Jackson Pollock , paint, 1949. 

Kant's subjectivity has caused the art educational system to fail. "Everyone is an artist, just express yourself." With no God, the concept of God given ability went away. Billy brings home scribbles from the first grade and they are stuck on the refrigerator and he is patted on the back for the sake of his self-esteem. Billy, that ..... learn how to draw. 

And we can see how modern philosophy rejected the knowledge of natures, and thus, was able to make up a false nature for man, one that prized intellect over the body, and separated the two.

Kant's Modernist Aesthetics resulted in the phenomenon of viewers looking at a work of art and waiting, indeed hoping, for a personal aesthetic experience. Don't worry the cognoscenti, the experts, will tell you what to feel. Because of Kant this is a subjective experience. John Saward has said that, "In the heresy of Modernism we find a vague "mysticism" and a cult of subjective experience." 6. Remarkably some cling, even though "Modern Art" ended decades ago, to the idea that the artist possesses a special internal spiritual knowledge and that that is what is presented, then the viewer must try to get it, to be enlightened by it. Theory was like theology for Greenberg and he had the zeal of a Savonarola. Kandinsky tried, in his writing about art, to make of it a pseudo religion.

How free floating, strained, and artificial this is, and how different from the contextual aesthetic experience that one may have before a work of art that has content, and may be in situ, in the place that it was made for.

The Calling of Saint Matthew, detail, Caravaggio, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, 1600.

From Caravaggio, Painter of Miracles, American writer Francine Prose says something special happens to viewers in front of a Caravaggio painting. She describes a tour guide explaining to students The Calling of Saint Matthew in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. "There is nothing she is telling them that they absolutely need to hear, and the power of the paintings is drowning out her voice." And, "… it is possible to understand this painting without knowing much about art history, or Caravaggio, or even, perhaps, about the New Testament." -7.

The only thing worthy of becoming the flesh of Conceptual Art, is "theory". And for all the other isms before Conceptual Art it was all about the theory. Those who have it, or invent it, spew it with authority, and tell us that we do not need to know what art is, because they will tell us what it is, and they will also tell us what is good.

There is a vast financial structure ensuring that the abstract paintings in the cellar of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, that no-one wants to look at now, are still valuable. John D. Rockefeller and his money created that financial structure, the idea for MOMA was hatched in his living room.

As art was becoming just theory strange things began to happen. Dadaists thrust mild obscenities and visual puns at viewers and began to call any object a work of art. Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal turned upside down and called it Fountain for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. The artists rejected it for the show, but it lives on in the lore of art as a joke on everyone. 

Fountain, Duchamp, 1917. 

     

 Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora, 1999  

This expensive joke is a plastic Pope John Paul II being crushed by a meteorite (exhibited at Royal Academy, London, sold at Christies for three million dollars). I am not sure what it means, but assuredly, it is a joke on Catholics.

And Abstract Art like Robert Ryman's painting White on White is a joke and complicit in it is New York Times Art Critic Michael Kimmelman, who says "Only experts are allowed to tell you what art is or not." And "We want to be told what to think." and "All art is Conceptual." He says that Ryman's painting is a "conversation within art" that "pushes the conversation forward." I suspect that that conversation goes on in the cellar of MOMA between all the abstract paintings in exile down there. 

These are "in jokes" with political and financial motivations. That makes them so obvious, and thus, so boring.  

 

White, Robert Ryman, 2003. 

Pope Saint Pius X attacked Modernism in his encyclical of 1907, "Dominici Gregis Pascendi, Feeding the Lord's Flock", in which he characterized Modernism as " the synthesis of all heresies".

He begins, "Modernists place the foundation of religious philosophy in that doctrine which is usually called Agnosticism. According to this teaching human reason is confined entirely within the field of phenomena, that is to say, to things that are perceptible to the senses, and in the manner in which they are perceptible; it has no right and no power to transgress these limits. Hence it is incapable of lifting itself up to God, and of recognizing His existence, even by means of visible things. From this it is inferred that God can never be the direct object of science, and that, as regards history, He must not be considered as an historical subject."-8. 

"The Agnosticism of our time is perfectly expressed by the blank, bureaucratic facades on Park Avenue in New York. And Charles Jencks in The Language of Post Modern Architecture also says, " Art, ornament and symbolism have been essential to architecture because they heighten its meaning, make it clearer, and give it greater resonance. All cultures, except the Modern one, have valued these essential truths and have taken them for granted."- 9.  

