CLICK HERE FOR THE OFFICIAL PAGE OF THE SHOW

 

   “Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane”: Andrew Graham-Dixon’s biography of Caravaggio glosses over the artist’s reputation for whoring and brawling

A visit to the Cathedral of San Salvador in Jérez de la Frontera in Andalusia enabled us to examine, over the sacristy door, another very interesting copy of The Incredulity of Saint Thomas in Potsdam, no doubt from the first third of the 17th century, with an added number of truculent figures. The rather awkward style, not far removed from the coarseness of the Loches canvases, reminded us of another local Andalusian painter (someone like Pablo Legot ?), however, the presence of this copy of a model located in Rome until about 1815 so close to the port of Cadiz raises the question of the success, which in Spain was precocious, of Caravaggio’s compositions and the importation of copies or originals by the Lombard master.
Whatever the case, it would be interesting to have a complete study of… READ MORE ON THE ARTTRIBUNENEWS

Spain, First Third of the XVIIth Century, after Caravage
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas
Oil on Canvas (The painting hangs too high up to be measured)
Jérez de la Frontera, Cathedral of San Salvador
Photo : Pierre Curie

One of the figures, St. Francis of Assisi, is depicted standing behind the holy family. He seems to have arrived in the traditional, brown Franciscan robes, his hands folded. The other figure, St. Lawrence, stands in the forefront in his gold-colored deaconate garb.

The unusual additions can be explained by the fact that the painting was commissioned by the Company of St. Francis, a lay apostolate that was in charge of the Oratory of St. Lawrence in Palermo, Italy. When the company initiated restorations to the building in 1669, they commissioned Caravaggio to create this painting and to include a few of their favorite patron saints. The members of the lay oratory wanted to create a scene that people could relate to and, it seems, one that connected their apostolate to the holy family.

Yet the inclusion of these two saints is not the only anomaly. In addition to depicting people that did not yet exist, Caravaggio also conflates the Italian clothing of his time with the backdrop of the Middle East. It also features an angel holding an actual banner of praise. The holy family appears almost glamorous and perhaps a bit too put-together for one that has traveled so far. But then again, most nativity scenes are creative interpretations of this historic night.

And, in this case, it is the inaccuracies that can make the painting most effective as a spiritual inspiration. Caravaggio depicted the holy family as a group of people to whom viewers of the painting could relate. The figures bear no halos. Joseph looks a bit younger and more muscular than we might normally imagine, and even Mary’s appearance in Italian dress must have helped her image to appear more relevant to onlookers. Caravaggio’s unique interpretation ….. READ MORE THE ARTICLE ON THE HUFFIGTONPOST.COM

ON AMAZON.COM  IS NOW AVAILABLE THE DVD OR THE DOWNLOAD OF THE FULL VERSION OF THE SHOW  “CARAVAGGIO XXI: 21 tableaux vivants from the paintings of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio” (40 minutes). ONE SHOW FOR A WORLWIDE AUDIENCE BECAUSE IS COMPOSED OF ONLY IMAGES AND MUSIC.  

 CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION AND PURCHASE DVD

CLICK HERE FOR DOWNLOAD

CARAVAGGIO XXI is a work of great visual impact yet extreme simplicity. One show only images and music they can enjoy the entire global audience. Using the technique of “tableaux vivants”, the scenes are composed of minimal elements (fabrics of varied colors and texture, common objects) which are used by the actors as they “compose” the 21 canvases in front of the audience. Once constructed, the paintings created the scene that would have appeared in the artists’ studio. The costumes and fine drapery are transformed in seconds by the ability of the actors who each take on the role of model, scenographer, costumer and props manager. The action is immobilized as if illuminated by one lone flash of lighting as one moment, one “perfect” gesture brings to life the heart of the painting. The impeccable iconographic precision, the expressive force of bodies and faces in the characteristic lateral “cut” of light, fully bring out the “poetry of reality” which constitutes what distinguishes the works of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

With: Gaetano Coccia, Adriana Del Duca, Dora De Maio, Francesco De Santis, Chiara Giuliani, Francesca Lugnano, Mauro Milanese

Author & theatrical director: Ludovica Rambelli

Music from Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi and others

Producers: Stefano Mavilio (ArsTuaVitaMea) & Maria Teresa Pilloni (Studio Blu Production)

Movie director: Massimo D’Alessandro

AVAILABLE ALSO FOR TV NETWORK, BROADCASTER AND DISTRIBUTORS – Contact info@studiobluproduction.org for information

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a dangerous man. Violent and sexually profligate, he murdered a pimp, escaped from prison, and was the victim of a vendetta, dying before he was 40. He was also an artist of penetrating humanity whose mastery of darkness and light influences painters and film-makers to this day. Darshan Singh Bhuller is a British choreographer who, in the course of a wide-ranging career, has created work for many leading dance companies. In 2006 he created Stand and Stare, a piece about the artist LS Lowry for Rambert Dance Company, and in his latest offering, Caravaggio: Exile and Death, he turns his attention to the 17th-century Lombard painter.

