Why Caravaggio?

The answer to this question is surely in the paintings’ immediacy. When one stands in front of a Caravaggio painting one is taken aback by the sheer power of the painting. What gives these paintings their immense power? First we should consider what power is. More specifically the theory of power put forth by Michel Foucault. Foucault does not acknowledge power as being situated in any one place or possessed by any particular person or sovereign locality. Power is in the spaces, gaps, interstices and relationships. This is where power operates. The paintings of Caravaggio illustrate this idea on an acute level of absolute carnality.

When one encounters a painting by Caravaggio one feels that there is something unique, special and powerful happening on the canvas. Obviously, through the techniques of chiaroscuro and tenebrism, Caravaggio isolates the figures in darkness to create dramatic effect with the highlighted areas of the painting. The drama does not end there. Caravaggio creates an intimate theatrical presentation of the figures that does not focus on the narrative of the story being represented, but instead attracts the viewer to the potency and drama of the flesh. The flesh is where we see the drama of the situation and, at the same time, the flesh is where the sensory apparatus feels the dynamics of the situation. Caravaggio is not content to make us feel on the anemic level what is considered acceptable in a ‘civilized’, hierarchically disciplined and socially sanctioned mode of feeling. He takes us to extremes. Just as he utilizes the extremes of chiaroscuro and tenebrism, he explores the extremes of human experience: sex and violence.

By utilizing these techniques and perspectives, Caravaggio brings the viewer into the painting. This is where the real power operates: in the relationship of between the viewer and the artist’s expression. Caravaggio is not merely working on the canvas. He is working on us. His project is completely subversive on almost every level. He was paid to create Christian propaganda for the Counter-Reformation powers in order to attract the mostly illiterate masses to the faith of the Catholic Church. He used the characters in the narratives of the Judeo-Christian texts to create something quite different: difference. The project of the Church was to attract followers into an orthodoxy of thought and religious practice. These practices included socialized behavioral practices dictated by the Church fathers. They intended a homogenization of society via religious imposition. Caravaggio painted against this project by subverting it to his own ends.

This very subversion speaks to the power principles of Michel Foucault. Foucault stated repeatedly that any power relationship of domination contains within it the power of resistance. This is what made Caravaggio a nightmare for so many of his contemporaries. He did not follow the rules. He exploded them. He opened up new perspectives that had the power to completely undermine the project of domination inflicted upon European society by Judeo-Christian theological tradition and the moneyed elites.

How Caravaggio did this was by giving birth to a radical individual subjectivity. In this, he shares a radical commonality with Machiavelli. Whereas Machiavelli broke with Christian tradition and ethics so that political power could be embodied in the Prince and later a more dispersed individualism of a Republic, Caravaggio broke with these traditions and ethics to produce a heterogenous empire of feeling and unique subjectivities. His paintings eschewed the traditional, linear interpretation of historical events as outlined in the Bible in favor of a raw immediacy. The logic of the Church goes something like this: ‘These events happened in a orderly succession that led us to our faith in Jesus Christ our Savior.’ Caravaggio’s use of carnal lower-class people and presenting them in intimate isolation within the guise of the Christian narrative followed a different and subversive logic of immediacy: ‘These supposed events are historical, but any experience of them is now.’ The Church clearly exploited the past in order to consolidate a monopoly on power in the present. Caravaggio took the past and placed it in the present and then exploited the present in order to speak to the future. He was breaking the chains that bound thought and feeling to a hollow anachronistic paradigm that was aching to be shattered. How do we know that it was aching to be shattered? By the visceral responses generated in the people who viewed his paintings. (Perhaps a more appropriate word to describe viewing a Caravaggio painting is witnessing. For these paintings are dynamic events that one experiences directly).

In short, Caravaggio was a force of nature, a singularity that turned the art world upside down. The screams and shocking portrayal of blood bring our eyes and hearts to a different historical narrative than the one intended by the Church. The power of his work disturbed the status quo. He brought to our attention all of the passion and horror of history and this who live it. This history was no longer domesticated by narratives in service of the civilizing processes that subjugated human experience by emptying it out with logic and reason. Caravaggio made us look at history through the flesh. He opened the doors to the next five hundred years of art, literature, theater, film and radical philosophy by putting the immediacy of human experience at the center of his work.