And John Saward in his book, The Beauty of Holiness and The Holiness of Beauty, says about the ideologies of modernity,

"When the Virgin Mother is not venerated, the Son's self-emptying is soon forgotten, and men dream of Progress, Superman, and the Will to Power."  If man is to soar upwards to self-fulfillment, then, at all costs, God's descent to a lowly womb must be denied." - 10. Nietzsche-Zarathustra's demands deicide. "To you, Higher Men, this God was your greatest danger. Only when the humble God is dead can the Superman arise."- 11. 

The Theology of the Body and Sacred Art

The study of Art History is about the study of "style". The study of Christian Art History is about the study of "meaning". Some parts of Art History need to be re-written from a Catholic point of view.

"The Theology of the Body" and a revival of Sacred Art are the answers to the errors of Modernism, Descartes' attack on the body, and the vacancy of abstract art. 

In his "Theology of the Body" Pope Blessed John Paul II said, 

"The body can never be reduced to mere matter; It is a spiritualized body, just as man's spirit is so closely united to the body that it can be described as an embodied spirit." -12.

Dr. Michael Waldstein in the substantial introduction to his translation of the TOB says this:

"The ancient Gnostics found themselves in a demonic, anti-divine universe. Matter was evil. Yet, the truly bottomless pit is opened only by the Cartesian universe with its complete indifference to meaning. Matter is "mere matter", sheer externality. It is value- free. The reason for this indifference of matter to meaning lies in the rigorous reconstruction of knowledge under the  guidance of the ambition for power over nature." -13.

What does the  Catholic Church have to say about this? It understands the real in a special way. Art can say something about how the Incarnation has materially changed the universe. The Church can have Sacred Art. The art of the Renaissance and the Counter Reformation Baroque in large part define Catholic Art. A case can be made, that the Virgin's connection with the art was not just coincidental, that without her, and without a vital female element in the culture, art would not have thrived.

To conclude, it is worth looking at the pietà concept once again, because Pope Benedict XVI has explained how Renaissance Art has changed the art of Antiquity to engage the theological:

  

“The languages into which the Gospel entered when it came to the pagan world did not have such modes of expression. But the image of the pieta, the Mother grieving for her son, became the vivid translation of this word. In her God’s maternal affliction is open to view. In her we can behold it and touch it. She is thecompasio of God, displayed in a human being who has let herself be drawn wholly into God’s mystery.” - 14.

He has said that through art, not just from the written word alone, we can understand more about God, in this case, more about the female aspect of his love, "his maternal affliction" and his "compasio". 

Pietà 2006, Virgin Mary, detail, marble, life size, by the author. 

1. Three Worlds of Michelangelo , James Beck, 1999, p.123-131

2. Civilization, Kenneth Clark, 1969, p. 123.

3. "Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists, 1999."

4. "Critique of Judgement", Immanuel Kant, 1790.

5. The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe, 1975, p.3

6. The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty, John Saward,     Ignatius, 1997, p. 24.

7.  Caravaggio, Painter of Miracles, Francine Prose, 2005, p. 8.

8. The Encyclical Dominici Gregis Pascendi ,Pope Saint Pius X, 1907.

9. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Charles Jencks, 1987, Rizzoli, p.7.

10. Saward, 148

11. Also Sprach Zarauthustra, Freidrich Nietzsche, 1883.

12. Man and Women He Created Them, A Theology of the Body,

    Pope Blessed John Paul II, Translated by Michael Waldstein, 2006. p. 96    

13. Ibid, p. 95

14. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Mary, The Church at the Source,1997. p. 78.

© 2014 by Cornelius Sullivan

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Pope Francis and Caravaggio: Part Two

October 6, 2013

By CORNELIUS SULLIVAN

NAPLES, FLORIDA - Pope Francis said, "That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That's me. I feel like him. Like Matthew." 

 

From my Pope Francis and Caravaggio, published last week, inhttp://www.italianinsider.it/?q=node/1694, about his recent interview:

 

"At the same time that some Catholics are worried about the pope being soft on important issues, the secular media is ready to definitively pronounce that church doctrine has been changed on controversial matters this week."  

 

Many who are agenda-driven have misread the Pope and have not understood the subtleties in how, without changing anything, Pope Francis has changed the order in the statement "Condemn the sin, love the sinner" to "Love the sinner, condemn the sin." In so doing, he has done more than cause the "l" of love to be capitalized rather than the "c" of condemn; he has proposed a real life change in determining which action should come first sequentially.

