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John the Baptist (Caravaggio)
Encyclopedia
John the Baptist was the subject of at least eight paintings by the Italian
Baroque
artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
(1571–1610).
The story of John the Baptist
is told in the Gospels. John was the cousin of Jesus
, and his calling was to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah
. He lived in the wilderness of Judea
between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea
, "his raiment of camel's hair, and a leather girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey." He baptised Jesus in the Jordan
, and was eventually killed by Herod Antipas
when he called upon the king to reform his evil ways. John was frequently shown in Christian art, identifiable by his bowl, reed cross, camel's skin and lamb. The most popular scene prior to the Counter-Reformation
was of John's baptism of Jesus, or else the infant Baptist together with the infant Jesus and Mary his mother, frequently supplemented by the Baptist's own mother St Elizabeth. John alone in the desert was less popular, but not unknown. For the young Caravaggio, John was invariably a boy or youth alone in the wilderness. This image was based on the statement in the Gospel of Luke
that "the child grew and was strengthened in spirit, and was in the deserts until the day of his manifestation to Israel." These works allowed a religious treatment of the partly clothed youths he liked to paint at this period - not all the models have a very saintly look.
Apart from these works showing John alone, mostly dated to his early years, Caravaggio painted three great narrative scenes of John's death - the great Execution
in Malta, and two sombre Salomes with his head, one in Madrid
, and one in London.
John the Baptist, Toledo
The ascription of this painting to Caravaggio is disputed - the alternative candidate is Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, an early follower. It is in the collection of the Museo Tesoro Catedralicio, Toledo
(Spain
), and John Gash (see references below) speculates that it may have been one of the paintings done by Caravaggio for the prior of the Hospital of the Consolation, as Caravaggio's early biographer Mancini tells us. According to Mancini the prior "afterwards took them with him to his homeland"; unfortunately, one version of Mancini's manuscript says the prior's homeland was Seville, while another says Sicily. There was a Spanish prior of the hospital in 1593, and he may not have left until June 1595. Gash cites scholar A.E. Perez Sanchez's view that while the figure of the saint has certain affinities with Cavarozzi's style, the rest of the picture does not, "and the extremely high quality of certain passages, especially the beautifully depicted vine leaves...is much more characteristic of Caravaggio." Gash also points to the gentle chiaroscuro
and the delicate treatment of contours and features, and similar stylistic features in early works by Caravaggio such as The Musicians
and Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy
. If this and other paintings by Caravaggio were indeed in Seville at an early date they may have influenced Velázquez
in his early works. However, the arguments in favour of Cavarozzi are strong, and he is known to have travelled to Spain about 1617-1619.
Peter Robb
, taking the painting to be by Caravaggio, dates it to about 1598, when the artist was a member of the household of his first patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte
. Robb points out that the Baptist is evidently the same boy who modelled for Isaac
in the Sacrifice of Isaac
, which would date both paintings to around the same period. Unfortunately this Sacrifice of Isaac is also disputed, and so the problem of authorship is not solved. John is shown against a background of green grape vines and thorny vine stems, seated on a red cloak, holding a thin reed cross and looking down at a sheep lying at his feet. The red cloak would become a staple of Caravaggio's works, one with many precedents in previous art.
John the Baptist carries over many of the concerns which animated Caravaggio's other work from this period. The leaves behind the figure, and the plants and soil around his feet, are depicted with that careful, almost photographic sense of detail which is seen in the contemporary still life Basket of Fruit
, while the melancholy self-absorption of the Baptist creates an atmosphere of introspection. The grape leaves stand for the grapes from which the wine of the Last Supper
was pressed, while the thorns call to mind the Crown of Thorns
, and the sheep is a reminder of the Sacrifice of Christ.
Caravaggio's decision to paint John the Baptist as a youth was somewhat unusual for the age - the saint was traditionally shown as either an infant, together with the infant Jesus and possibly his own and Jesus's mother, or as an adult, frequently in the act of baptising Jesus. Nevertheless it was not totally without precedent. Leonardo
had painted a youthful and enigmatically smiling Baptist with one finger pointing upwards (to Heaven?) and the other hand seeming to indicate his own breast, while Andrea del Sarto
left a Baptist which almost totally prefigures Caravaggio. Both Leonardo and del Sarto had created from the figure of John something which seems to hint at an entirely personal meaning, one not accessible to the viewer, and Caravaggio was to turn this into something like a personal icon in the course of his many variations on the theme.
John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram), Musei Capitolini, Rome
The model for Amor Vincit was a boy named Cecco, Caravaggio's servant and possibly his pupil as well. He has been tentatively identified with an artist active in Rome about 1610-1625, otherwise known only as Cecco del Caravaggio
- Caravaggio's Cecco - who painted very much in Caravaggio's style. The most striking feature of Amor was the young model's evident glee in posing for the painting, so that it became rather more a portrait of Cecco than a depiction of a Roman demi-god. The same sense of the real-life model overwhelming the supposed subject was transferred to Mattei's John the Baptist. The youthful John is shown half-reclining, one arm around a ram's neck, his turned to the viewer with an impish grin. There's almost nothing to signify that this indeed the prophet sent to make straight the road in the wilderness - no cross, no leather belt, just a scrap of camel's skin lost in the voluminous folds of the red cloak, and the ram. The ram itself is highly un-canonical - John the Baptist's animal is supposed to be a lamb, marking his greeting of Christ as the 'Lamb of God
' come to take away the sins of mankind. The ram is as often a symbol of lust as of sacrifice, and this naked smirking boy conveys no sense of sin whatsoever. Some biographers have tried to depict Caravaggio as an essentially orthodox Catholic
of the Counter-Reformation
, but Cecco the Baptist seems as irredeemably pagan as his previous incarnation as Cupid.
The Mattei Baptist proved immensely popular - eleven known copies were made, including one recognised by scholars as being from Caravaggio's own hand. It is today held in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery
http://www.roma2000.it/zgadopam.html on the Roman Corso. (The gallery also houses his Penitent Magdalene
and Rest on the Flight into Egypt
). The collectors ordering the copies would have been aware of a further level of irony: the pose adopted by the model is a clear imitation of that adopted by one of Michelangelo
's famous ignudi on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
(painted 1508-1512). The role of these gigantic male nudes in Michelango's depiction of the world before the Laws of Moses has always been unclear - some have supposed them to be angels, others that they represent the Neo-Platonic ideal of human beauty - but for Caravaggio to pose his adolescent assistant as one of the Master's dignified witnesses to the Creation was clearly a kind of in-joke for the cognoscenti.
