Caravaggio

All these centuries later, the sense of connection, of communication—of communion—that we feel with the long-dead painter seems almost vertiginously direct and profound. Having spent his brief, tragic, and turbulent life painting miracles, he managed, in the process, to create one—the miracle of art, the miracle of the way in which some paint, a few brushes, a square of canvas, together with that most essential ingredient, genius, can produce something stronger than time and age, more powerful than death.

Malta’s position at the center of a thriving slave market did little for its moral character, and it was common for the knights to have slaves as personal attendants. Nor was the tone of the place improved much by the influx of prostitutes who came to service the predominantly male society of merchants, traders, and theoretically celibate knights. In 1581, the knights revolted and imprisoned their grand master, Jean de la Cassiere, who had made the tactical mistake of attempting to expel the whores from the island.

physical effort required for a miracle to occur

If Caravaggio’s paintings are brilliant, nearly photographic representations of miracles in progress, Cesari’s frescoes more often evoke the illustrations in Sunday school textbooks. Indeed, Cesari is one of the many of Caravaggio’s contemporaries whose work reminds us of what it is easy to forget or overlook—that is, how revolutionary Caravaggio was, how much he changed and rejected: the baby-blue heavens, the pillowy clouds, the airy ascensions accompanied by flocks of pigeonlike cherubs and choirs of attractive angels. For Caravaggio, the lives of the saints and martyrs and their dramas of suffering and redemption were played out among real men and women, on earth, in the here and now, and in almost total darkness.

Several of Caravaggio’s earliest biographers grudgingly admired his art while condemning his bad behavior and distancing themselves from his famously difficult personality. And until very recently, critics were still making a strenuous effort to distinguish the living devil from the angelic, immortal artist.

Only now can we admit that we require both at once. The life of Caravaggio is the closest thing we have to the myth of the sinner-saint, the street tough, the martyr, the killer, the genius—the myth that, in these jaded and secular times, we are almost ashamed to admit that we still long for, and need.

one of the most astonishing things about his work is the fact that he was able to make paint and canvas communicate exactly what he wanted to convey—the paradoxical ordinariness of a miracle, the fact that these miracles happened not only to patriarchs or saints in haloes and robes, not only to levitating figures in ethereal firmaments surrounded by feathery clouds, but to human beings whose faces resemble faces we know, and who share our inescapably human doubts and pain and fear. By making us inescapably aware that we are looking at flesh-and-blood men and women, painted from nature, Caravaggio emphasizes the humanity of Christ and his disciples, of the Virgin and the Magdalene.

The tour guide suggests that everyone take notice of how much Jesus’s gesture recalls God’s in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, and she informs them that this chapel was Caravaggio’s first major public and religious commission. But even the most dutiful tourists have long since stopped listening. There is nothing she is telling them that they absolutely need to hear, and the power of the paintings is drowning out her voice.

Because the truth is that it is possible to understand this painting without knowing much about art history, or Caravaggio, or even, perhaps, about the New Testament. None of that is necessary to comprehend what Caravaggio is showing us: the precise moment at which a man’s life changes forever—and becomes something else completely

Caravaggio was a preternaturally modern artist who was obliged to wait for the world to become as modern as he was.

It’s shocking to realize how long that judgment prevailed and how very recently it was reversed—not until the 1950s, when a major exhibition in Milan reminded the world that one of its greatest artists had been overlooked.

Often ahead of his patrons, the people responded to an art that reminded them that these miracles had transpired neither in primary colors, nor in brilliantly hued paintings of sanitized saints and celestial fireworks, but in dusty streets and dark rooms much like the streets and rooms in which they lived.