 

If you condemn, ears become shut. If you love, ears become open. Only then can you assert that you can have a moral system; you can even insist that you have a right to have a moral ethical system that permits you to call your own sins, sins, and to believe that some behaviors are objectively sinful. 

 

Then, if someone calls you homophobic you can say:  well, I disapprove of murder, does that make me a murderaphobic? Then I must also have theftaphobia, and adulteryaphobia. Isn't a phobia a fear? I am not afraid of homosexuals, but I maintain that we have a right, the privilege even, under the Freedom of Religion, to have religious beliefs that differentiate good and evil. Yes, we get it from our religion, we get it from the Bible. It may be guaranteed by civil authority. And we can try to apply it to ourselves and to our own lives.

 

Enough of the rash, wishful thinking of those with agendas who misinterpret the Pope's call for understanding and mercy as a commendation of their own lifestyles. 

 

What is more puzzling is the fact that so many Catholic experts and theologians have found fault with the Pope's words. Much of what they say comes from a poorly disguised provincial pride that goes, "I would have said it differently." 

 

Other than that, the only point that the experts make that has any emotional resonance at all, is the idea that some faithful members of the Church have not been praised. An example would be those pro-lifers who work tirelessly in support of the Church's position on the sanctity of all human life.

 

In response to that, I say that it is not an accident that all of the Jesuit publications released the Pope's interview on September 19th and that the gospel for that day, read around the world, is about the woman who, known as a sinner in a Pharisee's house, washed the feet of Jesus with her tears of sorrow. In the same way that it is not an accident that the Pope talked about Caravaggio and Saint Matthew, both sinners, it is not an accident that this gospel is coupled with the Pope's words about understanding and forgiveness. Characteristically, in the gospel, Jesus did not rush to praise the Pharisee for being righteous, but was quick to forgive the sinner. 

 

We can understand how Caravaggio, the sinner, connects with Saint Matthew and how the Pope's words are truly pontifical, meaning bridge-building, the word derving from the Italian word for bridge, ponte.

 

As far as praising the faithful members of the Church, that is indeed part of the Pope's job. He beatifies and he canonizes, he meets with Bishops from around the globe, and he continually meets with worthy groups. He praises virtue. So let's give him a break and understand what he is doing when he acts on the gospel truths and occasionally reaches out to the lost sheep.

 

The Calling of Saint Matthew, Caravaggio, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.

Pope Francis and Caravaggio - by Cornelius Sullivan

NAPLES, FLORIDA - Pope Francis said, "That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew. It is the gesture of Matthew that strikes me: he holds on to his money as if to say, ‘No, not me! No, this money is mine.’ Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff."

These words are from: Pope Francis, interview with Father Antonio Spadaro, S.J., editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal, released on September 19 in answer to the question "Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio now [Pope Francis]?" http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview

This interview has immediately provoked considerable public controversy. The pope mentioned Caravaggio three times in the extensive, wide-ranging interview. It is not an accident that he chose to talk about this painter. Caravaggio is a painter of saints and sinners, and American author Francine Prose has titled her biography of him, Caravaggio, Painter of Miracles.

The interview has spawned a plethora of enthusiastic articles in secular media speculating that the pope has changed Church teachings on homosexuals, abortion, and contraception. We can look at the interview and see if that is indeed true.

The pope's link to Caravaggio's great painting of The Calling of Saint Matthew is a link about mercy. 

In the interview, Pope Francis said on the Gospel story of the calling of Matthew: “Jesus saw a publican, and since he looked at him with feelings of love and chose him, he said to him, ‘Follow me.’" And the pope continued, "when I had to come to Rome, I always stayed in the neighborhood of Via della Scrofa. From there I often visited the Church of St. Louis of France, and I went there to contemplate the painting of ‘The Calling of St. Matthew,’ by Caravaggio."

Caravaggio killed a man in a sword fight duel in 1606. At that time he was the most famous painter in Italy. He was banished from Rome, a fugitive in exile with a price on his head. He never returned and died mysteriously at age 38.

There was no predicting that the young artist from Lombardi would become one of the world's greatest religious painters. It began suddenly with The Calling of Saint Matthew in 1600. Before that, as a young artist he barely survived on the streets of Rome, making small still life paintings and working for other artists. Art historian Sir Kenneth Clark has named The Calling of Saint Matthew the painting that changed the history of painting.

