Posts
The Italian master was a scoundrel and a killer, but did he also use a machine to help him 'cheat’ as he created his paintings? Martin Gayford sheds new light on a 400-year-old mystery.
By Martin Gayford
Published: 12:05PM BST 13 Jul 2010
David with the Head of Goliath, c. 1607, by the Italian artist Caravaggio Photo: GETTY IMAGES
On July 18, 1610, a man named Michelangelo Merisi died on the southern coast of Tuscany. Recently, a team of Italian forensic investigators made the international news by claiming to have discovered his bones. By all accounts, he died miserably – the latest, not very plausible suggestion, being that lead poisoning had something to do with it. Murder has also been suspected. The earliest accounts describe a fatal attack of impatience, causing him to pursue on foot along the scorching coast a boat that was carrying his baggage away. Whatever the cause, the deceased was the great artist better known to posterity as Caravaggio. He was 38 years old.
Four hundred years later, he is, by many indications, the world’s favourite old master. Canadian researcher Philip Sohm has established that in the past 50 years, Caravaggio has overtaken that other Michelangelo – Buonarroti – as the favourite subject of art historical research. More, it seems, has been written about him in the past half century than any other artist....
....A deeper reason can be found in Caravaggio’s work itself. There is a dark mixture of violence and sexuality that appeals to the sensibility of an age that relishes the art of Francis Bacon and Quentin Tarantino. As the art historian Robert Hughes pointed out, you can see from the way the executioner holds his knife in Beheading of St John the Baptist that Caravaggio knew precisely the most brutally effective way to wield a weapon.
read more: www.telegraph.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment