[APPLAUSE]
DAVIDE GASPAROTTO:
Thank you very much.
It's a great pleasure to
be here this afternoon,
and thank you for coming.
I think it's a real tribute on
this wonderfully sunny day--
it's a real tribute to
the genius and the appeal
of Caravaggio, but
also to the importance
of our distinguished speaker
today, Michael Fried,
JR Herbert Boone
Professor of Humanities
and the History of Art at Johns
Hopkins University, Baltimore.
Michael Fried is best known
as an art critic and art
historian who is also a
literary critic and also a poet.
As an art critic, he's
closely associated first
with high modernism,
as practiced by artists
such as Morris Louis, Kenneth
Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank
Stella, and Anthony Caro--
a good friend of him--
and more recently
with photographers
such as Jeff Wall, Thomas
Struth, Thomas Demand;
the sculptor Charles Ray, whom
we know well here at the Getty,
since one of his
major sculptures
is exhibited here on the stairs
leading up to the museum.
He's close to video artists
like [? Andre ?] [? Zala ?]
and [? Douglas ?] [? Gould, ?]
and the painter Joseph Marioni.
So this is one side of Michael's
interests and personality
as an art historian,
his interest
for contemporary
developments of art.
But as an art
historian, he's best
known for his masterful trilogy
of books on French painting
and art criticism from the
middle of the 18th century
through the advent of
Manet and his generation
in the early 1860s.
Three very important books
that signed also our training
as art historians--
or at least my training
as an art historian--
Absorption and Theatricality--
Painting and Beholder
in the Age of Diderot from
1980; Courbert's Realism, 1990;
and Manet's Modernism,
or The Face of Painting
in the 1860s from 1996.
In 2010, Michael published
The Moment of Caravaggio,
based on the Andrew
W. Mellon Lectures
in the Fine Arts delivered at
the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, a transformative
account of the artist's
revolutionary achievement,
displaying a unique combination
of interpretive brilliance,
historical seriousness,
and theoretical
sophistication, providing
sustained and
unexpected readings
of a wide range of major works
by the great Italian painter.
In 2016, this book was
followed by After Caravaggio,
where Fried examines the
nature of the engagement
with Caravaggio of the following
generation of artists, which
includes major painters like
Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomeo
Manfredi, Valentin de Boulogne,
Nicolas Tournier, Cecco del
Caravaggio, and also, a little
bit unexpectedly, Guercino.
And I would like
also to remind you
that several masterpieces
by some of these painters,
some of the painters
I mentioned,
are also present
in our collections,
so you can see in the gallery
nearby where the Caravaggio
exhibition is displayed in
this pavilion of the museum.
Michael Fried is therefore one
of the best equipped historians
to introduce us in
the groundbreaking
art of Caravaggio, and
I'm really grateful to him
for accepting our invitation
to come to Los Angeles.
Please join me in
welcoming Michael Fried.
[APPLAUSE]
MICHAEL FRIED:
Thank you, Davide.
That was beyond the strict
truth, but I appreciate it.
So what I'm to do today
is "Three Paths Through
Caravaggio."
The three paths--
each one is determined
by one of the three paintings
in this remarkable exhibition.
It's a fantastic opportunity
to see these paintings.
So we'll begin with the
Boy with a Basket of Fruit,
and then there will be a
series of paintings following
that that I'll talk about.
Then we will have
the St. Jerome,
and finally we will have the
David with the Head of Goliath
and the paintings
that relate to that.
This will enable us
to look at and talk
about a significant number
of Caravaggio's masterpieces,
but by no means all.
I mean, there will
be major paintings
that won't come up today.
My focus all the way will be
on looking at the pictures.
So it's not basically
a talk with a lot
of art historical information.
That you can find.
Michelangelo Merisi
da Caravaggio--
Caravaggio is a place name--
was born in 1571 in
Caravaggio, not far from Milan,
and died in 1610.
So he makes it to the age of 39.
And given his lifestyle, he
did well to make it to 39.
We can all be impressed.
He represents something
like an earthquake
in the history of painting.
He's a remarkable figure.
Together with a family
of painters from Bologna,
the Carracci, they
and Caravaggio
together at the end
of the 16th century
and the very beginning
of the 17th century just
establish serious European
painting on a new footing.
The condition of
painting was actually
in some ways critical not
long before the 1580s and '90s
in Italy and elsewhere,
and then Caravaggio
and the Carracci between
them profoundly reorient it.
And we have largely as a
result an extraordinary century
of painting, 17th century
of painting, everywhere--
Italy, Spain, France.
So let's start out with Boy with
a Basket of Fruit from 1593-94.
