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The broad bias towards Northern European works
which the exhibition offers and easel paintings, and more generally
for delicate works of the period on copper, seems unaccountably
mostly to deny to abroad degree the real importance, even pre-eminence
at this time in and around Rome, of the great set-pieces for altars,
and for publicly accessible fresco art, in situ.
At the same time, to bolster up an apparent urge,
to mythologise Carravagio attributions are liberally taken on board.
Some thirty-five percent of the Caravaggios selected appear to be
of doubtful provenance. A journalistic mise-en-scene of a perilously
corrupt city is thus deliberately propagated here. As John Berger
(Studio International Jan/Feb l983) has rightly postulated, well
beforehand in a seminal article,
‘He was the first painter of life as
experienced by the popolaccio, the people of the back streets,
les sans-culottes, the lumpenproletariat, the lower
orders… following Caravaggio up to the present day, other
painters – Brower, Ostade, Hogarth, Goya, Gericault, Guttuso-
have painted pictures of the same social milieu. But all
of them, however great- were genre pictures, painted in order
to show others how the less fortunate or more dangerous lived.
For Caravaggio, however, it was not a question of presenting scenes
but of seeing itself. He does not depict the underworld for others;
his vision is one that he shares with it.’
John Berger’s interpretation is profound, and
far from today's sensational journalism. The works do not have the
semblance of photo-calls, but of deeply felt life experience at
a personal level as Berger claimed,
"The faces he painted are illuminated by that
knowledge, deep as a wound."
This was also the period of Brueghel the Elder and
so it could not reasonably here be claimed that Caravaggio was a
prior pioneer of still life painting. Similarly, the contemporary
research then into proportional harmony engendered a growing linkage
of music and art theory. In Gallery 2, "Painted Music", Caravaggio
was aware of all that Carraci’s academy in Bologna encouraged
and engendered. This situation is clearly at odds with the Catalogue’s
avowal that it was the music paintings of Caravaggio that inspired
Bologna.
To consider the broader sourcing of works on copper,
among the fifteen exhibited, those by Gentileschi and Elsheimer
reveal a special luminosity, but little is done to explain how copper
as a base facilitated all this. But the ingenuity of Caravaggio
in manipulating light cannot be allowed, as here, to obscure the
contributions of chiaroscuro –created works, as by the Bassanos,
Raphael, and indeed Ludovico Carracci.
Clovis Whitfield's scholarship in addressing the less
contentious, but equally perilous world of portraiture comes as
a relief in the exhibition sequence, in his selection of a range
of brilliantly varied representations. The inclusion of Vouet's
self-assertive self-portrait provides an amusing contrast to the
Annibale equivalent.
The difficult context
One of the persistent problems of forming such an
exhibition seems impossible to circumvent. The important pre-eminence,
in the Rome of 1592-1623, of religious dedication in art- of frescoes,
of great altarpieces, of a close integration of these elements with
the architectural whole under the economically decisive sway of
architecturally –driven patronage system, (whereby some fifty
churches had been either built anew or else reconstructed significantly
to accommodate frescoes and altarpieces) is clearly evident.
The dedication of the last gallery to altarpieces
is commendable, but by this stage the prior preponderance of Caravaggio’s
work in various modes proves hard to redress. The final flourish
here seems now simply an endorsement of what went before, rather
than the capitalisation of one single and abiding theme. The ‘Madonna
di Loreto’ and the 'Entombment', both by Caravaggio, still
look less than definitive of this genre, when set alongside the
works of Guercino, Annibale, and Lanfranco. So the primary role
of a public art proves less than fully assertive in such an exhibition,
as given to establishing the true order of such priorities prevailing
in the early seventeenth century Eternal City.
We print below the full text of John Berger's article,
from Studio International Vol 196 No 998 (1993), together with the
illustrations selected by the author at that time.
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