Remember caravaggio?
Reviewing The Denial of St. Peter, four hundred years too late
ELYSSA STELMAN STAFF
A horde of books and films have lately launched the artist Caravaggio into widespread acclaim. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610) influenced many of his contemporaries with his cinematic approach to light and shadow, and his naturalistic realism. Today, there is a widespread preoccupation with innovative art practice, though innovation for innovation’s sake is a vacuum. Caravaggio was a true innovator who skirted isolation, but ultimately worked in a time that reinforced change.
Caravaggio lived as tumultuously as he painted — in the light and the shadows. In his early 20s, he moved to Rome, a city in transition. The papacy had infused the city with a surplus of spiritual art in an attempt to counter the rise of Protestantism that had spread across Europe. A new art style, the baroque, emerged. Baroque consisted of devotional imagery that appealed to the emotions rather than the intellect. The church believed that this visceral appeal might draw followers and help revive faith in the church.
Rome brought Caravaggio fame. He abandoned the lightly-coloured still-lifes of his youth for religious imagery. While working on churchcommissioned art he simultaneously indulged in a life of vice and deviant behaviour. The combination of his talent, technique and esthetic united with his primeval nature defined his authentic style. He was interested not only in the shell of the individual but more importantly, in the tangled secrets of the interior. This in turn excited the intuitive and emotional drives of his viewers.
Caravaggio’s models were of the working class; labourers and prostitutes became the subjects of religious iconography. His legacy is that he stripped his biblical figures of any hint of idealism and doused them in light. His characters were based on live models and he captured not only their psychological essence, but also the minute details of their face and frame in a haunting realism.
The Denial of St. Peter c.1610, in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is one of Caravaggio’s later works. On a recent trip to New York, I visited the museum in the hope of seeing a Caravaggio “in the flesh.” Caravaggio significantly intensifies the dramatic moment by exaggerating dark and light tones. In The Denial of St. Peter, the background is obliterated by dark heavy pigment. This emphasizes neither site nor situation, but rather the psychological workings of Peter and the maid.
In The Denial, a soldier’s face is turned toward a maid so that his features are lost in shadow; her own face is pierced with a blinding light that has no apparent source. This intense light illuminates the piercing gaze of a woman in admiration or disbelief. By comparison, the light on St. Peter is subdued and yellow, giving it a softer, gentler glow. I marvelled at the directness of the maiden’s stare but I also immersed myself in an imagined fiction about her history. What are her thoughts? What do I imagine them to be? Her anxieties become my own. The distance between subject and viewer diminishes and, as a museum-goer myself, I shuffle awkwardly among the crowds feeling vulnerable and exposed.
Caravaggio’s soldier extends a gloved finger to touch the woman’s chin. Or does he? This could be an illusion of perspective. The ambiguity is intriguing and adds weight to the image. The highlight that falls on the cheeks of the maid and her shoulder direct our gaze to the distance between her face and the soldier’s. The woman’s full lips just miss the tip of the soldier’s nose. It is a seductive and sexually charged situation. The still image, the arrested moment, grips me with anticipation. The dramatic monologue inside my head kicks into overdrive. My rational side claims that there cannot be so much seduction in a biblical work, but my emotional side screams that the proof is on the canvas. Actually, there is no “proof” in a Caravaggio painting, only fully loaded innuendo.
The tired and elderly St. Peter stands to the right of the couple. Interestingly, he does not dominate the center of the composition as with most devotional works. The artist uses impasto (thick undiluted) paint in his treatment of the apostle. This gives weight to the sagging skin under the subject’s eyes. They are eyes burdened by the sight of calamity and the endurance of pain. He and the maid balance each other visually. Head bowed, he bears the weight of his sins because he has three times denied his acceptance of Christ. The girl and the soldier point three fingers at him in accusation.
Unlike other painters who have depicted The Denial of St. Peter, even those who followed in the school of the Caravaggists, Caravaggio’s work stands alone by the sheer force of its emotional grip. He manages to evoke the inherent vulnerabilities and misgivings that make us human.
A master of subtleties, Caravaggio understood (unlike the majority of contemporary artists) the expressive force of understatement. It is those little areas “in between” and the words left unsaid that are the most provocative.