Caravaggio studied in
Milan for a number of years
with a painter named
Simone Peterzano.
And then he came to Rome.
We don't have a lot of
information about his earliest
years.
In fact, all the information
we have about him
tends to be somewhat later.
But we know that
he worked making
paintings for another painter
named the Cavaliere D'Arpino.
and one of his specialties
were still life and the like.
And this would be an early
painting, so it was 1593-94.
He's 22, 23.
And you can see,
I think, the marks
of a certain kind of
youth in this painting.
On one level the
mastery is incomplete,
this young boy
looking at us, lips
parted, holding this
basket of fruit.
On the other hand, the power of
the painting is extraordinary,
and it's extraordinary relative
to the painting of its time.
The quality that I want to
emphasize right from the start
is the quality of presentation,
the way the boy and the fruit
and the painting are given
to us by the painter.
A large portion of Caravaggio's
originality and power
has to do with his from
the start discovering
and exploiting a new intensity
of the relation of the painting
to the viewer.
It's not that the relationship
of a painting to a viewer
had never been interesting to
painters before Caravaggio,
but with Caravaggio this
becomes I would say in some ways
the very center of his art and
the force of this painting's
address to us and the sense of
this painting's, I might almost
say, bestowal of
itself to the viewer
through the vehicle of this
extraordinary basket of fruit.
And then the boy himself,
I mean, not wholly
unlike the basket of fruit--
just extraordinarily
pretty and with rosy cheeks
and deep hair, a
boy who probably
looked not unlike Caravaggio.
My claim here is not that
this is a self-portrait,
but as you'll see,
the self-portrait too
plays a very important
role in Caravaggio's art.
It's not surprising if
what his paintings are
doing from the start
is thematizing,
bringing to the fore their
relation to the viewer.
The first viewer of any painting
is the painting's maker,
and in Caravaggio, as in the
work of certain other artists--
later this will be
true of Gustav Courbet,
the French realist--
that relationship
of the painting
to its maker in the
process of making
becomes built into
the painting, becomes
part of the deepest
content of the painting.
So already with this
picture, that dynamic
between the painting and its
richness given to the viewer,
implicating the viewer,
is already there.
The other thing that
I'll just point out--
I just am always struck by it--
this wonderful bowl of fruit.
And you'll see still
lifes, baskets of fruit--
I should have said
basket, not bowl--
come back in his art.
But notice too these leaves.
And the leaves for me also
have a little bit the character
of hands.
Caravaggio's going
to be very aware
that we have only
one hand in view
here, which is his right hand.
And notice how it turns
into the painting,
turns into the painting the way
the painter's own right hand
could almost match with it.
This is something that's going
to occur later very powerfully
with Courbet.
So I want to emphasize
something about, in that sense,
the transactional
nature of his paintings.
They are not simply on
the wall, indifferent
to us, and for us to look
at in a detached way.
They are engaging with us,
they want something from us,
and the first person they want
something from is the painter.
Shortly afterwards, there are
two pictures like this called
Boy Bitten by a Lizard.
One is in Florence in
the Longhi Collection.
The other, this one, is
in the National Gallery
in London, Boy Bitten by a
Lizard, from around 1594.
Very similar boy, also with
a flower behind his ear.
The lizard is here--
it's hard to see
because it's dark--
and it's biting a
finger, and he is
reacting in pain and surprise.
We get that bare shoulder,
beautiful floral still life
here with water and
reflection of the still life
elements here, and this
strange left hand like that.
My own serious engagement
with Caravaggio,
I mean the point
at which I realized
that I had something
to say about him,
happened standing in front of
this picture in the National
Gallery in London--
again, partly because
I'd been prepared
for it by having worked
on Courbet and Courbet's
self-portraits.
And it started to
strike me that there
was a sense in
which this could be
seen as a certain
sort of self-portrait.
I'm going to make--
I'm going to flip to
another later picture
where I see the
same structure so
that you'll be able to see
what I'm talking about.
This is a self-portrait
by Matisse from 1918.
The structure of this
self-portrait is fascinating.
In the first place,
it's mirror-reversed.
You see the palette
is in his right hand,
the brush is in his
left, so we know
this is the image as he
saw it in the mirror.
He's looking at himself
in the mirror, in effect,
and you see his canvas just
off picture to the right.
It's at right angles
to the mirror.
So I'm the painter.
I'm seated there, I'm looking
at my image in the mirror,
and I'm painting it
onto a canvas which
is set at right angles to it.
Now you see the same
structure in the Caravaggio.
If we take that left hand to
be something like a displaced
or disguised image of his--
reflection of his own
right hand working
on a canvas that's
there, the left hand
would be a left hand
holding a palette,
and he's pivoting between the
two just the way Matisse is.
