I went all over Europe and North America, tracking Caravaggio’s works and the places that touched his life for my novel A Name in Blood. But in particular I spent a great deal of time in Rome, Naples and Malta…. READ MORE AND VIEW PHOTOS ON MATT REES BLOG
The crypt beneath St Catherine’s parish church, in Żejtun, is a vaulted expanse with a cold slab stone floor. Characterised by silence, the crypt was built in the hole created by the cut stone used to build the church. It is a very humid place and bodies buried there in the past were well-preserved. When the crypt used to be cleaned more than just bones were transferred to the ossuary, according to Fr Gino Gauci. He is coordinating the transformation of the crypt into a visitors’ attraction as part of a wider project to create a heritage trail and museum within the Żejtun church. During a visit by Tourism Minister Mario de Marco yesterday, Fr Gauci recalled his experience as a child accompanying his father when the crypt was still being used to bury parishioners. “It was no miracle the bodies were well preserved. It was just the humidity,” the priest told a bemused minister. Visitors to the church will start the tour from the oratory and move on to the main church by passing through a narrow corridor. Fr Gauci explained that a large portrait depicting the beheading of St Catherine was believed to have been an abandoned sketch of Caravaggio’s beheading ….. READ MORE ON “TIMESOFMALTA.COM”
( January 22, 2013 ) – “Moretti and Monteverdi’s Caravaggio,” a ballet performance recorded at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, will be shown on Sunday, Jan. 27, at 2 p.m., and Wednesday, Jan. 30, at 7 p.m., at Criterion Cinemas at the corner of Temple and George streets in New Haven. The 93-minute show, conducted by Paul Connelly and starring Beatrice Knop, Polina Semionova and Vladimir Malakhov, was choreographed to reflect the artistic philosophies of the legendary Italian painter. (A Caravaggio exhibit is coming to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford this spring.) Details: www.bowtiecinemas.com.
Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Caravaggio:A Life Sacred and Profaneis essential reading for anyone interested in this mercurial late 16th, early 17thcentury Italian artist, whose brilliant, often disquieting work challenged the conventions of the Mannerist style that preceded him and opened up the path of gritty realism for artists in the centuries that followed. The book creates a more subtle, complex, and persuasively human portrait of a man too often reduced in the past to the caricature of the bad boy artist—violent, promiscuous, rebellious and anti-social. Graham-Dixon’s Caravaggio is all this, and at the same time deeply empathetic with the social outcast and the needy, and a serious, intentional student of the art and literature of the past as well as of his contemporaries. While much of his brief time on earth was mired in the darkness that pervades almost all his painting, he is here portrayed as sincere in the spiritual aspiration characterized by the sharply contrasting light. He was an ardent practitioner of “chiaroscuro”–and not only in his canvases : “Caravaggio’s life,” writes Graham-Dixon, “is, like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights.” Michelangelo Merisi, named Caravaggio after the town of his origin, was born into the very…… READ MORE ON “THEBUDDHADIARIES.BLOGSPOT.COM”
In our previous post on scofflaw and artist Caravaggio (born Michelangelo Merisi), we told the story of his turbulent life up to the point when he’d committed an unforgivable crime: murder.
Caravaggio wasn’t new to legal trouble, and his powerful patrons had protected him before. But this time, it was a little trickier. Unwilling to be tried in court, the 35-year-old, instead, fled Rome.
But he desperately wanted a pardon. That might be the reason behind his painting “Saint Jerome,” currently in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, which some scholars believe was executed shortly after his crime in 1606. We know, after all, that Caravaggio sent the painting to his latest and most powerful patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. And we know that, more than just a depiction of a saint, it’s a depiction of a saint known for some carousing in his early days—who eventually, of course, saw the light.
Perhaps Caravaggio was trying to make a parallel here to show that he, too, could turn things around. Another hint: Although Jerome was often shown with a bit of red, here he’s swamped in (and seemingly protected by) it. And red? That’s a cardinal’s color.
