Wednesday, March 10, 2010 Caravaggio More Important than Michelangelo??? Philip Sohm, art historian at the University of Toronto, claims that Caravaggio is overtaking Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts. His argument seems to based almost squarely on the fact that Michelangelo’s efforts were "Celestial" in nature, whereas Caravaggio dealt more "Earthly" matters such as the pitiful existence of the oppressed. Caravaggio certainly deserves more
research, and to appreciate him more, of course, BUT, using Celestial vs
Earthly as a measuring stick of "Greatness" is ridiculous. Just as belittling
Rembrandt because he mostly catered to the self centered ego driven pompous
requests of the Heartless Nobility to have their Portraits painted.
An Italian Antihero’s Time to Shine
ROME — By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio, who somehow found time to paint when he wasn’t brawling, scandalizing pooh-bahs, chasing women (and men), murdering a tennis opponent with a dagger to the groin, fleeing police assassins or getting his face mutilated by one of his many enemies, has bumped him from his perch. That’s according to an art historian
at the University of Toronto, Philip Sohm. He has studied the number of
writings (books, catalogs and scholarly papers) on both of them during
the last 50 years. Mr. Sohm has found that Caravaggio has gradually, if
unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo. He has
charts to prove it.
But, charts or no charts, Mr. Sohm has touched on something. Caravaggiomania, as he calls it, implies not just that art history doctoral students may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people. His otherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining to emerge from thick blocks of veined marble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime, grounded in Renaissance rhetoric, which, for postwar generations, now belongs with the poetry of Alexander Pope or plays by Corneille as admirable but culturally remote splendors. Caravaggio, on the other hand, exemplifies
the modern antihero, a hyperrealist whose art is instantly accessible.
His doe-eyed, tousle-haired boys with puffy lips and bubble buttocks look
as if they’ve just tumbled out of bed, not descended from heaven. Coarse
not godly, locked into dark, ambiguous spaces by a strict geometry then
picked out of deep shadow by an oracular light, his models come straight
off the street. Cupid is clearly a hired urchin on whom Caravaggio strapped
a pair of fake wings. The angel in his “Annunciation” dangles like Chaplin’s
tramp on the high wire in “The Circus,” from what must have been a rope
contraption Caravaggio devised.
Mr. Sohm, who announced his findings
during a talk at the College Art Association conference in Chicago last
month, focused on publications, not tourist revenues or exhibition attendance
figures, and his study says nothing about how Michelangelo and Caravaggio
stack up against box-office greats like Rembrandt and van Gogh.
“The only way to understand old art
is to make it participate in our own artistic life” is how Venturi phrased
it in 1925. That Caravaggio left behind no drawings, no letters, no will
or estate record, only police and court records, makes him a perfect Rorschach
for our obsessions. He was outed in the 1970s by gender studies scholars,
notwithstanding the absence of documents to indicate he was gay. Pop novelists
and moviemakers have naturally had a field day with his life. Exhibition
organizers cook up any excuse (“Caravaggio-Bacon,” “Caravaggio-Rembrandt”)
to capitalize on his bankability. Newly discovered “Caravaggios” test the
market every year.
Another Caravaggio retrospective has also opened, here at the Quirinale: two dozen paintings, on view through June 13, a blue-chip survey, installed ridiculously in darkened rooms with spotlights, as if his art needed more melodrama. But the pictures are glorious anyway. The exhibition is mobbed. It happens that a show of Michelangelo’s drawings is at the Courtauld Gallery in London, through May 16. Gifts for a beautiful young Roman nobleman, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, on whom Michelangelo had developed a crush, the drawings were ostensibly supposed to help Cavalieri learn to draw. Imagine Roger Federer handing you a DVD of himself at Wimbledon, saying “Just do this.” These are drawings of the most arcane refinement, unearthly beautiful. By contrast, Caravaggio, wrestling art back to the ground, distilled scenes into a theatrical instant at which time seems suddenly stopped. That’s why his pictures can bring to mind movie stills. The art historian Michael Fried, who has just written a book about Caravaggio, notes the quality of the figures’ absorption. Life-size images, they share our space and we theirs, face to face, as another art historian, Catherine Puglisi, has pointed out (something that doesn’t happen with Michelangelo’s enormous sculptures or his frescoed ceiling that we only see from far away). The immediacy somehow dovetails with the tabloid tawdriness of his biography, with the whole modern celebrity drama. The other afternoon endless scrums of tourists here jostled before the Caravaggios in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi and the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, feeding pocket change into the boxed light meters. It was probably just coincidental, but in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, nobody stopped to look at the Michelangelo. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/arts/
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