Sense and Nonsense about Caravaggio
Every writer from Caravaggio's day to our own has spoken of the artist's astonishing realism. One critic wrote a century after his birth that Caravaggio:
"recognized no other master than the model, without selecting [as artists had in the past] from the best forms of nature.....despising the superb statuary of antiquity and the famous paintings of Raphael, he considered nature to be the only subject fit for his brush."[my italics]1
Yet a contemporary, Giulio Mancini, also seemed to say that Caravaggio was no good at portraiture and that you needed to go to an artist like Annibale Carracci to get a good likeness.2 This paradox is accepted differently by different people. To writers certain that portraits are intended as accurate likenesses, the idea that Caravaggio may not have been good at getting a likeness is accepted as "possibly true." Howard Hibbard thought that the artist's potential weakness in portraiture explained the similarity between some of Caravaggio's figures.3 Writers like that have no other choice if they are to maintain their fundamental belief about portraiture. To those who know, like us, that almost all great portraits are a fusion of different faces for poetic reasons, the idea that Caravaggio was no good at likenesses is a mis-reading. He did not get a good likeness because he did not intend a good likeness.
Remember when a paradox occurs in the literature about great masters, it is almost certain that the writer is at fault, not the artist.
1.G. P. Bellori, Le vite de' pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, Rome, 1672, ed. E. Borea, Turin 1976, pp. 201-2 (original pagination)
2. G. Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura......, I, ed. A. Marucchi, Rome, 1956, p. 136
3. H. Hibbard, Caravaggio (New York: Harper & Row) 1983, p.46
Posted 15 Sep 2010: CaravaggioPortraitureVisual Perception
The EPPH Blog features issues and commentary.
Reader Comments