Some notes on Caravaggio, Nimbus, 1956
Caravaggio speaks to us out of a consciousness that is brooding and obsessive, and affects us in a way that is not simply artistic. By this I mean that he comes close to presenting us with a sensation of amorphous and desperate desire unredeemed by an authoritative vision. It can be felt in the apprehensive boredom of the unsuccessful pictures and in the oppressive intensity of the best. If this sensation were deep enough it might have destructive effects, since we all live within that margin of order which we succeed in imposing on life, i.e. on the unfulfilled longings of the heart, and his work might then be truly diabolic. His genius operates in that world of antithesis where the conflict between ideal and reality rages, and the moral victory, i.e. the ultimate affirmation of the goodness of life, is always so tenuously won that we feel the dread of chaos intensely — even when he is completely successful. If there could be such a contradictory phenomenon as the uninnocent artist he might be it. He indicates the sort of sensations we might expect from such a monster. But since he is wholly innocent beneath the apparent evidence of corruption he ends by moving us in a profound and religious way. It is the difficulty he experiences in standing outside his situation that creates the impression of an impure involvement. For the same reason there is no trace of the comic in his work, for that depends totally on detachment. On the other hand everything he does is tempered by a deep seriousness, and it is this seriousness that is his most attractive quality.
His work is full of the signs of those two cardinal sins from which (as Kafka pointed out) all the others spring: impatience and laziness. The work of every artist is conditioned by the way in which he resists or yields to these temptations, although it is possible to see clearly whether we are faced with a small talent well served or a great talent sinned against. From the walls of the Church of St. Luigi dei Francesi a great talent mysteriously glowers at us. These enormous paintings seem always to preserve their mystery sufficiently to shock me again with the grotesque and intimate nature of Caravaggio’s sensuality. All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity. Perhaps it is for this reason that it attracts so often the irrational, who fail to see that its purpose is moral, that is, the evaluation of experience; in the deepest sense, the development of taste.
The eroticism of Caravaggio is special because it exists in that area between the simple sensual appreciation of the object which produces the desire to posses it, and the passionate but detached concern of the Observer, which also seeks to posses but to posses through understanding.
Caravaggio frequently painted out of the first, and less intense eroticism, and thus left us with representations of desirable things, yet failed to move us on the more exhilarating plane of true art. The failure is one of energy and it robs the observation of that last illogical step that would carry it into the realms of wisdom. I believe that if the representation is good enough there is a kind of enjoyment to be got from an art that attempts no more than to show how lovely, ugly or whatever else certain aspects of life can be. It is a form of expression that attempts to go no further than the obviously definable qualities of the object described, those qualities apprehensible on a level where love is not involved but merely curiosity. The interest that such art may have is limited by the degree of our curiosity in the objects involved, when these objects bore us, we are as unmoved as we would be by an art that described nothing. It is wholly on the level of deep and passionate concern that I wish to consider Caravaggio. For this reason it appears to me as wrong to labour such aspects of this extraordinary man as, for instance, what is called mannerism to-day, or what previously was called cellar painting. Both labels, like all labels, are useful only to the servants of the Goddess of Dullness in reducing the true significance of the art to boredom.
I have said that the paintings in the church of St. Luigi shocked me by the intimate sensuality that they emanate, or rather the atmosphere of sensual intimateness that they create. But of course these pictures are not shocking; good painting never is. What I am shocked at is not the sensation itself, which is deep and convincing precisely because it illuminates an aspect of my consciousness and brings into play emotions which have dimly sought just such a fusion with the concrete world for as long, it seems, as I have existed. Now that they are released they have the familiarity of an old possession; but I am shocked to find on each recurrent contact that it still works; that these rhetorical fulsome compositions have this quality so strongly. I feel that it is grotesque in so far as it combines the form of the large public blood and thunder painting (Michelangelo) with the deeply personal tender and profound indoor feeling for objects that we find in Giorgione. The intimacy has a stronger sharper flavour, there is a brooding quality in the observation that makes one feel that all is not well. At least I think that something may easily happen in the picture; and am consequently surprised to find, each time I return, that the characters are still transfixed in the same fateful moment of action. Although the gestures remind me of Michelangelo the characters are no longer the loose types with which Buonarroti inhabited his painting, but convincing individuals, with a unique personal existence. They achieve this quality through the sensation of surface textural reality that is so strong that I find myself unable to avoid touching the canvas or at least wanting desperately to do so. Looking at them I become acquainted with their quality of existence in an intensely sensual way, and this carries with it a feeling that they are in some way threatened. They are at least very vulnerable. There is another dimension to their existence besides their own being. It seems that the presence of Caravaggio still haunts them. He has given such absorbing obsessional attention to the clothes and the flesh that he does not merely convince us of their existence but seems himself to remain restlessly hovering in the atmosphere that surrounds them. The mirror is not held up to nature but to the secret breaking heart of Caravaggio. The world of his longing and despair is intimately laid bare.