So the deep structure
of the painting
is of something like
a self-portrait.
The process of making
the self-portrait
is going to be something
protracted over time in a way
that you can see in the Matisse.
And here what we have is
this moment of surprise,
instantaneousness, shock.
This is going to recur again
and again in Caravaggio.
And the significance of it for
me is always that it comes--
it's secondary to an earlier
stage of protracted effort
on the painting when the
artist is, so to speak,
immersed in the making
of the painting.
And then at a certain point the
painting has to be set free.
The painting has to be released.
It has to be severed.
It has to be sent
out into the world.
And in Caravaggio, that's the
moment of shock, of severing.
It will later in his
art turn out literally
to be a moment of decapitation,
of an absolute cutting out
of the painting, in some
ways from the artist himself,
so that the painting can
fully enter the world.
Anyway, to me, this
was a thrilling moment
of seeing a deep
structure in a painting
that put all the emphasis
on instantaneousness,
but where the
deeper structure was
that of a protracted
process of making
through this structure of
what I call right-angle mirror
reflection.
This is a painting called The
Musicians from 1594 to '95.
It's in the Metropolitan
Museum in New York.
It was at a certain point
really very badly destroyed.
A lot of it is repainted.
It's repainted extremely well.
It's a picture that--
I grew up in New York.
I went to the Met
a lot as a kid.
I loved this picture, and I
kind of fell in love with her--
though it later emerged
that that was Cupid,
and I had to make various
emotional adjustments.
[LAUGHTER]
By this time, Caravaggio in
Rome acquired various very
influential patrons.
So we have to think of
him during these years
as literally living in one or
another palace being treated
very, very well,
having lots of time
to make the paintings
in as refined a fashion
as he wanted to,
and being sponsored
by these very wealthy, very
cultured, powerful people,
so that he knew the
paintings would be bought.
They would be acquired.
He had a really ideal situation.
He then relentlessly set out
to destroy it, and finally did.
But nevertheless,
it's an important fact
about his production
during these years.
Again, look at the
structure of this painting.
What emerges is
in the first place
a powerful structure
of something
that we could call a
dress, this central figure
who is tuning his lute
preparatory to making music
facing us, and then
this element that's
going to come back and back
and back in Caravaggio,
which is a figure
seen from the rear.
So putting together a
figure who faces address
and a figure who faces away--
a figure who faces
away, you realize,
is facing in the same
direction as the painter making
the painting, and
for that matter
the same direction
as the viewer,
say us, standing
before the painting.
So Caravaggio realizes,
and this is something--
this becomes explicit
in his painting
as in no painting
before him, but it's
going to become very, very
important in the centuries
to come.
It's there in Courbet.
In another way,
it's there in Manet.
It's the awareness that a
painting in a certain sense
faces in two directions.
Most obviously, it hangs on
the wall and faces the viewer.
But if you think of
the depicted space,
the painting, as it were,
faces away into itself,
and that lines up
with the orientation
of the viewer or the
painter making the painting.
In other words,
it's key not just
to the presence of the viewer,
but to the viewer's own sense
of--
in this case his, if we're
talking about the painter,
but if we generalize
it, his or her--
embodiment, their own
sense of themselves
as an embodied being with
a front and a back standing
before the painting.
These paintings acknowledge
human embodiment and work
with it, make it part of
the medium of painting
as no paintings before them.
This is important, because the
standard account of Caravaggio
and of Caravaggio's remarkable
realism or naturalism is
that it was and we should think
of it as essentially optical,
as if it represents simply a
new, more acute way of seeing
the world.
But his paintings aren't
just about, as realism isn't
just about, seeing the world.
It's conveying the
sense of what it
is to be a physical being
in a physical world.
And that involves a
sense of embodiment.
That involves a sense
of front and back.
That involves a
sense of the painting
not simply as something
you might call an image,
but as a material artifact
which itself faces but gets
made in a particular way.
All of these considerations come
into play in Caravaggio with--
I won't say as never before.
It's not that there's no
hint of this before, but now
with tremendous force.
Something else to remark
is that that's Caravaggio.
It's another of
his self-portraits.
He puts himself-- and
he's-- a self-portrait,
holding a cornetto.
He's going to be
playing the cornetto.
And you'll notice that
he's depicted himself
in a way that's consistent with
that right-angle structure,
right?
So you think of that
boy, and then you
think of how he's presented
himself there again
with his mouth slightly open.
Does that mean that he made this
painting, this image of himself
in that painting, using
that right-angle mirror
configuration?
I don't know.
I even rather doubt it.
