Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 137

Caravaggio (Naturalist: 1569-1609).

Michael Angelo Amerighi, the son of a mason, is usually called Caravaggio from his birthplace, a town of that name near Milan.99 He was the leader of the so-called "Naturalist" School (see introduction to "The Later Italian Schools"), which numbered among its disciples Spagnoletto (235) and the Dutch Gerard von Honthorst (1444). The characteristics of his art, as described below, were not out of keeping with the sombre character of the man.100 He had established himself as a painter at Rome, when he had to fly for homicide. He was playing at tennis and became so violent in a dispute that he killed his companion. After a short stay at Naples he went to Malta, where he gained the favour of the grand-master, and was made a Knight of the Cross of Malta. His ungovernable temper, however, again led him into trouble, and quarrelling with one of the knights, he was cast into prison. He escaped to Sicily and thence returned to Naples. Having procured the Pope's pardon for his original offence, he hired a felucca and set sail for Rome. The coast-guard arrested him in mistake for another person; the crew of the felucca plundered him of all his belongings; and after wandering disconsolately along the coast, he was seized with fever, and died at the early age of forty.

One notices first in this picture the least important things – the supper before the company, the roast chicken before Christ. Next one sees how coarse and almost ruffianly are the disciples, represented as supping with their risen Lord at Emmaus (Luke xxiv. 30, 31). Both points are characteristic of the painter, who was driven by the insipidities of the preceding mannerists into a crude "realism," which made him resolve to describe sacred and historical events just as though they were being enacted in a slum by butchers and fishwives. "He was led away," says Lanzi (i. 452), "by his sombre genius, and represented objects with very little light. He ridiculed all artists who attempted a noble expression of countenance or graceful folding of drapery." His first altar-piece was removed by the priests for whom it was painted, as being too vulgar for such a subject. "Many interesting studies from the taverns of Italy remain to prove Caravaggio's mastery over scenes of common life. For the historian of manners in seventeenth-century Italy, those pictures have a truly precious value, as they are executed with such passion as to raise them above the more careful but more lymphatic transcripts from beer-cellars in Dutch painting. But when he applied his principles to higher subjects, then vulgarity became apparent. It seems difficult for realism, either in literature or art, not to fasten upon ugliness, vice, pain, and disease, as though these imperfections of our nature were more real than beauty, goodness, pleasure, and health. Therefore Caravaggio, the leader of a school which the Italians christened Naturalists, may be compared to Zola" (Symonds, vii. 221).