Catriona Miller
In Netflix's stylish adaptation, Ripley, the title character develops an obsession with the dramatic paintings of Italian Baroque master, Caravaggio. Why is it that he, and we, can't get enough of a man known as much for his violent life as for his beautiful art?
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In the first episode of Ripley, Andrew Scott, playing the title character, is asked by Dickie Greenleaf, with whom he is trying to ingratiate himself, if he likes Caravaggio. His neutral reply, delivered with a trademark lizard smile is immediately suspicious - no one can be neutral about the Baroque painter. By the end of the series, Tom Ripley is obsessively seeking out Caravaggio's works and the drama ends with a direct juxtaposition between the seventeenth-century painter and the twentieth-century murderer. Patricia Highsmith's original novel makes no mention of Caravaggio, although Ripley does come to appreciate art. However, the visual punch of Caravaggio's paintings, backed by the obvious parallels of his life on the run as a wanted murderer, prove irresistible to series director, Steven Zaillian.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan in 1571, but made his name as a painter in Rome, having left his home city under the cloud of 'certain quarrels'. In 1600, his three paintings of the life of St Matthew for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, which feature in Ripley, were an overnight sensation. With dramatic, angled lighting, foreshortened poses, and a heightened sense of realism they exploit the same cinematic techniques which Zaillian employs in his slow, stylised monochrome. Caravaggio might have enjoyed a successful, lucrative career in a city full of wealthy patrons, but he could not stay out of trouble. Repeatedly arrested and imprisoned for brawling, defamation, and possession of illegal weapons, in 1606 he accidentally killed a man in a street fight, and fled Rome with a price on his head. For the last four years of his life, Caravaggio was a wanted man, moving between Naples, Sicily, and Malta, always painting, always looking over his shoulder.
In the autumn of 1609, Caravaggio was seriously injured in a knife attack in Naples. He never fully recovered, and when he started on a journey back to Rome, finally with the prospect of a Papal pardon, he was weak with fever. He died en route, penniless, alone, separated even from the paintings he had been carrying with him. David with the Head of Goliath, another Ripley featured work, dates from those last months. The painting is a dual self-portrait, the young artist holding the severed head of the old: the triumphant, youthful giant-killer and the bleeding, open-mouthed agony of a man under sentence of death by beheading. Caravaggio's younger self, a beautiful boyish physique bathed in light, looks pityingly at what he has become. The sword in his hand points the viewer to towards ugly reality of the giant's head. David and Goliath had always been a popular subjects with painters, but never was it treated more personally or more emotively.
Beheadings feature throughout Caravaggio's work: he painted David and Goliath several times, as well as Judith and Holofernes and John the Baptist. However, despite the violence of his life and of blood-spurting images such as these, his work is generally characterised by the implied threat rather than the realisation of brutality. St Paul, thrown from his horse on the road to Damascus seems about to be trampled under its hooves; St Matthew's imminent martyrdom is conveyed less by the sword than by the confused horror of spectators spiralling around the figure of the saint. In possibly his last work, currently on show at the National Gallery, Caravaggio shows The Martyrdom of St Veronica as a moment of calm: the violence here is not the arrow piercing the saint's breast but the dramatic use of red, the heightened lighting which pinpoints armour, weapon and facial expression, and the insistent press of men around the calm, pale female figure.
That brutal realism was one of the reasons why Caravaggio's work fell out of favour soon after his death. Although many artists, in Italy and abroad, picked up on his dramatic poses and chiaroscuro (light and shade) contrasts, nobody did it with quite the intensity. By the eighteenth century, raw emotion was out of fashion anyway and although the Victorians appreciated his precision and observation, they preferred his earlier, lighter works. It is no surprise that of the National Gallery's three Caravaggios, it is The Supper at Emmaus which was acquired in the nineteenth-century, a virtuosic display of foreshortening and still-life which nevertheless frames the figure of Christ within a conventional, centralised symmetry. It was not until the 1920s that Caravaggio was 'rediscovered' and slowly acquired the superstar status he enjoys today.
The Supper at Emmaus also illustrates two other reasons why Caravaggio feels so relevant today. He took people off the street to be his models and the disciples in the painting, astonished to realise that they are actually sitting eating with the resurrected Christ, have an unidealised believability in their care-worn features and well-worn clothes. Ripley took its time, lingering not just on locations, but on the bit-part actors who fleshed out the story - the postmaster, the dog-walker, the landlady - and Caravaggio took similar care knowing that over-familiar Biblical narratives would suddenly feel fresh if they were populated by people who looked like the your next door neighbour. His Death of the Virgin was rejected by the church for its almost grungy realism, and the painting's reputation was not helped by rumours that Caravaggio has posed his prostitute mistress as Mary. But the emotion is all the greater because of the honesty: a middle aged woman, with straggling hair, lined forehead and a griminess about her flesh.
Yet Caravaggio also loved beauty, especially beautiful young men. His early works were often of boys with wine, with fruit, with musical instruments, or playing cards. Even his religious subjects can have an intense eroticism: St Francis in Ecstasy, cradled by a young angel as he lies on the ground or a whole series of nearly nude representations of John the Baptist. We cannot know the truth about Caravaggio's sexuality, but scandalmongers during his life were quick to suggest the reasons behind these subject choices, just as Ripley exploits rumour in its presentation of the three main male characters. There is a hedonism to these paintings, with their emphasis on life's pleasures and their synaesthesiac sensuality. But there is a poignancy, too, these are fleeing pleasures, just as youth itself is transient. Bacchus with his heavy eyes, looks like he might have already stayed too long at the party.
Caravaggio's life story is a dramatic one, he is an ambivalent character at best and perhaps it is wrong to lionise a killer no matter how beautiful and compelling his art is. Ripley tries to seduce us with luscious locations, moody monochrome, and a charismatic lead actor, into empathising with a murderer - shamelessly co-opting Caravaggio and even suggesting parallels between them. But in the end it is the art which compels, not the man. It is impossible to stand in front of one of Caravaggio's paintings and not feel something, whether it's sexual frisson, pity, piety, or sheer adrenaline excitement. And they do that because, like a high-wire act, they tread a fine line, between beauty and ugliness, good and evil, violence and calm.
About the Writer:
Catriona Miller is an independent art historian and writer on art based in the UK. She has taught and lectured on all aspects of art history and is currently researching women artists in British collections and issues of nationalism and identity in nineteenth-century landscape painting.
Twitter: @cmillerartlife
Instagram: cmillerartlife
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