But that he depicts himself
that way shows how acutely aware
he is of that structure.
This is an artist who
knows what he's doing.
Whatever else is
true of Caravaggio,
he's an intellectually
extraordinarily acute painter
about his own enterprise.
This is Bacchus of around
1597 in the Ufizzi.
And again, it's the time
when Caravaggio still
has these very strong sponsors.
And he's produced this
remarkably compelling,
strange image--
a beautiful still life
at the bottom, then
this strange figure.
And you see how
this goes back to--
I mean, I could flip back to
the Boy with a Basket of Fruit
right at the beginning.
You sort of see the
consistency in his art
with this remarkable gesture
of the left hand extending
this shallow goblet of
wine towards the viewer.
Of course that extended
left hand is also
something like the mirror image
of the painter's own right
hand extended with the
brush towards the painting,
so that we have here something
that is simultaneously,
again going back to the
Boy with a Basket of Fruit,
an image of presentation--
as if this gesture
offers the wine,
but by doing so offers
the Bacchus himself,
and by so doing offers the
painting to the viewer.
The sense of being
addressed by this painting
is again amazingly powerful.
This is all something
essentially new.
And at the same time,
we have that right hand
playing with this wonderful
tie to his ostensible toga.
Something that you can't
possibly see, but it's true,
is in this flask of wine
there is around here
a tiny reflection of--
and if you come up
close in a strong light,
it's a tiny reflection
of what seems
to be a painter at his easel.
I had read about this,
and I was already
very interested in Caravaggio,
and had very close friends.
Two art historians-- a
man named Charles Dempsey,
and a woman named
Elizabeth Cropper.
And they were in Florence.
And I was coming to Florence.
And I said, could you--
and they had lots of connections
in the art world there.
I said, could you arrange
for us to go into the Ufizzi
some morning before it opens?
And they have powerful
lights, and we
could see if there really
is this little figure there.
And they did.
And so one morning I and my wife
and Charles and Elizabeth all
went to the picture with
the powerful lights,
and the guards immediately
said to us oh, you
want to see the little guy.
[LAUGHTER]
They knew all about it.
They'd been looking
at it for years.
And so trust me, the
little guy is there.
So that structure of
reflection and that sense
of self-portraiture
even in that sense
is built into this picture.
We're going to look
at this picture
again later, because
it establishes
a certain kind of paradigm
for Caravaggio of address
and presentation,
in this case figured
through the presentation
of the wine.
I'm showing you this just
because it's so remarkable.
It's strange seeing it so
large, because of course it's
not large.
It's small.
It's a small Basket of Fruit.
It's in the Ambrosiana
Library and Museum in Milan,
and it is simply breathtaking.
In a way no image--
this is not a bad image of it--
but no image can convey the
precise quality that it has.
One really doesn't know--
when you're standing in
front of it looking at it,
it kind of defeats
your imagination
as to how Caravaggio painted it.
I mean, it doesn't
seem quite possible
that he just looked at the
fruit and painted it that way.
Maybe he had some mirror
that he looked at it in,
because there is a way in which
it is in this case rendered
very, very optical as opposed
to massively physical.
I mean, this is a picture
that just exceeds my capacity
to describe it or evoke it,
but I wanted you to see it.
I also want you to notice--
I mean, I am very struck in
some of the still lifes--
this goes right back to the
Boy with the Basket of Fruit--
by these leaves
that are like hands.
I mean, Caravaggio's
paintings are made artifacts.
He as an artist is acutely
conscious of the act,
the process, the
duration of making.
His paintings in
all sorts of ways
acknowledge their madeness--
their madeness by the painter,
their for-the-viewerness.
And here I can't help feeling
the sense of something
like the hands that went
into the making of it.
I'm struck too by that branch
that goes off as if it were--
I don't know what, even like
a paintbrush or something.
And then this very
famous painting,
the Supper at Emmaus of 1601 in
the National Gallery in London.
So it's that moment where
after Christ's crucifixion
when He meets two of His
disciples on the road
and they have a dinner.
Christ is
unrecognizable to them.
And you see the brilliance
of Caravaggio's depiction
of Christ.
He gives us a Christ who
is extremely noncanonical.
I mean, this doesn't look
like the traditional images
of Christ.
And they recognize Christ at the
moment of His giving the Hebrew
blessing over the bread, and
that's what happens here.
And the painting focuses on
Christ's act of blessing,
but then the responses
of the two disciples.
One of them you can
see pushing back
violently in his
chair in surprise,
the other flinging out
his hands in that way.
And in the foreground of the--
well, first of all
you see this chicken
with these, in a sense,
pitiful legs, which--
but I mean that in a--
I mean, one has to
laugh, but I mean it also
seriously in that it is
some kind of prefiguration
of what is going to
come in the narrative.