The quality of the indoor private revelation is also to be found in Rembrandt but with a significant difference. Although a greater painter by far he attracts me less. The particular quality I seek to explore is of course part of the technical device of chiaroscuro. But it will easily be seen that this explains nothing if we turn to any of the thousands of dull technical experts who have used it, and in whose work there is no atmosphere of any kind. In Rembrandt we find always the keen detachment of the supreme Observer. We see the object cornered and shivering under the scrutiny of the artist. On the other hand in these paintings of Caravaggio the object seems to expand, if somewhat apprehensively, in the less critical eye of the lover. This is an overstatement, but will serve the purpose of clarifying the special nature of the intimate quality of these paintings. They verge on the realm of the confession — hovering on that vital line between the simply revelatory and consequently vulgar, and the honest statement that is moral and consequently dignified. It might further define their existence to say that Rembrandt’s vision could only have been produced from a Protestant point of departure, whereas Caravaggio is conspicuously catholic and Latin in temperament — the dago — so suspect to the English, or more correctly, to the puritan mind. There is no element of righteousness in Caravaggio’s vision. In terms of the painting this is difficult to define, technical examination only brings us nearer to a rebuff from the Mystery, the paint that is not paint, the object that is made profoundly important only to be lost in a transcendent sensation more fabulous still. Since the point at which a painting becomes important to us is that at which it transcends the nice qualities of paint and material, close technical criticism is always likely to impose another barrier, except when used by the painter himself who is concerned with the business of pushing paint about in order to observe its accidental effects and to learn from the manner of their occurrence how to direct them towards an understanding and a statement. It is clearly not the business of the spectator to approach painting in this manner precisely because it presupposes a desire and intention to paint a more relevant picture than the one in question. Thus the spectator will find himself making criticisms in terms of a picture which he would have painted or would have someone else paint for him, but which he can do nothing about; a ridiculous position and one that will endanger his peace of mind — one in which art will play the opposite of its true role of integration and catharsis, producing frustration, not fulfilment. I feel that it is in the difference in emphasis in the paintings of the individual detail that the righteousness in Rembrandt, and its absence in Caravaggio, can be observed. Not to add confusion to a difficult point, I will simply concentrate on the element in Caravaggio that gives me the sensation of a generous commitment that is catholic and Latin in its fullness. When I speak of the emphasis I mean the form of the head or figure as it exists for me when the illusion is absolutely convincing. I am not interested in breaking down the illusion to its material components. But I am anxious to pin-point the character of the illusion.
To begin with it is rhetorical. Each gesture is slightly more so, and if we look at the figure surrounding of St. Mathew in the painting of his vocation, we see how expectation can be a crucifixion of expectancy. These are elements in the illusion, and when all is said not the important ones. Yet if we look at any final and simple conception of the object here, I mean a head or a single figure, a hand or a foot, the same quality is to be felt in the same manner — the rhetorical placing of emphasis in terms of the feelings that dominated the artist. But which precedes which, the feelings or the object? Does Caravaggio attach his fantasy to the hand and the head, or do they provoke the emotion? I think we are near the secret of this harrowing work if we see in it a profound declaration of the sacred importance of the innate character of each particular Thing to the painter. It is a real genuflection to the fact that the artist lives dependently in the world of Things. In a bad painting of Caravaggio it is possible to see this gone wrong and to learn how tenuous and fine is the relationship on which these pictures are built. The involvement is very much concerned with the touch, smell, taste, and presence of the objects, it is a deeply complete commitment. In the bad pictures it is merely an involvement and fails to achieve Vision: preoccupation without triumph. Yet (and this is the point about this painter) when he succeeds in raising himself above the mire, of going through with the relationship until he has come out the other side, as it were, we get something as specially valuable as these paintings in the church of St. Luigi dei Francesi, something that is moving in an intimate and a nervous sensual way. And this gives it a stronger impact than is achieved in more rhetorical or more realistic art. Caravaggio is finally rhetorical about the so called realistic aspects of the Object. In this way he goes deeper than the rhetorical realism which does not attach itself to the loved individual detail. If for instance his concern was merely for the great effect (in the way in which we later find it in Tiepolo) he would not interest us as he does. It is the fact that no detail is unworthy of his love that affects us deeply, in painting the gesture in full rhetorical flower he is at the same time in love with the very simple existence of the object apart from its significance in action.