Caravaggio’s “Seven Works of Mercy,” in Naples
If the painting was a request for a pardon, though, the pardon wasn’t forthcoming. At least not yet. And so Caravaggio headed south to Naples. During his 7-month stay, the artist worked on several commissions, ….. READ MORE ON WALKSOFITALY.COM
An overarching premise of the exhibition Bodies and Shadow: Caravaggio and His Legacy is the artist’s legacy as it echoed across decades and even centuries of European painting. But an artist working in Long Beach right now has a surprisingly direct connection to the 16th century master.
Sandow Birk is candid in recalling that when he first encountered Caravaggio’s work as a student studying abroad, he was just a kid from L.A. who knew little about the art of painting. Struck by the dramatic poses, strong lighting and emotional impact that he saw in Caravaggio, Birk knew that he wanted to paint like that. Just as Caravaggio often took his models from the streets of Rome, Birk painted what he saw around him–street scenes of 1990s Los Angeles, populated by kids in hooded sweatshirts in urban landscapes marked by street graffiti. He arranged the figures in compositions directly traceable to Caravaggio.
We interviewed Birk in his Long Beach studio recently. Excerpts from that video are part of the multimedia tour of the exhibition, available to rent on site. The tour covers more than two dozen highlights of the exhibition, including not only work by Caravaggio, but also one of Birk’s other favorites, the Magdalen with the Smoking Flame by Georges de la Tour, from LACMA’s collection. Birk’s love of painting is palpable in the video, as is his process of learning through close observation of the work of Caravaggio and other artists in this exhibition.
LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy, an exhibition devoted to the legacy of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), one of the most influential painters in European history. The exhibition was co-organized by LACMA, the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, under the auspices of FRAME (French Regional American Museum Exchange), an international consortium to which all four museums belong.
Caravaggio’s striking realism, violent contrasts of light and darkness, and ability to express powerful emotions were as surprising to his contemporaries as they are to us today. In this exhibition many of the innovations introduced by Caravaggio were adopted by painters from different countries, backgrounds, and influences. In this exhibition an unprecedented eight paintings by Caravaggio himself are shown together for the first time in California. Fifty more paintings document his influence on a host of painters from France, Spain, and the Netherlands, including Georges de La Tour, Gerrit van Honthorst, Velázquez, and Simon Vouet.
“The four-hundredth anniversary of Caravaggio’s death in 2010 triggered many exhibitions throughout the world. These have generated new scholarship, reattributions of paintings and an ongoing fascination with Caravaggio and the Caravaggesque painters,” says J. Patrice Marandel, the Robert H. Ahmanson Chief Curator of European Art at LACMA, “Our exhibition has benefited from this new research and presents to the public unexpected aspects of the subject.”
Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy first opened simultaneously in two French venues, the Musée Fabre in Montpellier and the Musée des Augustins……. READ MORE ON FRAMEMUSEUM.ORG
It is not often that eight Caravaggios are exhibited together at an American art museum. It provides opportunity: To study the paintings themselves, to compare them to each other, to see what the Caravaggisti borrowed from the master and to see what they merely tried to borrow. Sometimes, as in the case of LACMA’s “Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy,” we can even use the Caravaggios on loan as a kind of baseline in an effort to help us understand whether or not a nearby painting might be a ‘new’ or ‘re-discovered’ Caravaggio.
(The LACMA show, which is on view through Feb. 10, 2013 and will travel to the Wadsworth Atheneum, is the fraternal twin of “Caravaggio and his Followers in Rome,”last year’s show at the Kimbell Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada: Same idea, different checklists. The Kimbell show claimed ten Caravaggios, the National Gallery of Canada’s three more. That prompted Richard Spear to take to Burlington Magazine to argue that the two additional works shown at NGC weren’t Caravaggios and that a third NGC-exhibited ‘attributed to’ painting, weren’t either. This section of the post was updated after I learned the citation in the LACMA catalogue is a bit loose.)
About 125 miles down Interstate 5 the San Diego Museum of Art has long had in its collection the above painting by an unknown Italian artist. While recently ….. READ MORE ON BLOGS.ARTINFO.COM
Theatre: Caravaggio. St James Cavalier
The life of great artists must, by virtue of their fine work, be good ground for analysis and investigation. It is often their backgrounds, their influences and their experiences which allow them to create such a strongly productive outpouring of emotion in their creative work.
As an exercise in memory and characterisation, Micallef succeeded in ….. READ MORE ON “TIMESOFMALTA.COM”