And here we have yet
another beautiful basket
of fruit coming off
the edge of the table.
So you have this,
this, and that.
A standard account, the standard
sort of art historical account
of this picture,
would say something
like by virtue of the fruit, the
basket of fruit protruding off
the edge of the table,
that puts the viewer
all the more intensely
in the scene.
I think that's exactly wrong.
I think the structure of those
gestures plus the fruit pushing
off the edge of the table
pushes the viewer away.
It's addressed to the
viewer, but it just
builds into the painting
an element of shock
and separation, distance, what
am I'm going to call severing.
Part of what the painting's
autonomy as a painting
is confirmed by the force of
the gestures that actually
thrust the viewer back.
Of course there's some kind
of very intense exchange
with the viewer.
In that sense, it
happens at close range.
But within that
close range there's
something like a split
second of distancing,
and that's going to be very
fundamental to Caravaggio's
art.
OK.
That's our first path.
Our second is going
to take off from this,
to my mind, amazing painting
of St. Jerome from around 1605
or 1606.
And it brings to light instantly
another fundamental resource
of painting for
Caravaggio, and it's
a resource that is from
this moment on going
to become a fundamental resource
for European painting period.
And I call that
resource absorption--
the depiction of
absorption, the depiction
of figures totally
absorbed or immersed
in what they are thinking,
doing, or feeling.
In this case, it's St.
Jerome completely absorbed
in his study of the
Bible as he makes
his early translation of the
Bible from Aramaic to Latin.
OK.
The force of the
painting is inseparable
from the force of our
conviction in his absorption
in what he is doing.
If this brilliant structure of
the extended arm holding a pen
or writing implement-- needless
to say, this is anachronistic.
That's not the way--
not what Jerome's-- there were
no books in Jerome's time.
This is something that
happens again and again
in the painting of the period.
This skull is looking on.
He is so absorbed as to
be unaware of the skull.
And we feel--
Caravaggio is brilliant,
unbelievably brilliant
and creative, in the actions
that he gives to his figures.
In this case, by
extending that arm,
it makes us so aware of
the force of the suspended
action of the arm.
The arm was reaching
out to do something.
It is suspended
because at that moment
Jerome is so much in the
grip of the thought of what
he is doing.
What's fascinating about
the depiction of absorption
is how minimal its
indications are.
I mean, fundamentally,
Jerome is depicted
as a brightly
illuminated bald head,
and then we get a
little bit of his eyes
in shadow and his lower face.
The force of our conviction of
his inwardness is tremendous.
That's what absorption can do.
It can give us this
conviction of inwardness
of those figures, the depth
of feeling within them.
But the way it works
is almost paradoxical,
because we are given just
the most minimal expressive
indications in the
faces of the figures.
As we will see in the
next painting we look at,
this is carried even further--
the next two paintings.
You might ask yourself,
where does our conviction
of that inwardness come from?
What is the source of it?
The standard rhetoric again is
going to be there is no depth
of the psyche that
Caravaggio cannot find out--
and this is said by a
very great art historian,
that he has this capacity
to render spiritual depth.
But the magic of absorption,
it is a discovery.
It's not as if there are no
absorbed figures in painting
before Caravaggio.
But just as he
radicalizes address,
he radicalizes absorption, and
it becomes for the first time
an absolute powerful
resource for painting
which painters after him are
going to seize on and pursue
for centuries to come.
My own impulse is to say that
sense of inwardness and feeling
has only one place
it can come from--
namely us, namely from the
viewer before the painting.
Somehow the magic
of absorption is
that it works to
lead us to project
our own sense of vitality,
our own sense of feeling,
our own sense of something
like empathic identification
into the figure so that
the depth of feeling,
the depth of thought
that we discover there,
is ultimately grounded
in something we
are led to do by the painting.
I take this particular painting
to be a really stunning example
of the power of absorption
in Caravaggio's art.
And then today looking
at it, I saw something
that I should've seen long ago
but I had never seen before,
in that Caravaggio is
one of the great masters
of the painting of drapery
in all of European art.
Drapery is an extremely
important part
of representational painting
during all these centuries.
It was the body and
then the drapery,
and the drapery extends the
realm of the body in all sorts
of, in a sense you could say,
expressively very free ways.
Here Caravaggio has done
something utterly stunning.
This man is totally
absorbed in what he's doing.
You might say he's gripped.
He's excited by it.
And look at his
red drapery as it
wraps around him, almost
as if it is responding to--
it is expressing the
intensity of the feeling
that he is expressing in
this very minimal way.