Just fifty years after the High Renaissance in Rome, where Michelangelo and Raphael presented the theology of the Church ideally transcendent in a heaven in the sky with Classical grace, Caravaggio brought the new Counter Reformation faith to the ground. He was a startling realist, inventing his own dramatic light on his models, his street friends, illumining and transforming them into saints. It was the time in Rome where Saint Phillip Neri and his followers on the streets of Camp Marzio lived a new classless faith.

It is not difficult to see how these realities resonate with the humble new pope.

Because Caravaggio was a brawler, fighter, and eventual murderer, always in and out of jail, being self-righteous was never part of his personality. He is a great artist because even when he painted the executioner, probably posed for by one of his friends, we get the feeling that he loves the man, and he is able to show us his humanity.

The part of the recent interview that has become controversial is when Pope Francis said, "We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods. That is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I am reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time."

He has not changed church doctrine. In the concept, "condemn the sin, and love the sinner," he has moved the accent to the latter.
  

Discourse, no matter how correct, does not change hearts. Pope Francis does, and that is his job.

Pope Francis said, “proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things.” These are what make “the heart burn: as it did for the disciples at Emmaus....The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.”

And about the proposal of the Gospel he said, "Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person? We must consider the person. Here we enter into the mystery of the human being."

I maintain that Caravaggio excels at portraying "the mystery of the human being" and that is why Pope Francis contemplates and understands his message in paint.

Coincidentally, the Gospel for the day that the interview was released was about the woman, a known sinner, in the house of a Pharisee, who washed the feet of Jesus with her tears.

At a pub in a Catholic university town, I was a mostly silent participant in a lively discussion about the pope's statements on the hot issues. An older writer proposed that it was about not having a narrow, negative focus on some issues while also not proclaiming the larger good news. A younger, more zealous theology student took a more critical view. When I mentioned the Gospel of the day, the young man said, "yes, and Jesus said, 'go and sin no more.'" I think that -go and sin no more- is from the woman taken in adultery, a different passage, maybe it was implied here,  but the central message of this gospel and the additional examples that Jesus used are about how the one who is forgiven much has great love. Jesus said, "her many sins have been forgiven; hence, she has shown great love." Luke 7: 36-50

At the same time that some Catholics are worried about the pope being soft on important issues, the secular media is ready to definitively pronounce that church doctrine has been changed on controversial matters this week. That is even though most of them have never taken the time to know what the authentic teachings of the church are on gays, abortion, and contraception. Someone should tell them that the teachings of the church are clearly defined in The Catechism of the Catholic Church. We can see that Pope Francis, even while calling for compassion and understanding, has told us that those teachings are the same this week as they were last week.

The paint of Caravaggio the sinner, who portrayed Matthew the tax collector sinner, speaks to the pope today.

The Calling of Saint Matthew, Caravaggio, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.

Caravaggio Exhibition Raising of Lazarus in Rome

Cornelius Sullivan

Rome

Until July fifteenth at the Museum of Rome, Palazzo Braschi ,by Piazza Navona, the large restored masterpiece will be displayed in a special room.

Raising of Lazarus, 1609, cm 380x275 Museo Regionale di Messina.

The painting is very large and the setting is ideal. You are able to approach very close to see the brushstrokes and get a sense of the weave of the canvas. You are able also to learn about the restoration process in some detail.

The painting was transported from Messina. The restoration in the Museum of Rome took seven months. The painting had significant damage from previous restorations and from the environmental conditions in Messina. It was exposed to both indoor and outdoor conditions of uncontrolled variations of temperature and humidity.

It is being called Resurrezione di Lazzaro, Resurrection of Lazarus, where it should be called “Raising of Lazarus”. As with the Virgin being assumed into Heaven it is passive on the part of the subject. Jesus ascended, Mary was assumed. Lazarus did not resurrect himself, he was raised.

Caravaggio painted this after he escaped from the prison in Malta. He received support in Sicily and the commission was important and the size of the painting signifies that his great gifts as a painter were still highly prized.