Bhuller leans heavily on Derek Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio. In particular, he borrows Jarman’s device of a fictional love triangle, in which Caravaggio switches his affections from a young street fighter to the boy’s girlfriend. In a soap-operatic conflation of fact and fantasy, both lovers end up dead, the boy becoming one with the murdered pimp Ranuccio Tomassoni, and the girl doubling as the drowned prostitute whose body served as the model for that of Christ’s mother in the painting Death of the Virgin. Bhuller also borrows Jarman’s calculated use of anachronism: a tableau of a blowsy young Bacchus includes an iPad; back-projected graphics have a computer-game gloss; and Bhuller himself appears on film as a sneering cardinal in sunglasses. All look like desperate measures inserted to beef up a narrative devoid of dramatic juice. Given the facts of the artist’s life, so thrillingly summoned in Andrew Graham-Dixon’s 2010 biography, it would seem difficult to manufacture an evening so lacking in colour, but Bhuller manages it. If you’re hoping for sodomy, throat-slitting and the creative blaze of Quattrocento Italy, forget it. What you get is an hour and a half of quirky….. READ MORE ON THE GUARDIAN/OBSERVER

The exhibition examines what many have described as a crucial period in Italian painting, starting as the sixteenth century drew to a close and Rome was still reeling from the trauma inflicted by the Lutheran schism, and developing, with ever-increasing vigour, through the reigns of four important Popes: Clement VIII Aldobrandini, Paul V Borghese, Gregory XIV Boncompagni and Urban VIII Barberini. Although this singular period only lasted for a short time, just forty years, from about 1595 to about 1635, it was what happened in those forty years that determined so many of the developments in European artistic practices until the end of the seventeenth century…. READ MORE ON THE OFFICIAL SITE

This October, CMA offers the rare opportunity to view the work of this Italian Baroque master. Ecce Homo (Behold the Man), painted by Caravaggio around 1605, and lent by the Musei di Strada Nuova – Palazzo Bianco, Genoa.  This powerful painting will be the centerpiece of an exclusive exhibition organized by CMA on view October 21, 2011 – February 5, 2012 in the only US venue.

Underscoring his remarkable influence upon his contemporaries will be ten other paintings—images of saints and sinner alike, lent from the collections of major Ohio museums and one private collection. These are works by artists who emulated Caravaggio’s distinctive and dramatically realistic style and they demonstrate the importance of Caravaggism throughout seventeenth-century European painting.

The Columbus Museum of Art joins the City of Columbus in celebrating our great city’s Bicentennial with programs and exhibitions throughout 2011 and 2012.  Caravaggio: Behold the Man! commemorates the Columbus Bicentennial through the celebration of the sister city relationship between Columbus, Ohio and Genoa, Italy.

CLICK HERE FOR THE OFFICIAL MUSEUM SITE

 

Exhibition: CARAVAGGIO AND HIS FOLLOWERS IN ROME

 Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth, Texas – October 16, 2011 through January 8, 2012

This ambitious exhibition explores the profound influence that Caravaggio had on painters from all over Europe who traveled to the papal city of Rome to profit from its vitality as a cultural capital. Not since Michelangelo or Raphael had one artist affected so many of his contemporaries and so irrevocably changed the course of European painting.

Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome brings together approximately 60 paintings by Caravaggio and the artists who were first to respond to his revolutionary new style. The 400th anniversary of the artist’s death was celebrated in 2010 with several significant exhibitions in Italy that reconfirmed his legacy and the remarkable power of his paintings. The present exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Kimbell Art Museum, provides an unprecedented occasion for a North American audience to examine his work and its impact on a whole generation of artists of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish origin who resided in Rome during his lifetime and immediately afterwards. A core of paintings by Caravaggio will be matched with major works by such diverse figures as Orazio Gentileschi, Jusepe de Ribera, Simon Vouet, and Gerrit van Honthorst––artists whose imaginations were indelibly impressed by the master’s sense of drama, monumentality, and humanity…. READ MORE ON “KIMBELL ART MUSEUM” OFFICIAL SITE