Then that arm extends, making
us again all the more aware
of the suspension of
action in absorption.
The skull is looking on.
And here is a drapery that
belongs to this end of things--
death, mere materiality--
and it just falls.
So part of the drama
of this painting-- it's
not just the drama of the
skull versus the living man.
It's the drama of the excited,
corporeal, moving, movemented
red drapery versus
the fall of the white.
Caravaggio is that kind of--
it's no accident Caravaggio is
a contemporary of Shakespeare.
I mean, what we have
in him is very often
a certain kind of poetic
power within the image
of just the highest level.
One of the handful of
the greatest painters
that we have in that sense.
The first painting where he
really discovers absorption,
the Penitent
Magdalene, comes up.
It's from 1595-96, and
it's in the Doria Pamphilj
Gallery in Rome.
It's Magdalene as she'd never
been represented before.
And even at the
time, it's criticized
as being just a girl
of the streets who
he just brought into the studio
and had her just sit there.
I mean, it took some
doing for people to find--
viewers now find
in this something
very powerfully
moving and affecting
in the vein of the Saint Jerome.
There she is, absorbed in her
grief and remorse over her past
and in this completely
quiet, absorptive mode.
But there were people
who couldn't see that--
I mean the expressive
minimalism of it.
It took a while for it
to take, for it to work.
It then becomes something
that the painters
who come after him are very
excited by and seize on.
And here's the fullest
version of this in his art,
and that's the
Death of the Virgin.
And this is 1605-1606,
and this is in the Louvre.
And here we have the Virgin
stretched out, having died.
This is controversial
in its own right.
When it's submitted to the
church for which he painted it,
it gets rejected,
probably because they're
unhappy with the
portrayal of the Virgin.
But here what I
want you to focus on
is the figure of Mary Magdalene.
Now we don't see
her face at all.
We just see her bowed head
and shadowy head in grief.
And we have these disciples
all themselves also, their
faces almost completely
hidden in shadow.
But people find this a deeply,
deeply moving painting.
It's of this painting that the
great art historian said there
is no depth of the human psyche
that Caravaggio cannot find
out.
I'm not saying for a
minute that's wrong.
But it is, so to
speak, to concentrate
on the effect of the painting,
the total overall of the effect
of the painting, and not quite
realizing the means by which
that effect is achieved.
And the means by which that
effect is achieved remarkably
are so expressively minimal.
We are barely given
the faces at all.
The handling of
lighting, light and dark,
chiaroscuro, plays a
very important part
in sustaining, bringing
about that effect as well.
This is The
Incredulity of Thomas,
Doubting Thomas, 1600-1601.
It's in the Gallery at
Sanssouci in Potsdam, Germany.
And here you see something else.
You see it's a
brilliant composition.
Caravaggio is a fantastic
inventor of compositions.
But this is a very
unorthodox composition.
Something you might say
is that in this picture
you see that Caravaggio--
absorption does the
work of composition.
I mean, the whole
composition thing
is simply based on the
total intense absorption
of all of those three
disciples as Thomas
puts his finger in the wound.
Christ looks down, brilliantly
directs Thomas's hand
into the wound.
And then look at the
subtle difference.
They're all absorbed, but
look at the subtle difference
in expression between
these two and Thomas.
Can you see the difference?
I mean, I think if I were to
put this to you as a question,
you'd get the answer.
He seems slightly surprised
more than they seem surprised.
And it's almost as if there's
the site of the wound,
but touching is believing.
So the finger is
thrust into the wound,
and then it's as if seeing
is necessary to believe
the touching.
It's like, is my finger
really in that wound?
So in the end, it is
a seeing of a touching
that itself is motivated
by something that
has to go beyond just seeing.
This is characteristic
of Caravaggio's--
again, I want to say
something like poetic genius,
imaginative genius,
to reconceive
traditional subjects in such an
obvious but radically original
way.
Something else-- again, we
talked about the drapery.
I want you to see
what happens here.
See, drapery in
Caravaggio will often
share the mood of the picture.
So we have this extraordinary,
almost like excitement
in the drapery not
here, not here, but just
in the area of that
extraordinary action.
And then one more tremendous
painting on this path,
The Crowning with Thorns, Christ
Being Crowned with Thorns,
in the Kunsthistorisches
Museum in Vienna.
This for me is one of my
favorite two, three, four,
whatever paintings
by Caravaggio.
I think it's a kind
of sheer masterpiece.
It's actually been doubted
by certain scholars,
but I can't see why
it should be doubted.
And when I've talked to
the people in conservation
in Vienna, they say it's in
remarkably wonderful condition.
So we have Christ
submitting to these torments
before the crucifixion.