There are many similarities with earlier Roman works. Especially striking is the repeat pose of Jesus pointing. In the Calling of Saint Matthew in the French church in Rome he is pointing-calling. In this scene he is raising, leaning back slightly, pulling up his friend. Gone are the rich expanses of glowing flesh and brilliant reds. It is still the hard to describe “Caravaggio red” but it is in a dark haze. All of the forms are recognizable only from the way the light just touches them and reveals shape. The light is illusive, hitting and skipping along from left to right. Less is better. He decides which characters reveal themselves and which remain only a hint in darkness where we must imagine their essence solely from the gestures.

As in a number of his group paintings there is a half-hidden self portrait. The usual expressions early on were disinterest or amazement, but now because of what he has lived, being knighted, then arrested, escaping and becoming a fugitive again, and being de-knighted, de-frocked. There is an expression bordering on horror. He is the figure in the back on the far left.

Caravaggio Self Portrait, detail.

Everything comes out of the dark. That is how he paints. This is his mature somber style reflecting the intense troubles of his later life even though he is still painting a miracle. He always knew about death, and even death on the streets, but now it is what he thinks about and paints more than anything else.

What can we make of the large expanse of darkness above the figures. It is a common feature of his late tragic work. It is as if death is a major player, an important character, in the drama. In the Death of the Virgin there is the large red drape taking up the top half of that painting. Clearly it was painted later to summarize the scene and complete the composition. That painting is often called “The Dormition”, the sleeping of the Virgin. There is still hope and color although we feel the grief of the disciples. But reproductions can never convey the immensity of the dark in the Raising of Lazarus. You cannot help but feel that the painter is telling you that death is immense.

He is like the old Titian and the old Rembrandt who threw away the fine pointed sable hair brushes, and all the learned craft, and all the skill, and became confident enough to load a large bristle brush with a thick glob of lead white paint and with one stroke describe, for example, the jaw of a rising man or the cheek bones of his sisters. Painting became like thinking for these masters.  

Raising of Lazarus, detail.home

(c) 2012 by Cornelius Sullivan

Caravaggio on the Run

Caravaggio on the Run in Malta

Cornelius Edmund Sullivan

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in the cathedral in Malta is the only painting that Caravaggio ever signed. He signed it in the Baptist’s blood on the pavement. A woman looks on and clasps her own head with two hands in horror and Salome holds the platter that the executioner points to, the basin for Saint John’s head.

The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, Oratory of St John’s Co-Cathedral , Valletta

He signed not “Caravaggio”, what he was called after his own town, but “Fr (Brother) Michelangelo“, his Knight of Malta name with crimson and cadmium red gushing from John’s neck.

This painting can tell us more about the tortured psyche of the great painter, brawler, murderer, and fugitive than any other painting. Events in Malta turned out to be a microcosm of his whole life. First he had acceptance, then more than acceptance, acclaim and notoriety. And then it all ended in violence, imprisonment, escape, and fugitive status again.

Caravaggio was so well known and respected that the pope had allowed him to become a knight and it was likely that he would eventually be pardoned for the murder in Rome and could return to the city triumphantly as a knight. They loved his painting of the Baptist and there was to be a festive dedication of it in the Cathedral. Then, again he drew his sword. What went wrong?   

He always had a hard time with daily life if he was not painting, what he was born to do. He jumped into the fight involving some knights to protect a friend. He probably thought it was no big deal. He didn’t kill anyone and it wasn’t anything that would not happen on any Saturday night in Campo Marzio in Rome. Caravaggio was arrested along with the other knights. Then he escaped.

The stock, easy answer to the question of why the great painter was always involved with criminal acts of violence, is that he had a predisposition for it and that he became easily insulted. Like a tragic Greek hero his fatal flaw  would bring him down. But did he sense that centuries later his painting in Malta would be studied and written about, that people would travel to see it? In his life time lesser artists continued to get the good commissions while his paintings were rejected?

My eyes tell me that whether he paints executioners or saints, his love for them as human beings shows. This is one of the reasons he is a great artist and his art has universal recognition and appreciation.

In the prison without his sword, his nightmares returned again, the ones about the bounty hunters taking his head for the reward. He could not stay locked up, they would find him. The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is a painting of his own worst nightmare. It is the most brilliant case of artistic sublimation, turning his dreadful dream into a biblical tale, and being paid to paint it.

After the homicide in Rome in 1606 he went into exile. He kept moving driven by a justifiable paranoia. As they say, if you are paranoid, it does not mean that they are not after you. At the same time he was aided, hidden, protected, and used by Italian aristocratic families that more than ever prized his great painting ability. So, despite his internal turmoil he continued to have patronage and was able to continue to make major important paintings, and his acclaim continued to grow. He was protected first outside of Rome in the Alban Hills, and then in Naples, and in Malta.