In 1601/02 Caravaggio was apparently living and painting in the palazzo of the Mattei family
, inundated with commissions from wealthy private clients following the success of the Contarelli chapel where in 1600 he had displayed The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
and The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. It was one of the most productive periods in a productive career. Ciriaco Mattei
's notebook records two payments to Caravaggio in July and December of that year, marking the beginning and completion of the original John the Baptist. The payment was a relatively modest 85 scudi, because John was a single figure. The copy may have been made at the same time or very soon after. In January of that year Caravaggio received a hundred and fifty scudi for Supper at Emmaus. For Vincenzo Giustiniani there was The Incredulity of Saint Thomas
, and in January 1603 Ciriaco paid a hundred and twenty-five scudi for The Taking of Christ. Each of these increased the immense popularity of Caravaggio among collectors - twenty copies survive of the Supper at Emmaus, more of the Taking of Christ.
But for all this success, neither the Church
itself, nor any of the religious Orders, had yet commissioned anything. The paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had been commissioned and paid for by private patrons, although the priests of San Luigi dei Francesi (which contains the chapel) had had to approve the result. Caravaggio's problem was that the Counter-Reformation
Church was extremely conservative - there had been a move to introduce an Index of Prohibited Images, and high-ranking cardinals had published handbooks guiding artists, and more especially the priests who might commission artists or approve art, on what was and was not acceptable. And the playful crypto-paganism of this private John the Baptist with its cross-references to the out of favour Classicising humanism
of Michelangelo and the High Renaissance
, most certainly was not acceptable. (See Peter Robb, M
, below).
John the Baptist, Kansas City
Bellini's Baptist is depicted within a conventional framework that his audience would know and share; Caravaggio's is almost impenetrably private. In 1604 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint a John the Baptist for the papal banker and art patron Ottavio Costa, who already owned the artist's Judith Beheading Holofernes
and Martha and Mary Magdalene
. Costa intended it for an altarpiece for a small oratory in the Costa fiefdom of Conscente (a village near Albenga, on the Italian Riviera
), but liked it so much that he sent a copy to the oratory and kept the original in his own collection. It is now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.
Caravaggio biographer Peter Robb
has pointed out that the fourth Baptist seems like a psychic mirror-image of the first, with all the signs reversed: the brilliant morning light which bathed the earlier painting has become harsh and almost lunar in its contrasts, and the vivid green foliage has turned to dry dead brown. There is almost nothing in the way of symbols to identify that this is indeed a religious image, no halo, no sheep, no leather girdle, nothing but the thin reed cross (a reference to Christ's description of John as "a reed shaken by the wind"). The painting demonstrates what Robb calls Caravaggio's "feeling for the drama of the human presence." This adolescent, almost adult, John seems locked in some private world known only to his creator. Caravaggio's conception of the saint as a seated, solitary figure, lacking almost any narrative identity (how do we know this is the Baptist? What is happening here?) was truly revolutionary. Artists from Giotto to Bellini
and beyond had shown the Baptist as an approachable story, a symbol understandable to all; the very idea that a work should express a private world, rather than a common religious and social experience, was radically new.
John the Baptist, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica
This is one of two John the Baptists painted by Caravaggio in or around 1604 (possibly 1605). It is held in the Palazzo Corsini
collection of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica
.http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://www.galleriaborghese.it/barberini/it/default.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3DGalleria%2BNazionale%2Bd%2527Arte%2BAntica%26hl%3Den%26hs%3DstC%26lr%3D%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official Like the John done for Ottavio Costa, the figure has been stripped of identifying symbols - no belt, not even the "raiment of camel's hair", and the reed cross is only suggested. The background and surrounds have darkened even further, and again there is the sense of a story from which the viewer is excluded.
Caravaggio was not the first artist to have treated the Baptist as a cryptic male nude - there were prior examples from Leonardo
, Raphael
, Andrea del Sarto
and others - but he introduced a new note of realism and drama. His John has the roughened, sunburnt hands and neck of a labourer, his pale torso emerging with a contrast that reminds the viewer that this is a real boy who has gotten undressed for his modelling session - unlike Raphael's Baptist, who is as idealised and un-individualised as one of his winged cherubs.
Ask who this model actually is, (or was), and the realism of the individual spills over as a record of Rome itself in the age of Caravaggio. Biographer Peter Robb
cites Montaigne on Rome as a city of universal idleness, "...the envied idleness of the higher clerics, and the frightening idleness of the destitute...a city almost without trades or professions, in which the churchmen were playboys or bureaucrats, the laymen were condemned to be courtiers, all the pretty girls and boys seemed to be prostitutes, and all wealth was inherited old money or extorted new." It was not an age which welcomed an art that emphasised the real.
John the Baptist (St John the Baptist at the Fountain), Collezione Bonelli, Valletta
St John the Baptist at the Fountain, in a private collection in Malta, is difficult to gain access to and consequently few scholars have been able to study it. John Gash (see references, below) treats it as by Caravaggio, pointing out the similarity in the treatment of the flesh to the Sleeping Cupid
, recognised as by the artist and dating from his Malta period. The painting has been badly damaged, especially in the landscape. The work is known in two other variants, each slightly different.
The theme of the young John drinking from a spring reflects the Gospel tradition that the Baptist drank only water during his period in the wilderness. The painting displays typically Caravaggist extreme chiaroscuro
(use of light and shadow), and is also typical in taking a young John the Baptist as its subject, this time set in a dark landscape against an ominous patch of lighter sky. "The mechanics of drinking and the psychology of thirst are beautifully conveyed through the artful manipulation of limbs and the carefully constructed head." (John Gash).
If it is in fact by the artist, it would have been painted during his approximately 15 months in Malta in 1607-1608. His recognised works from this period include such masterpieces as the Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page and The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
. The latter, in the oratory of the Co-Cathedral of Saint John, is the only work that the artist signed.
