Judith Beheading Holofernes
Caravaggio taught me that the true artist must be brave and reckless – that he must step outside comfort, hold his gaze steady, and look where others look away.
He was a drunkard, a brawler, almost certainly a killer, and unquestionably that rare thing: a genius. He stole my heart.
I was fifteen when I met him. A school trip to the Louvre in Paris. The girls rushed like moths to the flame of the ‘Mona Lisa’, dutiful and dazzled. I drifted elsewhere and stopped dead before ‘The Crowning with Thorns’.
I bought a postcard and pinned it beside my bed. That night I woke in a cold sweat, the pale, suffering Christ burned into my vision. Caravaggio’s Christ was no abstraction. He was flesh. He was exhausted. He was beautiful.
Caravaggio is routinely described as a Renaissance painter. He was not. By the time he was born in Milan in 1571, the Renaissance had exhausted itself. Harmony had hardened into formula. Grace had become habit. Caravaggio swept the cherubs and idealised landscapes off the canvas and into the gutter.
The Church was among the few reliable patrons. He painted what he was told – martyrdoms, Virgins, saints – but he smuggled in the street. His models were beggars, thieves, prostitutes, cardsharps. He dressed biblical figures in contemporary clothes and staged sacred history in rooms that smelled of wine and sweat.
He absorbed the lessons of the masters, then dispensed with their equilibrium. His realism was forensic. Every crease of skin, every dirty fingernail, every flicker of doubt preserved. His chiaroscuro was not decorative; it was interrogative. Light in a Caravaggio does not flatter. It corners. It extracts confession.
After training in Milan, he moved to Rome – a city swollen with ambition and paranoia, priests and informers, artists and hired blades. The Protestant north was stripping churches bare. Rome answered with theatre. Faith would not retreat; it would overwhelm.
Into that atmosphere stepped Caravaggio: painter, street fighter, reluctant servant of God.
His commission for ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew’ in San Luigi dei Francesi detonated quietly but decisively. The executioner’s blade in mid-swing. The crowd recoils. The saint appears suspended between terror and surrender. Nothing arranged for comfort. You feel the proximity of violence. Rome recognised itself in the canvas – brutal, theatrical, saved at the last second or not at all.
Caravaggio Pure Genius
Success came quickly and sat badly on him. He preferred taverns to salons. Arrested for brawling. Sued for libel. Charged with carrying illegal weapons. Patrons intervened; genius was too valuable a commodity to discard. Yet he seemed compelled to press his luck.
For ‘Madonna and Child with St Anne’, briefly installed in St Peter’s, he used a woman of questionable reputation as the Virgin. The painting was removed. Holiness, it was decided, should not look so convincingly human.
In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni during a violent street encounter – whether duel, quarrel or accident remains debated. Rome issued a death sentence. Caravaggio fled: Naples, Malta, Sicily. A marked man moving through ports thick with rumour.
The Angel
Exile hardened him. In Malta he painted ‘The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist’ – vast, austere, almost silent. Blood seeps across stone. He signed his name in it. Not bravado. Recognition.
He escaped prison, survived assaults, and lived as though time were a creditor closing in. A papal pardon was eventually arranged. In 1610 he set out for Rome expecting absolution. He died instead, feverish and alone in Porto Ercole, 39 years old, his canvases travelling separately.
For centuries he was an inconvenience – too raw for classicists, too physical for polite taste. It took the 20th century, fluent in catastrophe, to recognise him as modern.
The Surrealists saw in him not theology but psychic voltage. Around André Breton they argued that the unconscious was sovereign territory. Caravaggio had already mapped it. His darkness is not emptiness but interior space. Figures emerge from it as from dream or trauma. The sacred and the profane occupy the same bed. Desire and devotion share the same pulse.
He painted the subconscious before it was named.
Duchamp
If Caravaggio represents proximity – blood, breath, imminent consequence – Marcel Duchamp represents detachment. Where Caravaggio staged violent epiphany, Duchamp staged intellectual ambush. By presenting a urinal as art, he shifted the argument from skill to idea. Reverence dissolved under scrutiny.
Caravaggio risked damnation for realism. Duchamp risked ridicule for irony. Both understood that art survives by breaking it out of the frame, then breaking the frame.
Between them lies the ground I have tried to occupy. From Caravaggio I borrow light – the instinct to enter a scene at its most dangerous moment. The raised hand. The unspoken betrayal. The silence after the shot. Characters stand exposed, motives illuminated without consolation. Like his saints, they are compromised, entirely human.
From Duchamp I inherit suspicion. Suspicion of institutions, of piety, of inherited meaning. In prose this becomes structure – disrupted chronology, withheld certainty, context turned against itself. If Caravaggio supplies shadow and blood, Duchamp supplies the scalpel.
The Surrealists recognised in Caravaggio a precursor because he dared to show what lay beneath decorum. I recognise something more practical: courage without ornament. He painted as if forgiveness were unlikely and time short. That urgency matters to anyone writing within the moral fog of history.
Light, in his world, is never comfortable. It accuses.
No serious artist works in ignorance of Caravaggio (or Orwell). One may resist him, argue with him, recoil from his brutality – but one cannot bypass him. He stands at the threshold of modern seeing. He asks a simple question: will you decorate the surface, or will you enter the dark and risk revelation?
Duchamp asks another: will you accept the frame, or dismantle it?
Between those provocations lies the burden of contemporary art.
Caravaggio carried a sword and a death sentence. Duchamp carried irony sharp enough to wound tradition. Four centuries on, Caravaggio’s figures still step out of blackness and demand witness. Duchamp’s gesture still unsettles the museum wall.