In Malta the Grand Master wanted him to become like a court painter. His portrait of the Master is in the Musee de Louvre. The Grand Knight decided to make Caravaggio a Knight so that he could not leave the island. He would become a fugitive artist captive. Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt sent a hypothetical query to Pope Paul V Borghese. What if a man (unnamed) had committed a homicide in Rome in a brawl, could he, possessing special skills and character, still become a Knight of Malta? The pope knew it was Caravaggio and his response was quick and positive, yes. This could be seen as a prelude to his full pardon to be able to return to Rome, which indeed, did come from Pope Paul V in 1610.

Alof de Wignacourt, Musee de Louvre

From Caravaggio, Art, Knighthood, and Malta, by Keith Sciberras: “Less than two years after murdering Ranunccio Tomasoni, some eight months after he left Naples, a new chapter in his life was to begin. …the concessions made by Paul V represented a major step towards pardon.” -1.

In front of his painting of The Beheading Saint John the Baptist in the sanctuary of the Oratory of the Cathedral at Valletta, the paint not long dry, Caravaggio would be defrocked, de-knighted, in a solemn ceremony, with ritualistic calls of his name four times. They should have known that he was not there, because his offense was not being there. The unforgivable crime was not that he was in a brawl and locked up, but that he had escaped from the inescapable Alcatraz of Malta, the prison Fort St’Angelo, using a rope, and then he fled the city of rock. It has been suggested by historians that he must have had political help in his escape. I am not surprised by any physical or creative feat of this extraordinary man. He did win his sword fights and he was a professional fugitive with excellent powers of observation and his paintings required exceptional physical mastery.

  

Saint Jerome Writing, Museum of Saint John’s, Valetta

But after his escape…"the Grand Master wanted fugitives back in Malta… and Bellori, (Caravaggio’s biographer), himself records that Caravaggio feared the Knights were after him.” -2  I mention this not to imply that the Knights were responsible for his later death but rather because I am always interested in how Caravaggio thinks.

Many consider The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist to be Caravaggio’s best painting. I think it is The Calling of Saint Matthew, the master’s first great painting and the painting that changed the history of painting and formed a new way to make religious art.

Biographer Helen Langdon says about the Beheading of the Baptist, 

It is an ignoble scene. John does not kneel as is customary... but is brought low on the ground and his body is trussed like that of a sacrificial lamb his hands tied behind his back his red cloak suggesting blood and a rope snaking across the floor... 

...Its ignobility must have startled young knights who received instruction before it and who aspired to the glorious feats of Christian chivalry yet it is a meditation on the reality of martyrdom...-3.

Art Historian Howard Hibbard on the signature, “The signature is proof of Caravaggio's pride in attaining the honor he had sought so assiduously: its place and its nature are almost pathological and they seem to confirm our suspicions of Caravaggio's identification with the Baptist and of his unusual preoccupation with beheading.” -4.

The executioner is poised with blade for his final effort in a scene stilled, stopped in time. The Caravaggio red in the burnt umber dungeon is John’s cloak and also becomes the spilled, sacred stain. The bones of the prophet’s face in the dark show John’s character forged by wilderness fasting and show his resolve in martyrdom.

The painter’s defrocking carried the same irreversibility as a beheading, no going back. 

He was pardoned to return to Rome but did not make it and died mysteriously in July of 1610. In four years of exile he made as many enemies throughout the Mediterranean as he painted masterpieces. In Naples, before Malta, he was ambushed and attacked, disfigured, and nearly killed.  Was it a fever that caused his death on the beach or was it vengeance or justice that caught up with him at age thirty-eight?

He is an artist who knew the highs and lows of life. He painted the Baptist in his low death, in a place familiar to the artist, the lowest, darkest cell. The one to come that John announced died upright with arms raised to the sky and breathed his last, giving up freely what was his own, what was not given to Him. Caravaggio painted Saint John the Baptist at his own final baptism, not a baptism by water, a baptism by blood.