In Malta Caravaggio was accepted into the Order of Saint John (the Knights of Malta
) and became in effect their official artist, but his stay ended with a mysterious offense and his expulsion from the Order "as a foul and rotten limb". The crime on Malta has been the subject of much speculation, but seems to have extremely serious, possibly even involving the death penalty. Most modern writers believe that it was a crime of violence. His earliest biographer, Giovanni Baglione, said that there had been a "disagreement" with a knight of justice (i.e., a knight drawn from the European nobility); Giovan Pietro Bellori, who visited Malta to see the Beheading of John the Baptist some fifty years after the event, wrote that Caravaggio "had come into conflict with a very noble knight", as a result of which he had incurred the displeasure of the Grand Master and had to flee. It is possible that the offence involved a duel, which was regarded very seriously - but the penalty for duelling was imprisonment, not death. The death penalty was imposed for murder - and a death in a duel or brawl equated to murder - but the wording used by both Baglione and Bellori implied that the knight Caravaggio offended had survived. Peter Robb
, in his popular biography M
, (1998), makes the case for a sexual misdemeanour, but his argument is speculative.
John the Baptist, Galleria Borghese
The date of the John the Baptist in the Galleria Borghese
is disputed: it was long thought to have been acquired by Cardinal Scipione Borghese
some time between his own arrival in Rome in 1605 and Caravaggio's flight from the city in 1606, but Roberto Longhi dated it to the artist's Sicilian period (a date post-1608) on the basis of similarities in handling and colour. Lonhi's view has gained increasing acceptance, with a consensus in favour of 1610 emerging in recent years.
The painting shows a boy slumped against a dark background, where a sheep nibbles at a dull brown vine. The boy is immersed in a reverie: perhaps as Saint John he is lost in private melancholy, contemplating the coming sacrifice of Christ; or perhaps as a real-life street-kid called on to model for hours he is merely bored. As so often with Caravaggio, the sense is of both at once. But the overwhelming feeling is of sorrow. The red cloak envelopes his puny childish body like a flame in the dark, the sole touch of colour apart from the pale flesh of the juvenile saint. "Compared with the earlier Capitolina and Kansas City versions...the Borghese picture is more richly colouristic - an expressive essay in reds, whites, and golden browns. It also represents a less idealised and more sensuous approach to the male nude, as prefigured in the stout-limbed figures of certain of Caravaggio's post-Roman works, such as the Naples Flagellation and the Valletta Beheading of John the Baptist." (John Gash, see references below).
Borghese was a discriminating collector but notorious for extorting and even stealing pieces that caught his eye - he, or rather his uncle Pope Paul V
, had recently imprisoned Giuseppe Cesari, one of the best-known and most successful painters in Rome, on trumped-up charges in order to confiscate his collection of a hundred and six paintings, which included three of the Caravaggios today displayed in the Galleria Borghese (Boy Peeling Fruit
, Young Sick Bacchus, and Boy with a basket of Fruit
). They joined the Caravaggios that the Cardinal already possessed, including a Saint Jerome
and the Madonna and Child with St. Anne
(the Grooms' Madonna).
By 1610 Caravaggio's life was unravelling. It's always dangerous to interpret an artist's works in terms of his life, but in this case the temptation is overwhelming, and every writer on Caravaggio seems to surrender to it. In 1606 he had fled Rome as an outlaw after killing a man in a street fight; in 1608 he had been thrown into prison in Malta and again escaped; through 1609 he had been pursued across Sicily by his enemies until taking refuge in Naples, where he had been attacked in the street by unknown assailants within days of his arrival. Now he was under the protection of the Colonna family in the city, seeking a pardon that would allow him to return to Rome. The power to grant the pardon lay in the hands of the art-loving Cardinal Borghese, who would expect to be paid in paintings. News that the pardon was imminent arrived in mid-year, and the artist set out by boat with three canvasses. The next news was that he had died "of a fever" in Porto Ercole, a coastal town north of Rome held by Spain.
John the Baptist (St John the Baptist Reclining), Munich
This Reclining John the Baptist, discovered in Argentina, remains disputed and should perhaps be described as attributed, but it is accepted by Peter Robb
in his 1998 biography of Caravaggio. It is now in a private collection in Munich. The reasons for thinking it may be by Caravaggio, apart from the style and subject matter, are as follows: in July 1610, following news of Caravaggio's death, the bishop of Caserta wrote to Cardinal Scipione Borghese
that three paintings by the artist were in the Naples palazzo of the Marchesa of Caravaggio. They were two Saint Johns and a Magdalene. The paintings had been intended for Borghese and he instructed the Marchesa to look after them for him. Unfortunately for Borghese they were seized two days later by the head of the Knights of Malta in Naples, on the grounds that Caravaggio was a knight of the Order and all his possessions devolved on the Knights - which all involved must have known to be untrue, as Caravaggio had been expelled from the Order in 1608. The newly arrived Spanish Viceroy of Naples heard of the affair, but, believing the paintings were in Porto Ercole, wrote to the head of the Spanish garrison there telling him that the Knights had no right to them and that they should be returned to the Viceroy, "in particular the painting of John the Baptist." There is no certain knowledge of what happened to the various paintings after that point. Cardinal Borghese got the Youth with a Ram, but more than a year later. The other two paintings - the Magdalene and the second Baptist - disappeared, but it is possible, though unproven, that the Viceroy may have managed to secure the other Baptist. He would presumably have taken it back to Spain, and from there it could have made its way to South America. All this, however, is speculation - it needs to be pointed out that no-one knows the exact identity of the paintings involved.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque...
(1571–1610).
The story of John the Baptist
John the Baptist
John the Baptist was an itinerant preacher and a major religious figure mentioned in the Canonical gospels. He is described in the Gospel of Luke as a relative of Jesus, who led a movement of baptism at the Jordan River...
is told in the Gospels. John was the cousin of Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
, and his calling was to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah
Messiah
A messiah is a redeemer figure expected or foretold in one form or another by a religion. Slightly more widely, a messiah is any redeemer figure. Messianic beliefs or theories generally relate to eschatological improvement of the state of humanity or the world, in other words the World to...