Art must risk its own extinction to remain alive.
That is the lesson.
oOo
My Spanish civil war novel WE SHALL PASS is available from indy publisher Luath Press – click HERE.
And all the Amazons – click HERE.
“Young idealistic British volunteers to the Spanish Civil War find themselves in a Guernica-like nightmare, an ever-rising body-count. Add a love triangle stretched across the extremes of the English 1930s class system and you have something very powerful.” – PETER YORK
This is brilliant stuff and I intend to read it more carefully later in the day or week, given the attack on Iran. My initial response as a writer with a PhD in English, and an interest in Romantic poetry from Milton, is in how Caravaggio USED Biblical sources as an artistic device to convey the reality of society, the way that Milton used the Books of Enoch and Genesis to comment on the fortunes of the English Revolution and the demise of Cromwell’s heroic insurrection (against a tyrannical God) into compromise and reaction following the crushing of the Levellers – to whom he was linked. A hundred years after Caravaggio, Milton was an atheist who couldn’t give a stuff for religion but used it as a literary device to avoid the censors. The jury is out on Caravaggio’s beliefs, you know more about him than I, but his distancing from the “pure” Renaissance painters rested in his pure USE of religious iconography rather than belief therein. Out of such artistic necessity, as the true mother of invention, is true genius born.
Many thanks Cliff. As one still on the nursery slopes of exploring art history at 79 this is a wonderful encapsulation of a turning point – or two. The phrase “fluent in catastrophe” is sadly very timely. I did meet a woman who was trying to see everything Caravaggio in public collections world wide – will she make it before some idiot blows us all up? The phrase “then break the frame” put me in mind of Tracy Emin whose show we are booked in to see this week. She recently wrote this which for me summed up perfectly the crucial importance of art. “There’s something about making something from ourselves which is beautiful and otherworldly as well. And we need all of those things right now to remind us that we can be good-spirited, that we don’t have to make corruption, we don’t have to make greed, we don’t have to make power,” “Making a beautiful painting isn’t about making power. It’s empowering yourself to feel something, and then if you’ve done it correctly, other people look at it and feel something, too.” And so say all of us!
Thank you for, ss always, teaching me lessons I should have known.
What a wonderfully observed and interesting comparison of two very different artists, over four centuries apart that brings to mind many questions (and answers) and serves as a timely reminder.
To gaze and gawp at a Caravaggio painting is to immediately recognise the work of a genius. There is a reality that is instantly relatable because he believed not in academic drawing but taking ordinary people off the street and painting them warts and all. Thiis was a radical idea – art up until this point had been seen as sacred and more idealised to hang in churches.
Caravaggio tart was transporting you into the scene of a film – they are epic as they are dramatic..
Indeed, I always like to think what an artist would be producing if they were living and working in today’s world. How they would see and convey the sort of feelings and beliefs that they held in their own lifetime, with contemporary relevance, in perhaps another way or medium.
As Martin Scorsese said about Caravaggio, “he would have made a great film-maker.”
One has to remember that people didn’t read back then, and relied on artists to teach them about life lessons through the pictures and sculptures they made. Can you imagine the impression it must of had on the public? All the wows and gore blimey’s (in Italian of course).
As Clifford points out, he was painting the subconscious before it was invented as he was film scenes.
This was the birth of modernism but it took until the 20th century for this genius to be fully understood and appreciated.
Caravaggio was such a live-wire, and so in touch with the sensorial high-mindedness of man’s essential creative nature, that he gave himself completely to the path and beauty of painting. It was if Caravaggio had a divine calling, that he put his life heart and soul into.
He used chiaroscuro and tenebrism to brilliant effect, and was able to bring forth light from darkness onto the canvas..
For Caravaggio, his tempestuous personality could only be tempered by the base nature and animal instinct of man that gives way to depravity and indulgence but it was probably the only way for him to relax and enjoy himself.
“To hell with virtuosity, pomp and ceremony of the Establishment!” That is what he and Duchamp had in common.
They were doing it on their own terms, grabbing people’s attention and making them question what it really meant to think about form, design, style, subject matter (as artist’s should be asking) to rethink what you see and to see in a different light.
For Duchamp it was more about getting away from painting and coming up the concept, where thought, vision, language influenced each other.
No wonder he was aptly described by the painter Willem de Kooning as a ‘one-man movement.” He was taking on the mantle of questioning what art was about and how it could be done differently.
In the same vain, Caravaggio could be compared to a “one-man army.” He was driven by getting out of the comfort zone” that you had to sacrifice everything for your art, and if that meant fighting and killing, then you ultimately paid a very heavy price – death at the age of 38..
Not many of us are prepared to put our life on the line for what you do.
It takes courage, bravery and a certain coming to terms with the damnation that it is you who has to carry the burden – or more to the point like Christ, are the anointed, enlightened ones that God has chosen.
Both artists challenged conventionality, and achieved the rare feat of being outsiders but also part of the mainstream.
As Clifford so poignantly points out, it is art that reminds us what we are about and the power it can have over us.
We need art in our lives to survive.
It is the antithesis of warfare, where powers destroy what it means to be human for political gains and purposes.
Remember which side you are on.
Love it
One thing that most critics and observers fail to realise that due to his circumstances of having to paint so quickly due to his circumstances ( on the run, using friends and prostitutes as models ) he used black as his main background colour and his lighting was from a single source usually from a skylight giving the strong contrast which he is famous for.
Thank you Clifford for once again choosing a brilliant subject to draw attention to- x