Caravaggio in Rome

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (29 September 1571, Milan – 18 July 1610) was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His intensely emotional realism and dramatic use of lighting and darkness had a formative influence on the Baroque school of painting.
Presently at the Scuderie del Quirinale Museum an exhibit of all of his major works is on display. It is next to impossible to get tickets and you have to line up just to see if there is some cancellations. Museums and private collections have loaned works from their collections for this very special and important exhibit.

Caravaggio used ordinary street people as his models, even once using the corpse of a drowned prostitute fished out of the Tiber river in Rome as the model for a dead Virgin Mary. This in itself was a revolution in painting, his works are very different from the other painters of his era and though he was totally forgotten after his death, his rediscovery in the 20th century makes him very popular today.

This brings me to last weekend when after our visit to the Church of the Santissimi Apostoli in Rome and to the Palazzo Colonna we went for lunch. At the table next to us was this lady who told us she had seen a report on CNN (a news channel I avoid like the plague) which talked about the current sex scandal at the Vatican and the whole paedophilia story which is now consuming the Holy See. More lurid revelations this week and now it extends back to the days of Jean-Paul II and his friends, truly disturbing.
So this lady asks our friend the Art Historian if Caravaggio was a pedophile. Our friend asks her why she is asking this question.
The lady goes on about how she saw the documentary on CNN about the Vatican and the sex scandal and how she also saw the exhibit of Caravaggio paintings at the Scuderie and was wondering about this because she did notice lots of young naked boys in Caravaggio paintings.

Our friend was taken aback with this association which leaps over 400 years to today. She pointed out that Caravaggio lived in a very different time and it is not possible to associate his paintings with what is going on in the Church today, there is no link. The world and people of the 16th Century did not think the way we do and did not see or feel things in the same way,
it was a very different time. Our friend then pointed out that in the 16th century, classical thought was still very much the leading school, the male body in classical thought is the expression of an ideal, of beauty and perfection.

The lady was not satisfied, she wanted to know why not little girls, why little boys. Again our friend patiently explained to her that women or girls in the 16th century were considered property and simply kept under key at home. It was unthinkable to represent women in a fashion other than what was allowed by the Church who then controlled tightly all expressions of art.
She explained that works showing the Virgin Mary breast feeding baby Jesus which were acceptable before the Council of Trent were not appropriate after the Council in response or as a reaction to Protestant ideas. Works that did not conform where destroyed and the artist could face severe punishment. A woman could be a mother, working in fields or at home taking care of children or she could be the Virgin Mary. Society was also divided in strict social classes which did not mix and from which you could not escape. She also pointed out to her that in our way of seeing things today, we often forget how different the world was then compared to today. Women became objects of beauty about 150 years ago and still very gradually as society changed. She also explained to her that the whole concept of childhood or children as we know it simply did not exist 100 years ago, children were nothing more than little adults, only in the 20th century would all this change.

It just reminded me of how unfortunately we today are ignorant of the past and how our concept of what is acceptable dictates what we think was good or bad in the past, as if we could go back and correct the past. We are always ready to apologize for our ancestors. How often we hear today people say, back then they were not as open minded as we are or knowledgeable or advanced. I am sure that 50 years from now the same will be said about us.

Unfortunately for this lady, she did not like Caravaggio's paintings because she believed that they encouraged paedophilia, seeing evil behaviour where none existed. She was unable to understand classical thought, she probably did not know about classicism, forgetting that Caravaggio was only expressing the ideas and ideals of his time, nothing more. The so called boy angels is beauty not something disgusting. Caravaggio had a dissolute life, murdered 2 people, had debts and a terrible temper and was himself murdered on a beach by his enemies, but he was also a very great artist, not a paedophile.

I pointed out to her, that in the following centuries other artists would use putties and cherubs to decorate Palaces and Churches, are they not naked male babies one would think, no they were merely the expression of an ideal at a time in history, because if you study those putties you will see that their faces represent innocence, playfulness and that they are unaware of sin.

Her comment and questions reminded me of my visits to Greece where there is plenty of male nudity both adult and youthful, Praxiteles the great sculptor of the classic age followed the ideal of beauty expressed in the male body. Male nudity expressed in painting or sculpture may not be acceptable to some for whatever reason, but it is nonetheless the expression of timeless classical beauty.