. He lived in the wilderness of Judea
Judea
Judea or Judæa was the name of the mountainous southern part of the historic Land of Israel from the 8th century BCE to the 2nd century CE, when Roman Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina following the Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt.-Etymology:The...
between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea
Dead Sea
The Dead Sea , also called the Salt Sea, is a salt lake bordering Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west. Its surface and shores are below sea level, the lowest elevation on the Earth's surface. The Dead Sea is deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world...
, "his raiment of camel's hair, and a leather girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey." He baptised Jesus in the Jordan
Jordan
Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...
, and was eventually killed by Herod Antipas
Herod Antipas
Herod Antipater , known by the nickname Antipas, was a 1st-century AD ruler of Galilee and Perea, who bore the title of tetrarch...
when he called upon the king to reform his evil ways. John was frequently shown in Christian art, identifiable by his bowl, reed cross, camel's skin and lamb. The most popular scene prior to the Counter-Reformation
Counter-Reformation
The Counter-Reformation was the period of Catholic revival beginning with the Council of Trent and ending at the close of the Thirty Years' War, 1648 as a response to the Protestant Reformation.The Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort, composed of four major elements:#Ecclesiastical or...
was of John's baptism of Jesus, or else the infant Baptist together with the infant Jesus and Mary his mother, frequently supplemented by the Baptist's own mother St Elizabeth. John alone in the desert was less popular, but not unknown. For the young Caravaggio, John was invariably a boy or youth alone in the wilderness. This image was based on the statement in the Gospel of Luke
Gospel of Luke
The Gospel According to Luke , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Luke or simply Luke, is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension.The...
that "the child grew and was strengthened in spirit, and was in the deserts until the day of his manifestation to Israel." These works allowed a religious treatment of the partly clothed youths he liked to paint at this period - not all the models have a very saintly look.
Apart from these works showing John alone, mostly dated to his early years, Caravaggio painted three great narrative scenes of John's death - the great Execution
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Caravaggio)
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is an oil painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio. According to Andrea Pomella in Caravaggio: An Artist through Images , the work is widely considered to be Caravaggio's masterpiece as well as "one of the most important works in Western...
in Malta, and two sombre Salomes with his head, one in Madrid
Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (Madrid) (Caravaggio)
Salome with the Head of John the Baptist , c. 1609, is a painting by the Italian master Caravaggio in the Palacio Real, Madrid.The early Caravaggio biographer Giovanni Bellori, writing in 1672, records the artist sending a Salome with the Head of John the Baptist from Naples to the Grand Master of...
, and one in London.
John the Baptist, ToledoToledo, SpainToledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...
Toledo, Spain
Toledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...
(Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
), and John Gash (see references below) speculates that it may have been one of the paintings done by Caravaggio for the prior of the Hospital of the Consolation, as Caravaggio's early biographer Mancini tells us. According to Mancini the prior "afterwards took them with him to his homeland"; unfortunately, one version of Mancini's manuscript says the prior's homeland was Seville, while another says Sicily. There was a Spanish prior of the hospital in 1593, and he may not have left until June 1595. Gash cites scholar A.E. Perez Sanchez's view that while the figure of the saint has certain affinities with Cavarozzi's style, the rest of the picture does not, "and the extremely high quality of certain passages, especially the beautifully depicted vine leaves...is much more characteristic of Caravaggio." Gash also points to the gentle chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro in art is "an Italian term which literally means 'light-dark'. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted"....
and the delicate treatment of contours and features, and similar stylistic features in early works by Caravaggio such as The Musicians
The Musicians (Caravaggio)
The Musicians is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio . It is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York....
and Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy
Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (Caravaggio)
Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio...
. If this and other paintings by Caravaggio were indeed in Seville at an early date they may have influenced Velázquez
Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period, important as a portrait artist...
in his early works. However, the arguments in favour of Cavarozzi are strong, and he is known to have travelled to Spain about 1617-1619.
Peter Robb
Peter Robb
Peter Robb is an Australian author.Robb spent his formative years in Australia and New Zealand, and between 1978 and 1992 he spent most of his time in Naples and southern Italy, interspersed with sojourns in Brazil. At the end of 1992 he returned to Sydney.His first book, Midnight in Sicily, was...
, taking the painting to be by Caravaggio, dates it to about 1598, when the artist was a member of the household of his first patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte
Francesco Maria Del Monte
Francesco Maria Del Monte, full name Francesco Maria Bourbon Del Monte Santa Maria, was an Italian Cardinal, diplomat and connoisseur of the arts...
. Robb points out that the Baptist is evidently the same boy who modelled for Isaac
Isaac
Isaac as described in the Hebrew Bible, was the only son Abraham had with his wife Sarah, and was the father of Jacob and Esau. Isaac was one of the three patriarchs of the Israelites...
in the Sacrifice of Isaac
Sacrifice of Isaac (Caravaggio)
The Sacrifice of Isaac is the title of two paintings by the Italian master Caravaggio .- Princeton version :The Sacrifice of Isaac in the Piasecka-Johnson Collection in Princeton, New Jersey, is a disputed work that was painted circa 1603...
, which would date both paintings to around the same period. Unfortunately this Sacrifice of Isaac is also disputed, and so the problem of authorship is not solved. John is shown against a background of green grape vines and thorny vine stems, seated on a red cloak, holding a thin reed cross and looking down at a sheep lying at his feet. The red cloak would become a staple of Caravaggio's works, one with many precedents in previous art.
John the Baptist carries over many of the concerns which animated Caravaggio's other work from this period. The leaves behind the figure, and the plants and soil around his feet, are depicted with that careful, almost photographic sense of detail which is seen in the contemporary still life Basket of Fruit
Basket of Fruit (Caravaggio)
Basket of Fruit is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio , which hangs in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana , Milan....
, while the melancholy self-absorption of the Baptist creates an atmosphere of introspection. The grape leaves stand for the grapes from which the wine of the Last Supper
Last Supper
The Last Supper is the final meal that, according to Christian belief, Jesus shared with his Twelve Apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. The Last Supper provides the scriptural basis for the Eucharist, also known as "communion" or "the Lord's Supper".The First Epistle to the Corinthians is...
was pressed, while the thorns call to mind the Crown of Thorns
Crown of Thorns
In Christianity, the Crown of Thorns, one of the instruments of the Passion, was woven of thorn branches and placed on Jesus Christ before his crucifixion...