This is the reed scepter
that He has mockingly
been given as King of the Jews.
The crown of thorns is
being shoved onto His head
by these two people.
The image of Christ is of
the most profound passivity.
This again is part of
the imaginative genius
I'm talking about.
It's presenting Christ
not as pathetic,
not as someone who's just
been tortured and tormented.
But what he's focusing
on here is the idea
of Christ's at this
moment complete acceptance
of what is done to Him.
And the most remarkably,
again, poetic expression
in the picture of that
profound passivity
is the way He holds
the reed scepter.
The reed scepter has
been forced on His hands.
He doesn't grip it.
He holds it between
those fingers as lightly
as it can be held,
but He does hold it.
And this passivity, this
completely minimal action,
is of course the most
efficacious action
that's ever taken in
the history of humanity
from a Christian point of view.
It's going to be Christ's
acceptance of His sufferings
and death that is
going to change
the world for the rest of time.
Then we have the
complete absorption,
astonishing absorption,
of this figure
in armor, who seems
to be something
like the supervising officer,
the guy who's in charge
of this whole operation.
And if you ask yourself--
and we barely see his face.
It's cut off.
It's in shadow.
But we sense again, in
the way we have been,
the depth of his absorption
in what's taking place.
In this case, his
absorption seems so great
that it starts to take
on the feeling of a kind
of identification with Christ.
And then Caravaggio does
one of his other strokes
of utter
representational genius,
and that's that hand
and the proximity
of that hand to Christ's hand.
I mean, that hand
doesn't have to be there.
That hand could have been there.
Could have been anywhere.
You have to imagine that hand
moving without the man even
being aware of it in a
gesture of identification
coming as close as
possible to Christ's hand.
So what we're
seeing is something
for which there is no textual
authority in the Bible.
This is just Caravaggio
working off of the image
that he's making of
this absorbed figure's
identification with the
passive suffering Christ.
It's an incredibly
profound picture.
It's pictorially
utterly beautiful.
It's worth going
to Vienna to see.
Third path, David with
the Head of Goliath,
this astonishing painting that
you all have seen upstairs.
You know the story.
In this case, you
also probably know
that that's a self-portrait
of Caravaggio.
It's a question as to when
this painting was made.
We're not sure of the dates
of numbers of his pictures.
Davide and the Getty have
put it very late around 1609,
with Caravaggio
dying around 1610.
I and certain other
art historians
go for an earlier moment,
something like 1606.
You shouldn't care
at all what I think.
I'm just not an authority
invading in that way.
But there are serious
people who argue both ways.
For art purposes,
it's not crucial
whether it's 1606 or 1609.
Again, it's a
staggering you could
say Shakespearean-quality
poetic invention.
The young David, who is
based on a young painter who
lives with Caravaggio
named Cecco del Caravaggio,
who becomes a remarkably
fascinating painter
in his own right, holding the
severed head of Goliath, which
is the head of Caravaggio.
This beautiful sword
coming down; again,
this brilliant
handling of drapery;
this extraordinarily subtle
expression of something
like at once--
you might say absorbed--
beholding of the head
at a kind of sympathy,
but also a kind of
hesitation, drawing back,
the quality of mixed feeling.
But look.
You saw the picture before.
You saw the picture before.
It's the same structure
as the Bacchus.
But where the Bacchus
gives us the wine
by way of giving us the picture
along with the still life,
all kind of thematized
by the tiny reflection
here, here instead of the wine,
instead of the still life,
is the painter himself.
Again, in Caravaggio's art--
I'll show you other examples--
decapitation, cutting of a head
off, starts to emerge
as a major theme.
And I associate that
decapitation with something
like--
this is a moment--
the larger argument
would be to say
that this is a moment,
Caravaggio's moment,
of the emergence of a
new kind of painting,
a painting which at this
moment we can call something
like the gallery picture, made
for new kinds of galleries
in Rome, where the
picture has to aim
at a new kind of absolute
autonomy in itself.
It has to be framed and
separated from what's around it
with a new force.
In that sense, it
has to be cut out
from its environment, in that
sense severed, but also--
and this is less obvious, but I
really want to emphasize this--
it has to be severed
from the artist in order
to be released into the world.
So it makes sense that
in this extraordinarily
decisive and emblematic
picture the head is
the head of the artist himself.
All right.
So the self-portrait,
the recurrence
of the self-portrait
in Caravaggio,
is not because he
just keeps wanting
to see himself in his art.
It's all part of the
structure of trying
to separate from the art.
So the self that
appears there is
a kind of vestige or afterblow
from a kind of act of severing.
This is stupendous
painting, needless to say.
