Content area
Full text
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) has entered the popular imagination as an archetypal bohemian artist - a radical non-conformist all too familiar with the criminal courts, brawling in the streets with tennis partners and impetuously quarrelling with other painters. Until only a few decades ago, the assertion that Caravaggio read anything at all would have seemed completely outrageous. From the very beginning, writers approached his art and life almost as though he were unlettered, though in Rome he associated with a sophisticated and decidedly literary crowd.1
He was perceived by many of his contemporaries as an artist who had no theory, who painted exactly what he saw without regard for the great idealizing tradition of the High Renaissance. For example, the critic and early biographer of Caravaggio, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, writing in 1672, said that he "lacked invention, decorum, disegno, or any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken from him, his hand and his mind became empty", and "it seems that he imitated art without art". He further complained that Caravaggio disdained the example of ancient statues and the great paintings of Raphael.2
For Bellori, Caravaggio was among a very select group of important painters, but one who also served as an object lesson in the dangers of following nature too closely. Bellori's negative comments are symptomatic of a decline in Caravaggio's artistic reputation, which had already reached a low point in 1633, when the Florentine-born Spanish critic Vincencio Carducho wrote that Caravaggio "worked naturally, almost without precepts, without doctrine, without study [...] with nothing more than nature before him, which he simply copied. I heard a devoted follower of our profession say that the coming of this man to the world was an omen of the ruin and demise of painting".3 When in 1708 Roger de Piles created a numerical scorecard rating the work of fifty-seven earlier masters according to their handling of colour and their compositions, drawing and expression, Caravaggio ranked fifth from the bottom.4
It was really not until the early twentieth century that Caravaggio was rediscovered. In 1951, an exhibition in Milan of the work of Caravaggio and his followers sparked tremendous interest in his career among the general public, and led to many scholarly...