, and the sheep is a reminder of the Sacrifice of Christ.
Caravaggio's decision to paint John the Baptist as a youth was somewhat unusual for the age - the saint was traditionally shown as either an infant, together with the infant Jesus and possibly his own and Jesus's mother, or as an adult, frequently in the act of baptising Jesus. Nevertheless it was not totally without precedent. Leonardo
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
had painted a youthful and enigmatically smiling Baptist with one finger pointing upwards (to Heaven?) and the other hand seeming to indicate his own breast, while Andrea del Sarto
Andrea del Sarto
Andrea del Sarto was an Italian painter from Florence, whose career flourished during the High Renaissance and early Mannerism. Though highly regarded during his lifetime as an artist senza errori , his renown was eclipsed after his death by that of his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci,...
left a Baptist which almost totally prefigures Caravaggio. Both Leonardo and del Sarto had created from the figure of John something which seems to hint at an entirely personal meaning, one not accessible to the viewer, and Caravaggio was to turn this into something like a personal icon in the course of his many variations on the theme.
John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram), Musei Capitolini, RomeRomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, and Doria Pamphilj GalleryDoria Pamphilj GalleryThe Doria Pamphilj Gallery is a large art collection housed in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome, Italy. It is situated between the Via del Corso and Via della Gatta. The principal entrance is on the Via del Corso...
, RomeRomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
Cecco del Caravaggio
Cecco del Caravaggio , is the name used for a Baroque artist working in Rome in the early decades of the 17th century, an important early follower of Caravaggio. He has been identified as Francesco Boneri , although this is not universally accepted.Little is known about Cecco del Caravaggio...
- Caravaggio's Cecco - who painted very much in Caravaggio's style. The most striking feature of Amor was the young model's evident glee in posing for the painting, so that it became rather more a portrait of Cecco than a depiction of a Roman demi-god. The same sense of the real-life model overwhelming the supposed subject was transferred to Mattei's John the Baptist. The youthful John is shown half-reclining, one arm around a ram's neck, his turned to the viewer with an impish grin. There's almost nothing to signify that this indeed the prophet sent to make straight the road in the wilderness - no cross, no leather belt, just a scrap of camel's skin lost in the voluminous folds of the red cloak, and the ram. The ram itself is highly un-canonical - John the Baptist's animal is supposed to be a lamb, marking his greeting of Christ as the 'Lamb of God
Lamb of God
The title Lamb of God appears in the Gospel of John, with the exclamation of John the Baptist: "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" in John 1:29 when he sees Jesus....
' come to take away the sins of mankind. The ram is as often a symbol of lust as of sacrifice, and this naked smirking boy conveys no sense of sin whatsoever. Some biographers have tried to depict Caravaggio as an essentially orthodox Catholic
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
of the Counter-Reformation
Counter-Reformation
The Counter-Reformation was the period of Catholic revival beginning with the Council of Trent and ending at the close of the Thirty Years' War, 1648 as a response to the Protestant Reformation.The Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort, composed of four major elements:#Ecclesiastical or...
, but Cecco the Baptist seems as irredeemably pagan as his previous incarnation as Cupid.
Doria Pamphilj Gallery
The Doria Pamphilj Gallery is a large art collection housed in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome, Italy. It is situated between the Via del Corso and Via della Gatta. The principal entrance is on the Via del Corso...
http://www.roma2000.it/zgadopam.html on the Roman Corso. (The gallery also houses his Penitent Magdalene
Penitent Magdalene (Caravaggio)
Penitent Magdalene is a 16th century oil on canvas painting by Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. The painting portrays a repentant Mary Magdalene, bowed over in penitent sorrow as she leaves behind her dissolute life, its trappings abandoned beside her. At the time of its completion, ca...
and Rest on the Flight into Egypt
Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Caravaggio)
Rest on the Flight into Egypt is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome....
). The collectors ordering the copies would have been aware of a further level of irony: the pose adopted by the model is a clear imitation of that adopted by one of Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
's famous ignudi on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
Sistine Chapel
Sistine Chapel is the best-known chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope in Vatican City. It is famous for its architecture and its decoration that was frescoed throughout by Renaissance artists including Michelangelo, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio...
(painted 1508-1512). The role of these gigantic male nudes in Michelango's depiction of the world before the Laws of Moses has always been unclear - some have supposed them to be angels, others that they represent the Neo-Platonic ideal of human beauty - but for Caravaggio to pose his adolescent assistant as one of the Master's dignified witnesses to the Creation was clearly a kind of in-joke for the cognoscenti.
In 1601/02 Caravaggio was apparently living and painting in the palazzo of the Mattei family
Palazzo Mattei
thumb|250px|right|The courtyard of the Palazzo Mattei di Giove.The Palazzo Mattei di Giove is the most prominent among a group of Mattei houses that forms the insula Mattei in Rome, Italy, a block of buildings of many epochs...
, inundated with commissions from wealthy private clients following the success of the Contarelli chapel where in 1600 he had displayed The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (Caravaggio)
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is a painting by the Italian master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It is located in the Contarelli Chapel of the church of the French congregation San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, where it hangs opposite The Calling of Saint Matthew and beside the altarpiece The...
and The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. It was one of the most productive periods in a productive career. Ciriaco Mattei
Ciriaco Mattei
Ciriaco Mattei was an Italian nobleman of Rome and of the House of Mattei and one of the most prolific art collectors of his time.-Family:...
's notebook records two payments to Caravaggio in July and December of that year, marking the beginning and completion of the original John the Baptist. The payment was a relatively modest 85 scudi, because John was a single figure. The copy may have been made at the same time or very soon after. In January of that year Caravaggio received a hundred and fifty scudi for Supper at Emmaus. For Vincenzo Giustiniani there was The Incredulity of Saint Thomas
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Caravaggio)
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is a painting of the subject of the same name by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, c. 1601-1602. It is housed in the Sanssouci of Potsdam, Germany....
