Caravaggio (German Edition)

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Not only was he protector of the Sistine Chapel Choir, but he was also at the forefront of the late Renaissance shift from medieval polyphony to monody. He favoured the single melodic line sung by the solo voice, as well as new forms of musical theatre: Four boys tune their instruments or leaf through their scores to prepare for their performance: That painting formed part of the collection of Federico Federigo Borromeo, who may have commissioned it from the artist.

Del Monte was ambassador for the powerful Florentine family of the Medici , who supported the expense of his Roman residences. Encouraged by del Monte, Caravaggio painted two of his most teasingly original pictures of the mid-to-late s for the Medici grand duke of Tuscany: Bacchus and Head of the Medusa. The Medusa is even more strikingly unconventional and might in its way be regarded as a precursor of conceptual art. Painted on canvas and attached to a piece of wood in the shape of a shield with a strap on the back, it is a picture intended not merely to be looked at but actually worn.

It turned its wearer by implication into the hero Perseus , at the moment when he slew the snake-haired Medusa. He is mentioned in testimony given in July by a barber named Luca, in connection with a murky and ultimately unsolved case involving a missing cloak and a dagger:. This painter is a stocky young man…with a thin black beard, thick eyebrows and black eyes, who goes dressed all in black, in a rather disorderly fashion, wearing black hose that is a little bit threadbare, and who has a thick head of hair, long over his forehead.

I carry the sword by right because I am Painter to Cardinal del Monte. I am in his service and live in his house. I am entered on his household payroll. It was with those works, in which he placed sacred figures in a modern setting and in modern dress, using a live model posed before him, that Caravaggio perfected the method that would bring him both fame and notoriety. He also began at this time to develop his characteristically extreme technique of chiaroscuro, darkening his shadows to produce stark contrasts of light and dark, a method eloquently described by Bellori:.

Early life and training in Lombardy: 1571–92

He went so far in this style that he never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow. It was illegal for women to model for painters in Rome at the time, so employing a prostitute was a convenient way of getting around the legislation. Caravaggio would be linked to a number of other prostitutes during his time in Rome, and there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that he actually operated as a pimp in the time when he was not painting for Cardinal del Monte or his other patrons: In any case, the triangular relationship produced a simmering antagonism between the two men.

Tomassoni was a dangerous man to have as an enemy, with powerful connections in the city: On July 23, , Caravaggio signed a contract to paint two large paintings for the side walls of the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, the church of the French in Rome. The commission was secured for him by his patron Cardinal del Monte, whose links to the Medici meant that he had close connections with the French community in Rome.

Caravaggio responded to the challenge with mastery. The subjects prescribed were The Calling of St. Matthew and The Martyrdom of St.

Caravaggio

Christ and Peter , wearing timeless robes that symbolize eternal salvation, encounter Matthew and a group of taxpayers in gaudy modern dress. Christ beckons Matthew, as if to draw him away from the temptations of money toward redemption. One of the men, who has been merely feigning Christian devotion, leaps up to assassinate Matthew with a sword.

Caravaggio included his own self-portrait in the picture, as a man looking back at the horror of the killing as he turns to flee. The paintings for the Contarelli Chapel instantly established Caravaggio as the most dynamic and original painter working in Rome.

Caravaggio - Gemaldegalerie

More commissions followed, notably, in the autumn of , for the funerary chapel of Tiberio Cerasi in Santa Maria del Popolo. The subjects this time were The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion of St. Caravaggio treated both themes with extreme austerity and simplicity. He placed Paul on his back in a pool of light, just after having been struck from his horse by a divine thunderbolt. In the second picture he showed Peter being crucified upside down by a group of burly, poor assassins, grimly focused on the mechanics of murder.

In each of the pictures, Caravaggio aggressively asserted the humility of the followers of Christ. Santa Maria del Popolo was one of the principal pilgrimage churches of Rome, placed as it was at the northernmost edge of the city. These were paintings aimed squarely at poor pilgrims, intended to foster in them a sense of identification with the equally poor first followers of Christ. His pictures make a striking contrast with the altarpiece for the same chapel, painted at the same time by Annibale Carracci , in which the Virgin Mary , clothed splendidly as the Queen of Heaven, is watched on her way skyward by a group of nobly dressed apostles.

Two rival approaches to representing the mysteries of the faith are there crystalized. But during the years that followed, his direct insistence on Christian humility and poverty would fall out of favour with the Catholic church in Rome.

