Art & Life...Separate?

This is a painting by Michelagnolo Da Caravaggio (1571-1610). “Taking of Christ” 1602. This is one of my favorite pieces. Obviously it is his portrayal of the betrayal of Christ by Judas just outside Gethsemene. I love the detail. The emotionality and the faces, the placement of hands and the gleam of armour. I love his body of work. He was criticised by his contemporaries because his work was too real. He used light in a way that most painters didn't at the time. He scorned the traditional idealization of religious subjects and dared to portray them with a humanity, which ultimately made him one of the most popular artists of his time among the commoners of his culture. The realism seemed to be too much for many of his religious contemporaries and sometimes patrons. He was often criticised and rejected for the humanizing emotionality of many of his paintings.

To see more of his paintings, go to
http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/bio/c/caravagg/biograph.html

In 1606 he killed a man named Tomassoni in a dual and fled Rome with a death sentence over his head. He apparently lived brutally. He liked to fight. He appears in court records as a nasty, thuggish character, threatening and attacking people for inane provocations like badly cooked artichokes. He behaved very badly. It seems his murdering Tomassoni was the inevitable conclusion of a destructive lifestyle. In the final 4 years of his life, on the lam, he apparently cranked out increasingly intense paintings (including The Seven Acts of Mercy) many of which illuminated biblical scenes with gripping intensity. He probed the human condition, the suffering of Christ, the spectrum of human interaction with Christ and the divine with greater sympathy than I've witnessed in a series of works by a painter.

How odd that such a scoundrel, murderer, and possibly homosexual could produce some of the most intimate portraits of biblical imagery. Perhaps he had an insight into the brutality that so infuses the biblical text (below The Sacrifice of Isaac 1602). He is not reported to be a religious man, but most definitely a doubting Thomas (above, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas 1601-02). What must he have been thinking in the hours he spent painting this picture of Thomas asking Jesus to prove himself. I wonder if maybe his paintings were his way of trying to really see God rather than portray God. Maybe that is the way we could live. It's an idea.

It is obvious to me that Caravaggio had little ambition to portray any of the biblical characters with the same tiresome lack of humanity and weight as his predecessors and contemporaries. He added anger to the face of Isaac (Sacrifice of Isaac) as an angel stops his father from slitting his throat. I don't know about you, but I've never seen that kind of portrayal. It seems closer to the truth. I've never heard anyone entertain Isaac's possible anger in a sermon. It's usually about how much faith his father had. But I've wondered about Isaac's psyche. I have wondered at how Isaac turned out to be such a sad excuse of a man. Then I think about the fact that he had a father who tried to kill him. I find it hard to believe that any young man could ever erase the image and memory of his father holding a knife to his throat. Maybe forgiveness, maybe, but certainly not the memory.

All in all, Caravaggio isn't the funny subject matter you probably hoped to find in today's blog. But I think his work should be considered. His work cannot be separated -as many religious biographers have tried to do- from his life. If you had seen his work prior to learning what I've told you, you might conclude that he was a devout, theological man. However, the quality of this man's life flies in the face of what necessary character we want to believe produces such beautiful, insightful, and inspiring pieces of art.