I. DON'T GO BLAMING VASARI
Naturally, it all makes for a good story. I too once had a landlord I wanted to throw rocks at.
But there are plenty of pitfalls to wedding an evaluation of an artist’s work to their biography. One is the way in which this story quickly degenerates into cliché with each retelling. We know how these stories go: Jackson Pollock drunkenly raging and stumbling about while being dragged under by his own insecurities, Charlie Parker somehow radically changing the nature of music between heroin nods, Van Gogh cutting off his fucking ear. And something something something about their "demons." All good stuff for some bio-pic that’ll drum up moderate returns, but inevitably falling far short when it comes to explaining anything about what an artist accomplished. Nothing that adequately explains how their work was a “game changer,” or about the game that was changed, or why that game was possibly in need of changing, or about why any of this mattered in the first place. Nothing that explains the alleged greatness or “genius,” and certainly nothing about how said art may have been problematic in its time, but widely accepted and praised in the years after the artist’s death. Or, in the case of Caravaggio: the other way around.
II. ATTRIBUTION
Disputes over proper attribution are bound to coalescence around any artist who’s been dead for many centuries. As with so many other artists, so it’s been with Caravaggio. First there’s the array of sordid details – his scurrilous misdeeds, criminal offences, etcetera. About which the various accounts offer a fair amount of conflicting and contradictory info. Then there’s the matter of the man’s work itself, and which paintings can be rightfully credited to his hand, and the questions about which ones were done by students and imitators. The earliest accounts of Caravaggio’s life and work – brief though they might have been – were written by critics and contemporaries during or shortly after Caravaggio’s lifetime. Many of these dwell extensively on the artist’s temperament and exploits, offering a portrait of a reprobate, a shameless opportunist chasing after prestigious patrons, a habitual brawler and criminal offender, a denizen of the most undesirable layers of society. It’s possible that many of the earliest accounts were penned by critics who simply disliked the man, disliked his paintings, and were incredulous with the degree of artistic influence he had throughout the Baroque era.
Such might be the case with the overview offered by Giovanni Pietro Bellori. Published in his 1672 volume The Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Bellori’s account is largely devoted to cataloguing Caravaggio’s careerism and misbehavior than to discussing the artist’s work. But when Bellori turns his attention to Caravaggio’s paintings, the verdict is a harsh one. He conceded that Caravaggio was vastly influential on younger artists of his day, but dismisses the results as an art hinging on “novelty,” mere stylistic apeings of Caravaggio’s “facile manner.” Bellori liked the early phase of Caravaggio’s career, but – as more and more of each slips into swathes of darkness – much less so with the artist’s more renowned mature works. He seems especially troubled by Caravaggio’s disregard for working from sketches and classical models, his practice of working directly from observation. This break from traditional practice resulted, Bellori lamented, in an art in which “the antique has lost all authority.” With that in mind, Bellori summarizedW:
"...Many of the best elements of art were not in him; he possessed neither invention, nor decorum, nor design, nor any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken away from his eyes, his hand and his imagination remained empty.”
Such was the consensus among a number of critics and patrons, both during the artist’s lifetime and over the next several centuries that followed. The gauge here was the art that had preceded the Baroque – the High Renaissance work of Da Vinci & co., and the convulsive vibrancy of the Mannerists who soon followed. The art of the previous era, the argument went, involved a process of extensive drawing, planning, development in the preparatory stages; a process in which subject matter was skillfully transformed – manipulated, idealized, refined, sublimated – by the artist’s imagination and intellect. By contrast, Caravaggio shrugged off established methods and classical models, opting instead to dumbly paint whatever was in front of him. Hence, he was little more than an impassive technician, “lacking inventiveness” – a mere imagist, but not a painter in the true, post-Renaissance sense of the word.
Slippage is also an issue here, as well. The account offered by André Félibien, is translated as asserting that Poussin – a friend and confidant of Félibien-- “could not bear Caravaggio and said that he had come into the world in order to destroy painting.” Another, more anecdotal, version is more specific; and contains a curious qualifier. On first viewing Caravaggio’s “Death of the Virgin,” Poussin is said to have cried out:
“I won’t look at it, it’s disgusting. The man was born to destroy the art of painting. Such a vulgar painting can only be the work of a vulgar man. The ugliness of his paintings will lead him to hell.”