, and in January 1603 Ciriaco paid a hundred and twenty-five scudi for The Taking of Christ. Each of these increased the immense popularity of Caravaggio among collectors - twenty copies survive of the Supper at Emmaus, more of the Taking of Christ.
But for all this success, neither the Church
Christian Church
The Christian Church is the assembly or association of followers of Jesus Christ. The Greek term ἐκκλησία that in its appearances in the New Testament is usually translated as "church" basically means "assembly"...
itself, nor any of the religious Orders, had yet commissioned anything. The paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had been commissioned and paid for by private patrons, although the priests of San Luigi dei Francesi (which contains the chapel) had had to approve the result. Caravaggio's problem was that the Counter-Reformation
Counter-Reformation
The Counter-Reformation was the period of Catholic revival beginning with the Council of Trent and ending at the close of the Thirty Years' War, 1648 as a response to the Protestant Reformation.The Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort, composed of four major elements:#Ecclesiastical or...
Church was extremely conservative - there had been a move to introduce an Index of Prohibited Images, and high-ranking cardinals had published handbooks guiding artists, and more especially the priests who might commission artists or approve art, on what was and was not acceptable. And the playful crypto-paganism of this private John the Baptist with its cross-references to the out of favour Classicising humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
of Michelangelo and the High Renaissance
High Renaissance
The expression High Renaissance, in art history, is a periodizing convention used to denote the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance...
, most certainly was not acceptable. (See Peter Robb, M
M
M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water...
, below).
John the Baptist, Kansas CityKansas City, MissouriKansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
Bellini's Baptist is depicted within a conventional framework that his audience would know and share; Caravaggio's is almost impenetrably private. In 1604 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint a John the Baptist for the papal banker and art patron Ottavio Costa, who already owned the artist's Judith Beheading HolofernesJudith Beheading Holofernes (Caravaggio)
Judith Beheading Holofernes is a work by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, painted in 1598-99. The widow Judith first charms the Assyrian general Holofernes, then decapitates him in his tent.- Subject :...
and Martha and Mary Magdalene
Martha and Mary Magdalene (Caravaggio)
Martha and Mary Magdalene is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It is in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Alternate titles include Martha Reproving Mary, The Conversion of the Magdalene....
. Costa intended it for an altarpiece for a small oratory in the Costa fiefdom of Conscente (a village near Albenga, on the Italian Riviera
Italian Riviera
The Italian Riviera, or Ligurian Riviera is the narrow coastal strip which lies between the Ligurian Sea and the mountain chain formed by the Maritime Alps and the Apennines...
), but liked it so much that he sent a copy to the oratory and kept the original in his own collection. It is now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.
Stark contrasts of light and dark accentuate the perception that the figure leans forward, out of the deep shadows of the background and into the lighter realm of the viewer's own space...The brooding melancholy of the Nelson-Atkins Baptist has attracted the attention of almost every commentator. It seems, indeed, as if Caravaggio instilled in this image an element of the essential pessimism of the Baptist's preaching, of the senseless tragedy of his early martyrdom, and perhaps even some measure of the artist's own troubled psyche. The saint's gravity is at least partly explained, too, by the painting's function as the focal point of the meeting place of a confraternity whose mission was to care for the sick and dying and to bury the corpses of plague victims.http://www.nelson-atkins.org/collections/european/detail/stjohn.htm
Caravaggio biographer Peter Robb
Peter Robb
Peter Robb is an Australian author.Robb spent his formative years in Australia and New Zealand, and between 1978 and 1992 he spent most of his time in Naples and southern Italy, interspersed with sojourns in Brazil. At the end of 1992 he returned to Sydney.His first book, Midnight in Sicily, was...
has pointed out that the fourth Baptist seems like a psychic mirror-image of the first, with all the signs reversed: the brilliant morning light which bathed the earlier painting has become harsh and almost lunar in its contrasts, and the vivid green foliage has turned to dry dead brown. There is almost nothing in the way of symbols to identify that this is indeed a religious image, no halo, no sheep, no leather girdle, nothing but the thin reed cross (a reference to Christ's description of John as "a reed shaken by the wind"). The painting demonstrates what Robb calls Caravaggio's "feeling for the drama of the human presence." This adolescent, almost adult, John seems locked in some private world known only to his creator. Caravaggio's conception of the saint as a seated, solitary figure, lacking almost any narrative identity (how do we know this is the Baptist? What is happening here?) was truly revolutionary. Artists from Giotto to Bellini
Giovanni Bellini
Giovanni Bellini was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. His father was Jacopo Bellini, his brother was Gentile Bellini, and his brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna. He is considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it...
and beyond had shown the Baptist as an approachable story, a symbol understandable to all; the very idea that a work should express a private world, rather than a common religious and social experience, was radically new.
John the Baptist, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte AnticaGalleria Nazionale d'Arte AnticaThe Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, or National Gallery of Ancient Art, is an art gallery in Rome, Italy, located on two sites: the Palazzo Barberini and the Palazzo Corsini....
, RomeRomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
Palazzo Corsini
The Palazzo Corsini is a prominent late-baroque palace in Rome, erected for the Corsini family between 1730-1740 as an elaboration of the prior building on the site, a 15th-century villa of the Riario family, based on designs of Ferdinando Fuga. It is located in the Trastevere section of the city,...
collection of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica
The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, or National Gallery of Ancient Art, is an art gallery in Rome, Italy, located on two sites: the Palazzo Barberini and the Palazzo Corsini....
.http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://www.galleriaborghese.it/barberini/it/default.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3DGalleria%2BNazionale%2Bd%2527Arte%2BAntica%26hl%3Den%26hs%3DstC%26lr%3D%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official Like the John done for Ottavio Costa, the figure has been stripped of identifying symbols - no belt, not even the "raiment of camel's hair", and the reed cross is only suggested. The background and surrounds have darkened even further, and again there is the sense of a story from which the viewer is excluded.