As a result, Caravaggio would suffer much censorship and frustration, despite his rising reputation. Sometime during the first half of , Caravaggio left the household of Cardinal del Monte—although he remained under his protection, as he would assert more than once during his several appearances in court—to take up residence with the powerful Mattei family, who lived in a honeycomb of interconnected residences built over the ancient Roman Teatro di Balbo. Caravaggio lived in the palace of Girolamo Cardinal Mattei, painting a number of pictures for him and his two brothers, Ciriaco and Asdrubale.

In the second picture he once more included his own self-portrait as a witness to the Judas kiss, holding up a lantern as if almost to advertise his by-now-trademark use of intense light-dark contrasts. About the same time, Caravaggio was commissioned to add an altarpiece to the two side panels he had painted for the Contarelli Chapel. The subject was Matthew and the Angel, in which the apostle was to be shown writing his gospel to heavenly dictation.

For the first time, Caravaggio painted a picture that displeased his patrons within the church, and for the first time, he was forced to modify his aggressive insistence on the theme of holy poverty. Initially, he represented Matthew as the poorest of peasants, with gnarled features and rough hands, sitting in a simple Savonarola chair with the soles of his dirty feet prominent in the foreground: That picture, which survives only in black-and-white photographs having been destroyed by fire in Berlin during the World War II , was rejected outright and a replacement requested.

Caravaggio continued to work at secular commissions during that period, painting a highly erotic depiction of Cupid surrounded by the tumbled attributes of science, art, music, and military might, entitled Amor Vincit Omnia. An Englishman visiting Rome about , Richard Symonds, was told the story by a custodian who took him around the Giustiniani Palace. Whether the rumours were true or not, it would be a mistake to regard Caravaggio as homosexual in any modern sense of the term.

The balance of evidence suggests that he did have sexual relationships with men as well as women, but it could be argued that his amorous or sexual preferences were defined by his conspicuous reluctance to settle with any one partner. In Baglione publically exhibited a parody of the work titled Divine Love , which he later followed with a second version in which Caravaggio himself is depicted in the guise of the devil plotting to sodomize a furtive figure of Cupid. In late summer Baglione had Caravaggio and Gentileschi thrown into prison on charges of criminal libel, which potentially carried a sentence of life rowing in the papal galleys.

The subsequent trial, for which full transcripts survive in the Roman archive, elicited from Caravaggio his only known statement on the art of painting , a single frustratingly terse sentence: After the libel trial Caravaggio traveled to Loreto , Italy, to research a large altarpiece on the subject of the Madonna of Loreto. He returned to Rome around the start of and, at about the same time, moved into rented accommodation in the Vicolo dei Santa Cecilia e Biagio now the Vicolo del Divino Amore.

Between and he would receive only a handful of commissions for large-scale public religious paintings, a fact suggestive of the extent to which his style was out of tune with the times. At the same time, his appearances in court for various disturbances of the peace multiplied. The pattern continued into On July 19 he was arrested once more, this time for defacing the house front of a woman named Laura della Vecchia, a crime known as deturpatio , often committed as revenge for an insult or affront.

Caravaggio | Italian painter | www.farmersmarketmusic.com

Just 10 days later he was arrested yet again for inflicting grievous bodily harm. Caravaggio skipped bail and fled to the coastal city of Genoa for the month of August. On his return he discovered that the landlady from whom he was renting his house in the Vicolo dei Santa Cecilia e Biagio, one Prudentia Bruni, had seized his possessions and changed the locks. He committed the crime of deturpatio against her, this time smearing excrement on the door of her house and singing obscene songs to the accompaniment of a guitar outside her window.

In her deposition to the court, the landlady complained that Caravaggio had damaged one of the ceilings in her house, a detail that may suggest one of the practicalities of his working method.

Becoming Caravaggio

At the end of , Caravaggio signed a contract to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the papal grooms in St. Shortly afterward Caravaggio completed the last of his great altarpieces for Roman churches, The Death of the Virgin. Austere, solemn, tragic in its very mundanity, the work shows the Apostles lamenting the death of Mary in the poorest of homes.

Amor Vincit Omnia Italian: Principles of Art History Writing. The Age of Caravaggio. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Boy Peeling Fruit c. Anne Madonna de Palafrenieri The Annunciation Burial of St. Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history.

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