Maart 2013: jaargang 10, nommer 1 - LitNet

LitNet Akademies Jaargang 10 (1), Maart 2013
paintings were studied and an appreciative interview with a museum guide from the Galleria
Borghese, where six of Caravaggio’s paintings are displayed, was conducted.
The following unconditionally positive questions (Whitney and Trosten-Bloom 2010:11-2)
were put to the museum guide:
• What is your earliest or most pleasant memory of Caravaggio?
• What do his paintings mean to you on a personal level?
• Which painting is your favourite one and why?
• What, in your opinion, is the one thing that enlivens his paintings – without which they
imply would not be the same?
• What would you wish today’s painters could learn from him?
I then also put the questions to myself, transcribed the two interviews and identified the
following three positive themes from them:
• Caravaggio’s superior workmanship and the way he uses the interplay between light and
shadow.
• Three of his paintings in which Jesus is pictured as a baby boy (The Madonna of Loreto),
as a small boy (The Madonna of the Palafrenieri), and as a corpse after his crucifixion
(The Entombment).
• The exceptional earthy realism in his paintings.
Caravaggio was exceptionally skilful in applying an extreme tenebrism(“term describing
predominantly dark tonality in a painting” – Chilvers 2009:620). Graham-Dixon (2010:184)
explains the effect that this effect has on his paintings: “He used it here [in The Betrayal of
the Christ] as a ruthless means of exclusion, spotlighting the figures at the very centre of the
drama and casting everything else into deepest shadow.” Spear (1971:v) argues that the
poorly lit scenes also convey a very strong message: “Equally evident is his emphasis on
nocturnal arbitrary lighting, murky but nonetheless integrated with the dramatic piety of his
religious works and with the badly lit ‘lower class’ environments. Poor people – poor light.
Not for him the aristocratic sun.”
The Entombment
Graham-Dixon (2010:279) describes the Jesus in this painting of Caravaggio strikingly:
“Caravaggio’s dead Christ is punishingly unidealized. He truly is the Word made flesh: a
dead man, a real corpse weighing heavily on those who struggle to lay him to rest.”
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