Free Essay About Caravaggio AND “The Denial Of Saint Peter”

Michelangelo Merisi, aka Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), is a painter who introduced a “powerfully frank realism and dramatic, theatrical lighting and gesture to Italian Baroque art” (Stokstad, and Cothren, Art History, p. 720). The young artist became interested in still-life painting when he arrived in Rome from Milan. There he found a studio work as a specialist painter of fruit and vegetables. However, once he started working on his own, he began to include half-length figures with still life. In Rome, Caravaggio’s natural tendency for violence caused him a lot of difficulties. But, despite the repeated problems with the law, the artist worked in an innovative style, which affected painters all over Italy and Northern Europe. He developed a technique, which is now called tenebrism, and in which forms emerge from a pervasively dark background into a strong light that often falls from a single source outside the painting to bring about the effect of a theatrical spotlight (Stokstad, and Cothren, Art History, p. 724; Stokstad, and Cothren, Art: A Brief History, p. 379). There were many contemporaries of Caravaggio who were fond of him and who were not. For example, the art historian Giovanni Bellori, in his Lives of the Painters (1672), described Caravaggio’s painting as “reinforced throughout with bold shadows and a great deal of black to give relief to the forms. He went so far in this manner of working that he never brought his figures out into the daylight, but placed them in the dark brown atmosphere of a closed room, using a high light that descended vertically over the principal parts of the bodies while leaving the remainder in shadow in order to give force through a strong contrast of light and dark” (Stokstad, and Cothren, Art History, p. 721).
Caravaggio painted directly on the canvas without preliminary drawings. In his private works, the artist depicted precisely subjects and themes of a homoerotic nature (Adams, p. 347). The one of the most polished works of early Caravaggio is The Bacchus (fig. A). The artist reproduced the farmer’s tan of those parts of youth’s skin, i.e. face and hands, which have been exposed to the sun, as well as the dirt under his fingernails (Stokstad, and Cothren, Art: A Brief History, pp. 376-377). However, the figure himself is neither clearly male nor clearly female – painted lips, smoothly arching eyebrows, a delicate offer of the goblet of wine do not seem to be the features of a man. Additionally, there something provocative in “fingering the black bow that holds his loose clothing together at the waist” (Stokstad, and Cothren, Art: A Brief History, p. 377).
After 1600s, most of Caravaggio’s paintings were for religious art, which was aimed not at a social or cultural elite, but at the ordinary observer. His interpretation of religious subjects was direct and dramatic, which was acquired through combining “intensely observed figures, poses, and expressions with strongly contrasting effects of light and color” (Stokstad, and Cothren, Art History, p. 724). However, the reaction to them were different, and as a result, sometimes his paintings were rejected because of “powerful, sometimes brutal, naturalism”, which is unsuitable to the subject matter. Such happened with the painting over the altar in the Contarelli Chapel that depicts St. Matthew accompanied by an angel and writing his Gospel. The clergy considered the painting unacceptably crude, common and inconsistent with guidelines for saintly decorum because of cross-legged pose of Matthew and the fleshiness of the angel who sidled up to him. Therefore, Caravaggio had to paint a second, more appropriate altarpiece for the chapel with a nobler Matthew and a more distant angel (fig. B). Unfortunately, the first painting was destroyed during the World War II.
During the last months of his life, Caravaggio painted another example of religious art that illustrates the biblical narrative of Saint Peter denying Christ (fig. C). It is a picture in which the dialectics between the naturalism and idealism, mimesis and fiction is changed in a totally different way than in his other works (Christiansen, p. 33). There are three essential characters: a maid with a face part in light, part in shadow and pointing at Peter with both hands; a soldier with a shadowed faced and pointing with one hand; and Peter with his face and hands lit who denies Christ with both hands. Thus, three pointing hands allude to Peter’s three denials. Caravaggio organized narrative elements according to a tight geometric structure, stressing gesture and facial expression (Christiansen, p. 33). For instance, Peter’s weary eyes and forehead show the combined expression of anger and self-recrimination. But, unlike other Caravaggio’s paintings, the effects of this one is created by extraordinary abbreviated brushworks that gives it the haunting quality of something experienced rather than observed. Caravaggio was not just reproducing the scene, he was trying to examining the deeper human significance of the action portrayed (Christiansen, p. 34). This was achieved through gesture, expression and dramatic use of light. By the way, the soldier’s helmet is an object that links the biblical scene to the Caravaggio’s present since it was painted from a studio prop.
So, Caravaggio developed a very different image with a legacy of the past and the issue of the artistic invention. He might have stated that painting a vase is as difficult as painting a figure. The artist chose painting as mimesis over painting as fiction, but probably he wished to leave his mark in grand tradition of figure painting. Although, he sometimes borrowed his compositional models from the works of Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, the painter omitted their idealizing premised and linked his works to everyday world. His works appealed to uneducated public because of similarity to their lifelikeness as well as to sophisticated collectors because of a sophisticated way in which his works reformulated canonical models of High Renaissance.

References

Adams, L. S. (2011). A History of Western Art (5th ed). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Christiansen, K. (2005). The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin: Going for Baroque – Bringing 17th-Century Masters to Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Stokstad, M., and Cothren, M. W. (2011). Art History (Vol. 2, 4thed). Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Stokstad, M., and Cothren, M. W. (2011). Art: A Brief History (4thed). Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
The Denial of Saint Peter. The Metropolitan Museum of Art – The Collection Online. Retrieved from
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/437986?=&imgno=0&tabname=online-resources