Caravaggio was not the first artist to have treated the Baptist as a cryptic male nude - there were prior examples from Leonardo
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
, Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
, Andrea del Sarto
Andrea del Sarto
Andrea del Sarto was an Italian painter from Florence, whose career flourished during the High Renaissance and early Mannerism. Though highly regarded during his lifetime as an artist senza errori , his renown was eclipsed after his death by that of his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci,...
and others - but he introduced a new note of realism and drama. His John has the roughened, sunburnt hands and neck of a labourer, his pale torso emerging with a contrast that reminds the viewer that this is a real boy who has gotten undressed for his modelling session - unlike Raphael's Baptist, who is as idealised and un-individualised as one of his winged cherubs.
Ask who this model actually is, (or was), and the realism of the individual spills over as a record of Rome itself in the age of Caravaggio. Biographer Peter Robb
Peter Robb
Peter Robb is an Australian author.Robb spent his formative years in Australia and New Zealand, and between 1978 and 1992 he spent most of his time in Naples and southern Italy, interspersed with sojourns in Brazil. At the end of 1992 he returned to Sydney.His first book, Midnight in Sicily, was...
cites Montaigne on Rome as a city of universal idleness, "...the envied idleness of the higher clerics, and the frightening idleness of the destitute...a city almost without trades or professions, in which the churchmen were playboys or bureaucrats, the laymen were condemned to be courtiers, all the pretty girls and boys seemed to be prostitutes, and all wealth was inherited old money or extorted new." It was not an age which welcomed an art that emphasised the real.
John the Baptist (St John the Baptist at the Fountain), Collezione Bonelli, VallettaVallettaValletta is the capital of Malta, colloquially known as Il-Belt in Maltese. It is located in the central-eastern portion of the island of Malta, and the historical city has a population of 6,098. The name "Valletta" is traditionally reserved for the historic walled citadel that serves as Malta's...
Sleeping Cupid (Caravaggio)
Sleeping Cupid is a painting by the Italian master Caravaggio.Unlike many of Caravaggio's works, it can be dated accurately. It was commissioned for Fra Francesco dell'Antella, Florentine Secretary for Italy to Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, and an old inscription on the...
, recognised as by the artist and dating from his Malta period. The painting has been badly damaged, especially in the landscape. The work is known in two other variants, each slightly different.
The theme of the young John drinking from a spring reflects the Gospel tradition that the Baptist drank only water during his period in the wilderness. The painting displays typically Caravaggist extreme chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro in art is "an Italian term which literally means 'light-dark'. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted"....
(use of light and shadow), and is also typical in taking a young John the Baptist as its subject, this time set in a dark landscape against an ominous patch of lighter sky. "The mechanics of drinking and the psychology of thirst are beautifully conveyed through the artful manipulation of limbs and the carefully constructed head." (John Gash).
If it is in fact by the artist, it would have been painted during his approximately 15 months in Malta in 1607-1608. His recognised works from this period include such masterpieces as the Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page and The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Caravaggio)
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is an oil painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio. According to Andrea Pomella in Caravaggio: An Artist through Images , the work is widely considered to be Caravaggio's masterpiece as well as "one of the most important works in Western...
. The latter, in the oratory of the Co-Cathedral of Saint John, is the only work that the artist signed.
In Malta Caravaggio was accepted into the Order of Saint John (the Knights of Malta
Knights Hospitaller
The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta , also known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta , Order of Malta or Knights of Malta, is a Roman Catholic lay religious order, traditionally of military, chivalrous, noble nature. It is the world's...
) and became in effect their official artist, but his stay ended with a mysterious offense and his expulsion from the Order "as a foul and rotten limb". The crime on Malta has been the subject of much speculation, but seems to have extremely serious, possibly even involving the death penalty. Most modern writers believe that it was a crime of violence. His earliest biographer, Giovanni Baglione, said that there had been a "disagreement" with a knight of justice (i.e., a knight drawn from the European nobility); Giovan Pietro Bellori, who visited Malta to see the Beheading of John the Baptist some fifty years after the event, wrote that Caravaggio "had come into conflict with a very noble knight", as a result of which he had incurred the displeasure of the Grand Master and had to flee. It is possible that the offence involved a duel, which was regarded very seriously - but the penalty for duelling was imprisonment, not death. The death penalty was imposed for murder - and a death in a duel or brawl equated to murder - but the wording used by both Baglione and Bellori implied that the knight Caravaggio offended had survived. Peter Robb
Peter Robb
Peter Robb is an Australian author.Robb spent his formative years in Australia and New Zealand, and between 1978 and 1992 he spent most of his time in Naples and southern Italy, interspersed with sojourns in Brazil. At the end of 1992 he returned to Sydney.His first book, Midnight in Sicily, was...
, in his popular biography M
M (book)
M is a book by Australian author Peter Robb about the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. First published in 1998 in Australia by Duffy & Snellgrove, the book provoked controversy on its being published in Britain in 2000....
, (1998), makes the case for a sexual misdemeanour, but his argument is speculative.
John the Baptist, Galleria BorgheseGalleria BorgheseThe Borghese Gallery is an art gallery in Rome, Italy, housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana. It is a building that was from the first integral with its gardens, nowadays considered quite separately by tourists as the Villa Borghese gardens...
, RomeRomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
The date of the John the Baptist in the Galleria BorgheseGalleria Borghese
The Borghese Gallery is an art gallery in Rome, Italy, housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana. It is a building that was from the first integral with its gardens, nowadays considered quite separately by tourists as the Villa Borghese gardens...
is disputed: it was long thought to have been acquired by Cardinal Scipione Borghese
Scipione Borghese
Scipione Borghese was an Italian Cardinal, art collector and patron of the arts. A member of the Borghese family, he was the patron of the painter Caravaggio and the artist Bernini...
some time between his own arrival in Rome in 1605 and Caravaggio's flight from the city in 1606, but Roberto Longhi dated it to the artist's Sicilian period (a date post-1608) on the basis of similarities in handling and colour. Lonhi's view has gained increasing acceptance, with a consensus in favour of 1610 emerging in recent years.