The prison Fort St’Angelo, Valetta, Malta

1. Caravaggio, Art, Knighthood, and Malta, Keith Sciberras, 2006, p.30

2. Sciberras, p.34

3.  Caravaggio, Helen Langdon, 1998,p.357.

4. Caravaggio,  Howard Hibbard, 1983,p.238.

(c) 2012 by Cornelius Edmund Sullivan, sullivanart.com

Caravaggio, Saints and Sinners - by Cornelius Sullivan

Caravaggio, Saints and Sinners  

Cornelius Sullivan - Rome

Caravaggio the painter was a public sinner. He was in and out of jail and finally a wanted man fleeing Rome never to return. He killed a man in a sword fight on a Sunday evening in 1606. He died in exile four years later at age thirty nine.

Why do we today like his paintings so much?  His art has been ignored and despised at different times throughout the centuries? 

Calling of Saint Mathew, San Luigi dei Franchesi, Rome  

He posed sinners as saints. Is it because we are all part saint, and part sinner that we understand his art.?  He painted the most unlikely saints, previous sinners.  Like Saint Matthew, tax collector for the Romans, and Saul, Pharisee who became Saint Paul, persecutor of Christians, and the man who held the coats of the mob that stoned to death the first Christian martyr, Saint Stephen.   

                                                                                                         Conversion of Saint Paul , Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome  

He knew sinners. Some say that his murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni was over a bet on a tennis match.  More likely it is because Tomassoni was a pimp, and Caravaggio’s girl friend at the time was working the streets.  It was a gang fight.

He painted religious dramas for the Counter Reformation Catholic Church that was becoming a church for the people, especially in Rome because of the faith of Saint Philip Neri.  Neri, also known as the Apostle of Rome, lived his holy life in the same streets that Caravaggio fought in.  His apostolate was to all classes, especially to the poor, and his gifts were humility and humor.  

                                                                                    Pilgrim Madonna and Child, Church of Saint Augustino, Rome

The council of Trent that ended in 1545 ratified the making and use of images in churches and counteracted the iconoclasm of the Reformation. The stage was set for a new painter to tell the same old truths of the faith in a new way. “Stage” is the right word with regard to Caravaggio, his stories are filled with drama and movement.

There was no indication that he, with his Lombard still life training in oil paint and his volatile personality, would be the artist who would invent the direction of religious painting that would be followed for the next centuries.  

The connection between his art and his street life began shortly after he came to Rome from his town Caravaggio and from Milan. The paintings were of card sharks and musicians and plaintive shirtless boys looking at the viewer.  Then out of nowhere came his career changing comission to make three paintings of Saint Matthew for the French Church, San Luigi dei Franchesi.  Unexpectadly he creates a new genre,  dynamic compositions with realistic figures telling a story.

In the first, The Calling of Saint Matthew, the light joins and reinforces his narration, it tells us where to look, and it tells us what is happening.  The same models that he painted as card players are now counting money.  On the right, Jesus points to Saint Mathew with a hand remeniscent of God pointing to infuse Adam with life in Michelangelo’s fresco from the Sistine Chapel.  We can imagine the bolt of life giving energy, like lightning, coming from God’s hand  in the Creation of Adam.  In The Calling of Saint Matthew, the gesture is more like a “Hey, I’m talkin’ ta you Matthew” with a casual but authoritative air from Jesus. 

Caravaggio invented gestures to tell the story and to reveal character. He did not often use the stock and tried gestures that were a part of seventeenth century Italian Painting.  He was so good with these inventions that we always understand what is going on right away.  

Art historian Rudolf Wittkower remarks –“As one would expect, traditional gestures are abandoned and emotions are expressed by a simple folding of the hands, by a head held pressed between the palm or bowed in silence and sorrow. When ample gestures are used, as in the Raising of Lazarus, they are not borrowed from the stock of traditional rhetoric,…” 1.

In the Raising of Lazarus Christ points in the same way as he did choosing Saint Matthew but here he leans back a little as a puppeteer would, as if he were levitating his friend Lazarus with strings.  The pose of Lazarus is something that could only be known by an artist who had seen death in the streets.  

                                                                                            Raising of Lazarus,  National Museum, Messina

The intersection of religious narrative and autobigraphical truth would continue in the later works. So much so that it is difficult to separate out or ignore the personal references.  He won’t let us forget the sword fight.  Again and again he chooses to paint violent martyrdoms and Old Testament decapitations.

The life experiences of the painter enabled him to look without blinking at religious themes that often involve life and death, and a look at this world and the next. That’s why we like his art.  He takes us to places that we, ourselves,  could not imagine.

       1. Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy p.22 

(c) 2011 by Cornelius Sullivan