To go back to the
slightly earlier painting,
this is the most
vivid portrayal or one
of the two most vivid portrayals
of the act of decapitation
in his art.
This is Judith and Holofernes,
an earlier moment, 1599.
It's in the Palazzo
Barberini in Rome.
And here I find myself
wanting to see this almost
as an allegory for the
act of painting itself,
as if she's a stand-in
for the painter,
as if that cutting of the head
off is also at the same time
a depiction of something
like the act of painting
as it has been emerging
in Caravaggio's art.
There's this great
stress on this instant
again, like the pained instant
of the boy bitten by a lizard,
and that's expressed also in
these glass-like jets of paint.
So the stress is
all on the instant.
And then there's this
counter-structure
of the total
absorption, immersion
of the maid next to Judith.
Notice how Judith's
face has something
of the feel of David's face--
committed to what she's
doing, but with a certain kind
of ambivalence,
whereas the maid is
completely now rapt in
relation to the picture.
So Caravaggio in paintings
like this is actually
allowing himself to depict or
give expression to something
like different
successive let me call
them moments within the
process of painting--
the moment of deep immersion
in the painting, of the
doing of it, the
moment of separation,
and if the moment of
separation is powerful enough,
it might actually lead
you to re-immerse.
His paintings are full of
this kind of complexity
of structure, in my view.
Another related painting--
we're getting towards the end--
truly fascinating,
beautiful painting,
Salome Receiving the
Head of John the Baptist
from around 1607 in the
National Gallery in London.
Again, that structure
goes right back to the Boy
with a Basket of Fruit.
It's a structure
of presentation.
In this case, the
presentation is
by the executioner, who's
got his hand on his sword
down here, and then
gives us the head of John
the Baptist in this salver.
This is again in that
realm of a certain kind
of imaginative
Shakespeare-quality poetry.
Her gaze is averted.
Her gaze is averted as if to put
off the moment of really seeing
that head, as if to put
off the moment of something
like the full separation
from the painting.
At the same time, her maiden--
look at the way in which they
virtually share a single body;
this is something
else that Caravaggio
does so it's as if not just two
different persons but something
like two different moments
in the same protracted act
of painting and
releasing the painting--
is completely
spellbound by the head.
And notice the tremendous
affinity between the two.
It's as if one of them reflects,
is identified with, the other,
with this extraordinary
fist of making
in the very center
of the picture.
This is what we're dealing
with with this guy--
structures of this
kind of complexity,
this kind of pointedness.
I can well imagine that some
of you in the audience--
this would certainly be true
of lots of art historians--
would say everything that
he's saying is going too far.
It's going too far.
It's pushing it too far.
OK, fine.
But then you have to
account for it, right?
If what I'm saying
doesn't persuade you,
that's fair enough.
But one can't pretend that
those structures aren't there.
And if the kind of account I'm
giving you is unpersuasive,
then the onus is on
let's say certainly
an art historian to come
up with another account.
Simply ignoring what's
going on won't do it.
This is probably
the last painting
that Caravaggio ever made, and
it's one of the most profound.
It's in slightly
ruinous condition.
It sits in a bank vault in
Naples, if you can believe it.
It's The Martyrdom
of Saint Ursula.
This is the King of the Huns.
He wants to marry her.
She says no, and
he executes her.
In this painting,
he executes her
by shooting an arrow into her
at this extraordinarily intimate
range--
a kind of range that I
think of as something
almost like painting distance,
the distance he would
be from a painting, as if she
were the painting and that
is something like the
making of the painting.
That is Caravaggio himself
again up against her.
You have to imagine her
body pressed against his.
There's a soldier here.
There's another soldier there.
His hand extends through
here as if to stop the thing.
So you have to imagine something
like Caravaggio himself
trying to witness
the actual making
of the painting, the moment
of the making of the painting,
as the arrow goes
into Ursula, who
has this extraordinary
response to it--
looks down as if with a kind of
grave surprise at her own mood.
We have the same
kind of structure
in the head of the
King of the Huns
that we have in those other
figures like Judith and David.
I mean, it's not simple
pleasure in what he's doing.
But it's like
Caravaggio straining
to see the inception
of the act of painting
as it is carried out in
this mortal operation.
And there on the breastwork
of the King of the Huns
we have a lion, who's
a traditional symbol
for the sun, which is to say
for light-- this basic condition
of painting in this painting
that is otherwise so dark.
So the last painting we have by
Caravaggio is, to me-- again,
this very profound painting--
maybe the most
profound and sustained
of all of his
meditations on something
like the internal,
tragic, fatal structure
of the act of painting itself.
Thank you for your attention.
[APPLAUSE]