The painting shows a boy slumped against a dark background, where a sheep nibbles at a dull brown vine. The boy is immersed in a reverie: perhaps as Saint John he is lost in private melancholy, contemplating the coming sacrifice of Christ; or perhaps as a real-life street-kid called on to model for hours he is merely bored. As so often with Caravaggio, the sense is of both at once. But the overwhelming feeling is of sorrow. The red cloak envelopes his puny childish body like a flame in the dark, the sole touch of colour apart from the pale flesh of the juvenile saint. "Compared with the earlier Capitolina and Kansas City versions...the Borghese picture is more richly colouristic - an expressive essay in reds, whites, and golden browns. It also represents a less idealised and more sensuous approach to the male nude, as prefigured in the stout-limbed figures of certain of Caravaggio's post-Roman works, such as the Naples Flagellation and the Valletta Beheading of John the Baptist." (John Gash, see references below).
Borghese was a discriminating collector but notorious for extorting and even stealing pieces that caught his eye - he, or rather his uncle Pope Paul V
Pope Paul V
-Theology:Paul met with Galileo Galilei in 1616 after Cardinal Bellarmine had, on his orders, warned Galileo not to hold or defend the heliocentric ideas of Copernicus. Whether there was also an order not to teach those ideas in any way has been a matter for controversy...
, had recently imprisoned Giuseppe Cesari, one of the best-known and most successful painters in Rome, on trumped-up charges in order to confiscate his collection of a hundred and six paintings, which included three of the Caravaggios today displayed in the Galleria Borghese (Boy Peeling Fruit
Boy Peeling Fruit (Caravaggio)
Boy Peeling Fruit is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted circa 1592-1593.This is the earliest known work by Caravaggio, painted soon after his arrival in Rome from his native Milan in mid 1592. His movements in this period are not certain...
, Young Sick Bacchus, and Boy with a basket of Fruit
Boy with a Basket of Fruit (Caravaggio)
Boy with a Basket of Fruit, c.1593, is a painting generally ascribed to Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, currently in the Galleria Borghese, Rome....
). They joined the Caravaggios that the Cardinal already possessed, including a Saint Jerome
Jerome
Saint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...
and the Madonna and Child with St. Anne
Madonna and Child with St. Anne (Dei Palafrenieri) (Caravaggio)
The Madonna and Child with St. Anne is one of the mature religious works of the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, painted in 1605-1606, for the altar of Archconfraternity of the Papal Grooms in the Basilica of Saint Peter...
(the Grooms' Madonna).
By 1610 Caravaggio's life was unravelling. It's always dangerous to interpret an artist's works in terms of his life, but in this case the temptation is overwhelming, and every writer on Caravaggio seems to surrender to it. In 1606 he had fled Rome as an outlaw after killing a man in a street fight; in 1608 he had been thrown into prison in Malta and again escaped; through 1609 he had been pursued across Sicily by his enemies until taking refuge in Naples, where he had been attacked in the street by unknown assailants within days of his arrival. Now he was under the protection of the Colonna family in the city, seeking a pardon that would allow him to return to Rome. The power to grant the pardon lay in the hands of the art-loving Cardinal Borghese, who would expect to be paid in paintings. News that the pardon was imminent arrived in mid-year, and the artist set out by boat with three canvasses. The next news was that he had died "of a fever" in Porto Ercole, a coastal town north of Rome held by Spain.
John the Baptist (St John the Baptist Reclining), MunichMunichMunich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
This Reclining John the Baptist, discovered in Argentina, remains disputed and should perhaps be described as attributed, but it is accepted by Peter RobbPeter Robb
Peter Robb is an Australian author.Robb spent his formative years in Australia and New Zealand, and between 1978 and 1992 he spent most of his time in Naples and southern Italy, interspersed with sojourns in Brazil. At the end of 1992 he returned to Sydney.His first book, Midnight in Sicily, was...
in his 1998 biography of Caravaggio. It is now in a private collection in Munich. The reasons for thinking it may be by Caravaggio, apart from the style and subject matter, are as follows: in July 1610, following news of Caravaggio's death, the bishop of Caserta wrote to Cardinal Scipione Borghese
Scipione Borghese
Scipione Borghese was an Italian Cardinal, art collector and patron of the arts. A member of the Borghese family, he was the patron of the painter Caravaggio and the artist Bernini...
that three paintings by the artist were in the Naples palazzo of the Marchesa of Caravaggio. They were two Saint Johns and a Magdalene. The paintings had been intended for Borghese and he instructed the Marchesa to look after them for him. Unfortunately for Borghese they were seized two days later by the head of the Knights of Malta in Naples, on the grounds that Caravaggio was a knight of the Order and all his possessions devolved on the Knights - which all involved must have known to be untrue, as Caravaggio had been expelled from the Order in 1608. The newly arrived Spanish Viceroy of Naples heard of the affair, but, believing the paintings were in Porto Ercole, wrote to the head of the Spanish garrison there telling him that the Knights had no right to them and that they should be returned to the Viceroy, "in particular the painting of John the Baptist." There is no certain knowledge of what happened to the various paintings after that point. Cardinal Borghese got the Youth with a Ram, but more than a year later. The other two paintings - the Magdalene and the second Baptist - disappeared, but it is possible, though unproven, that the Viceroy may have managed to secure the other Baptist. He would presumably have taken it back to Spain, and from there it could have made its way to South America. All this, however, is speculation - it needs to be pointed out that no-one knows the exact identity of the paintings involved.
Caravaggio never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, putting a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark. The painters in Rome were greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles.
Shadows, he felt, offered shelter as can four walls and a roof. Whatever and wherever he painted he really painted interiors. Sometimes - for The Flight into Egypt or one of his beloved John the Baptists - he was obliged to include a landscape in the background. But these landscapes are like rugs or drapes hung up on a line across an inner courtyard. He only felt at home - no, that he felt nowhere - he only felt relatively at ease inside. ... A body flares with light in an interior of darkness. The surroundings - the world outside the window - can be forgotten. Only the worst news can come from there. The desired body disclosed in the darkness - which is not a question of the time of day or night but of life as it is on this planet - the desired body, disclosed like an apparition, beckons beyond, not by provocative gesture but by the undisguised fact of its own sentience, promising the universe lying on the far side of that skin, calling you to leave.
See Also
- The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Caravaggio)The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Caravaggio)The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is an oil painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio. According to Andrea Pomella in Caravaggio: An Artist through Images , the work is widely considered to be Caravaggio's masterpiece as well as "one of the most important works in Western...