This dualism, where we have a tiresome rhetorical composition that in itself is boring but contains exciting passages of vivid observation, is what we normally find in Caravaggio. Frequently the disparity between the conception as a whole and the manner of execution in the details makes it difficult for us to appreciate the profound love that is there behind the facade. For instance it is difficult to accept the painter’s understanding and love for a sensual Roman porter from Trastevere if it is presented to us as a conception of Christ — and how often does Caravaggio grotesquely inhabit his religious pictures with debauched faces. It is a quality of this work that its reality is never a religious reality in the sense bestowed on that word by the great tradition of Italian religious painting. It is religious in so far as it presents a deeply honest and passionate view of man, but as for the conventions of religious painting they will not contain these portraits in sensuality. The sensation I get in this respect is that of finding myself intensely present in a studio where a group of people are posing for a religious painting. It is a fair criticism of Caravaggio to say that he fails to move us in terms of the religious belief behind his subject, and that the subject when it is a religious one is never what it seems to be. The painter’s love for the earthy and sensual aspect of his subject in nearly every case dominates. Yet in spite of this it would be wrong to try to reduce Caravaggio to the status of a “realist” who has strayed into the world of rhetorical religious painting by accident and to his detriment. It is certainly a reasonable speculation whether Caravaggio would have painted these subjects for choice (the sort of thing that the latter mannerist derivative painters, especially the Dutch, chose to paint seems nearer to the true taste of the man who painted the Vocation of St. Matthew). But when the two lines cross, that is on the one hand his concern for the physical sensual existence of the object, and on the other his sympathy for the circumstances in which it is to be painted, and when this crossing is focused dead on in relation to the composition, we get a painting that is superb by the highest standards. And moreover we get a picture that is doubly religious, religious in the deep respect for the object, in its profound love of life, and also in the manner in which it presents a situation full of religious significance. In such a picture it becomes impossible for us to divide these two elements, so profound is the simultaneous focus of both these kinds of love and respect.
It seems to me that in the Vocation of St Matthew this happens. Consequently my remark about the taste of the man who painted it is only valid in terms of those other paintings where this does not happen. Perhaps this is the great weakness of all criticism, that it tends to take facts derived from the examination of unimportant works and applies them in making a judgement about a man whose whole importance rests in the successful work, where these facts do not exist — such as the dualism in the attitude of Caravaggio in his religious paintings. Faced with this masterpiece I can simply say that he is a great religious painter and a great realist rhetorical painter as well. I gratefully acknowledge a debt to a great and mysterious genius. We must be prepared to acknowledge the “perversity of the poetic imagination”, because that is what we are up against here: the sensual earthy rhetorical realist has painted the superbly transcendent religious picture.
Having said this, however, I would like to return to my original view of Caravaggio the supreme sensual realist. Because it is in so far as he achieves this transcendence which I find in the Vocation of St. Matthew (through submitting himself to the physical presence of objects) that he is particularly interesting to me. I am only too aware that this painter is just now the subject of fashionable revivalism, but like most revivals and rediscoveries its true roots lie in the relation that Caravaggio has to contemporary painting. There can be no doubt that the brooding quality imparted to his canvases by his sensuous and disturbing feeling for texture and presence is very much of our time. We can see the quality of his work because it is of a kind that we have been made aware of as relevant through the work of such painters as Max Ernst and Francis Bacon for instance, Bacon’s horrific sense of texture as something not just a matter of paint but as a gateway to sensations that belong to a level of our consciousness where our real life goes on, by this means revealing to us what Proust called “that reality far from which we live, from which we get further and further away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable” is very close it seems to me to the intense awareness of texture that we find in Caravaggio. The disturbing presence that Ernst in his best pictures can impart to Things, both human figures and still life, has a close relation to this very quality in the older painter. In any case to me his importance lies in the fact that he moves me in a direct personal way very much relevant to the sense of doom, and the desperate need for a clarifying vision of the mess, that is at the heart of our present dilemma. The nervous tenor of his work, and for that matter of his disordered and tragic life, can only be sympathetic to anyone burdened with the deep sense of chaos, injustice and despair inherited by those born in the twentieth century. It is by no means an accident of fate that Caravaggio had to wait till now to be rediscovered.
I have referred principally to the paintings in the church of St. Luigi dei Francesi and especially to the Vocation of St. Mathew because for me this is the supreme expression of Caravaggio’s genius, but of course Rome contains many other important pictures by this painter. He is perhaps nearer to Rome in spirit than any other painter of the Renaissance. There is none of the lightness of the Etruscan character in his painting, but there is that beautiful seriousness of the Roman mind, the cultured enquiring mind (in his case tortured and obsessed) of the highly conscious and sophisticated. Still, we feel at last the value of that heavy sensuality (here serving a deeply valuable human purpose) that elsewhere seems more often to serve the degradation of the race.
— Some notes on Caravaggio, Nimbus, 1956
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