The End of Caravaggio

Bologna's argument about the radical nature of Caravaggio's art has been fruitful and interesting, particularly when he has critiqued the simplistic iconographic readings of Caravaggio's paintings that have proliferated in the last few decades. There is certainly something exciting about Bologna's discovery that Caravaggio's Roman friend Andrea Ruffetti da Toffia, who sheltered him in Rome for a month after his murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni at the end of May 1606, was the means by which Caravaggio came into contact with the marquis of Villa in Naples, now recognized as the main force behind the commission for The Seven Acts of Mercy, the first known commission Caravaggio got in Naples. (16) Ideas and attitudes, or ideological positions, though, are not caught by association like viruses. The fact that the marquis of Villa, friend of a friend of Caravaggio's, was a defender of Galileo in 1610 does not, in and of itself alone, prove much about Caravaggio's paintings in 1606. Openness to new ideas of various kinds, not just in the new sciences, was certainly one of the traits shared by Caravaggio's supporters, but whether this in itself tells us about Caravaggio's specific aims as an artist is unclear. Bologna's effort to tie Caravaggio's realism to the new science's investigations of the real remains on one level a "Zeitgeist" argument, a general parallel drawn between one form of experimentation and another that is quite different in nature. On another level, Bologna's thesis relies on a contradictory assumption that Caravaggio's rebelliousness was remarkably obedient to his patrons' rebelliousness.

Bologna's latest attempt to tie Caravaggio's final works to this same "Galilean" attitude on the part of patrons seems to me to evade an important point about his art, an aspect that was made very visible by this exhibition: Caravaggio's art was sensitive not just to the ideas and desires of individual patrons but also to the expectations of a larger, mass audience as well. In Rome, he confronted Romans with Romans themselves, standing in for biblical characters. In Sicily, he may have responded to a far more traditional society with elements that recall not only local gestures but also folklore, local legend, popular arts. (17) It appears that Caravaggio's art in this period specifically addressed not just the libertines and the skeptics but also the orthodox and the devout, and it did so not on new ideological terrain but by the manipulation of every device that painting can deploy to reach and move its audience. The means that Caravaggio found in the final years differed from those he found in Rome, but in the end look just as idiosyncratic.