'Do you like Caravaggio?' asks wealthy Dickie Greenleaf to his enigmatic new friend Tom Ripley, at the beginning of the current Netflix drama based on Patricia Highsmith's famous thriller: The talented Mr. Ripley. The query is a kind of test and is about more than just class. It is intended as a measure of character, of soul. For Greenleaf, the playboy son of an American shipping magnate on a permanent vacation on the Amalfi Coast, the answer could act as a key that unlocks a world of shared culture and taste.
Questions about Caravaggio are also being asked in London as the National Gallery opens its doors to an exhibition examining the final work of artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, which is being exhibited in Britain for the first time in twenty years. His masterpiece from 1610, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula is on loan from a gallery in Naples and is a large, shadowy study of violence and religious passion.
In preparation for the show, British art critics dusted off their most extensive vocabulary to salute art's great baroque 'n' roll star once again. "It's hypnotic," wrote the Guardian The film's Jonathan Jones last week urged theatergoers to watch the static drama for free, rather than paying for West End tickets. They can also gaze at Caravaggio himself, standing on one side of the saint's figure, in the last self-portrait he painted months before he died at the age of 38. After all, this is the man who changed it all through emotional intensity and relatable humanity in representing Bible stories.
"It is difficult for us now to realize how different his work is from before," says Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, curator at the National Gallery, explaining how Caravaggio rejected the artistic tradition of creating beautiful objects above all else. "He's the opposite. Even if we encounter these images without the level of religious knowledge that was common at the time, they can communicate. One of his innovations was realism, you see real people with goiters and wrinkles. He even painted the famous city prostitutes."
What drove this stark new vision? Whitlum-Cooper speculates that this was the artist's childhood in Milan, a city ravaged by the plague and ruled by the wayward Cardinal Borromeo: "There is a sense of the need to feel; to let things be real, even to repent yourself. It's intense."
His artistic freedom, she suspects, also came from his lack of any formal training as an apprentice in an artist's studio. 'He didn't even learn to paint frescoes when he signed up. And there are no signs of sketches under the paint. It looks like he applied the paint directly, with real bravado."
That 'cinematic' lighting made Caravaggio a superstar in the film era
Jonathan Jones, the Guardian
Caravaggio's repeated appearances in the new Ripley series, in scenes set in Naples and later Rome, is not merely a geographical coincidence. As Jones notes as he watches it Saint Ursula: "That 'cinematic' lighting made Caravaggio a superstar in the film era." The artist's celebrated chiaroscuro has fascinated photographers and filmmakers for decades: it started from the first moment it became possible to play with real light, with electric lamps and projectors, instead of paint.
'There's something about the way he crops and frames the image. We now see it as a cinematic language," Whitlum-Cooper adds. "The size of the canvas also makes the viewer almost complete the image; almost participates."
Andrew Graham-Dixon, author of the 2010 book, Caravaggio: a sacred and profane life, thinks that Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was the first to recreate the look on screen. 'Then Martin Scorsese of course. When he was making Mean streets he often went to the Met to study the Caravaggio. He designed the film around framing, by starting a scene in the middle of the action; usually with someone doing something heinous, like torturing someone." Scorsese told him he was immediately impressed with the work, explaining, "Initially I related to it because of the moment he chose to highlight the story. The Conversion of Saint Paul, Judith beheads Holofernes: he chose a moment that was not the absolute moment of the beginning of the action... He would have been a great filmmaker, there is no doubt about that."
For Graham-Dixon, it is not just the light and shadow, but also the directness that continues to inspire directors. "Perspective had become incredibly annoying for artists. It meant losing all sense of what to look at, like a school photo. Caravaggio's chiaroscuro sabotaged the perspective and allowed him to emphasize a detail. If he thought, "I just want to show the tear on her face as she catches the light," then chiaroscuro allowed him to do that. This is the lightning strike he gave the art world."
And the cinematic legacy goes beyond camerawork. The artist's life is also tackled on screen. Derek Jarman's 1986 film, Caravaggioplayed up his transgressions, while the 2022 Italian arthouse biopic, The shadow of Caravaggio, aimed at the censorship of his art. Graham-Dixon's own book has just been bought by an American film company, he adds.
The exhibition at the National includes the gallery's late Caravaggio, Salome receives the head of John the Baptist. Beheadings were a favorite theme. Towards the end of the Ripley series, a museum guide in the Galleria Borghese is overheard describing an equally bloodthirsty painting, David with the head of Goliath. "Caravaggio connects the killer and the victim by portraying David as sympathetic in the way he stares at the severed head," the tourists are told, as Ripley, now a murderer himself, listens in.
Steven Zaillian's delightful black-and-white adaptation reveals much of the extraordinary life of the painter, who was on the run from a murder, like Highsmith's 'talented' anti-hero, played by Andrew Scott. In a 350-year flashback in the final episode, Zaillian actually summons the spirit of the artist - imagining himself hiding from the Knights of St John as they track him down, just as Ripley evades the police. "I found that little parallel interesting," the director has said.
In Naples, Ripley is also taken to a Caravaggio that in one episode has hung in the Pio Monte della Misericordia for more than four centuries, Seven mercies, which takes its title from the painting. In the background of this work two men can be seen preparing a body for burial. Ripley discovers that it was painted a year after the artist himself was accused of murder in Rome. Caravaggio, likely vilified for homosexuality, then deposed by his patrons and struggling to pay the bills, soon began a downward spiral that accelerated when his face was disfigured in a knife attack outside a Neapolitan inn. He had already been sentenced to death for murdering Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 after a game of tennis. The outlaw fled to Naples, while Ripley heads to Rome under an assumed identity. Once there, the killer visits the San Luigi dei Francesi, home to three Caravaggios, one of which depicts a sword-wielding killer.
Ripley and the idiosyncratic Caravaggio share a grim glamor and this is an uncomfortable fact for Whitlum-Cooper: "The way we fetishize violence is problematic. It is not felt for women or black men who may have committed crimes. That is why we have tried to counterbalance this in the show by emphasizing the story of Saint Ursula."
Related: The Last Caravaggio review - an unmissable and murderously dark finale
Caravaggio's final artistic impulse was to give the full treatment to an early Christian princess from Britain who had allegedly traveled to marry a pagan prince, according to a mysterious religious text: The golden legend. Ursula's accompanying 11,000 virgins were subsequently killed in Cologne, but not before 'the chief of the Huns' had offered the princess his hand in marriage. When she rejected him, he shot her with an arrow. The painting shows the deadly act in close-up, on a lifelike scale.
"There was a lot of resistance to Caravaggio's style. He was on the losing side of a religious battle over whether the church is for the poor or should be controlled by the rich," says Graham-Dixon. "The clergy did not want paintings that suggested religion was for the masses. They wanted the old style of paintings, in which the Virgin Mary resembles the Queen of Heaven, and not a poor woman in a night shelter."
Before Caravaggio's death in southern Tuscany, when, still on the run, he probably succumbed to malaria, his creative influence was already felt in Naples and Sicily, which were Spanish possessions at the time. This is how his great influence on European art, and subsequently on film, came about, Graham-Dixon thinks: "No one supported him at the time, except all the other artists who couldn't get his work out of their heads. "