He was loved and hated fiercely, as most radical geniuses are. He opened pathways for artists and thinkers as diverse as: Rembrandt, Velazquez, Goya, Rousseau, Delacroix, Manet, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, William S. Burroughs, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Kathy Acker and, of course, the two artists who carried on Caravaggio’s tradition with acute ferocity: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Francis Bacon.

Perhaps the most useful message we can take away from the subversive methodology of Pasolini, Bacon and Caravaggio is that history is there for us to use and open up upon plane of naked human felt experience. In this we can see the potentialities Pasolini spoke to when he said: “Never underestimate the revolutionary power of the past.” It is clear from the revolutionary work of Caravaggio that he took the lead on that charge.

Francis Bacon, who, for his part, perhaps more than any other artist since Caravaggio, used the violence of paint to shock audiences around the world. Bacon clearly carried the Caravaggian impulse forward by basing his production of art on (in his words): “...an attempt to lift the image outside of its natural environment.” and: “opening up areas of feeling, rather than merely an illustration of an object.” One can also see in the work of Francis Bacon a direct homage to Caravaggio in the screaming mouths that Bacon spent a lifetime trying to perfect.

Caravaggio opened the to the future of thought and expression. We see in the work of Caravaggio, Pasolini and Bacon an obsession with articulating the felt experience of the horrors of the historical time within which one is embroiled. As we look out upon the monstrous vicissitudes taking place all around us in the service of the twisted logic of barbaric hyper-capitalism, religious extremism, intolerance and putrefying patriarchy, we can see that the relevance and urgency of the Caravaggian project is as strong as ever for any writer, thinker, painter or creative person capable of articulating the resonant intensities within the felt human experience of this current historical moment we find ourselves engaged in.

In short, Caravaggio was a force of nature, a singularity that turned the art world upside down. The screams and shocking portrayal of blood bring our eyes and hearts to a different historical narrative than the one intended by the Church. The power of his work disturbed the status quo. He brought to our attention all of the passion and horror of history. This history was no longer domesticated by narratives in service of the civilizing processes that subjugated human experience by emptying it out with logic and reason. Caravaggio made us look at history through the flesh. He opened the doors to the next five hundred years of art, literature, theater, film and radical philosophy by putting the immediacy of human experience at the center of his work. He was loved and hated fiercely, as most radical geniuses are. He opened pathways for artists and thinkers as diverse as: Rembrandt, Velazquez, Goya, Rousseau, Delacroix, Manet, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, William S. Burroughs, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and, of course, the two artists who carried on Caravaggio’s tradition with acute ferocity: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Francis Bacon. Perhaps the most useful message we can take away from the subversive methodology of Pasolini, Bacon and Caravaggio is that history is there for us to use and open up upon plane of naked human felt experience. In this we can see the potentialities Pasolini spoke to when he said: “Never underestimate the revolutionary power of the past.” It is clear from the revolutionary work of Caravaggio that he took the lead on that charge. Francis Bacon, for his part, who, perhaps more than any other artist since Caravaggio, used the violence of paint to shock audiences around the world. Bacon clearly carried the Caravaggian impulse forward by basing his production of art on (in his words): “...an attempt to lift the image outside of its natural environment.” and: “opening up areas of feeling, rather than merely an illustration of an object.” One can also see in the work of Francis Bacon a direct homage to Caravaggio in the screaming mouths that Bacon spent a lifetime trying to perfect. Caravaggio opened the to the future of thought and expression. We see in the work of Caravaggio, Pasolini and Bacon an obsession with articultaing the felt experience of the horrors of the historical time within which one is embroiled. As we look out upon the monstrous vicissitudes taking place all around us in the service of barbaric hyper-capitalism and religious extremism and intolerance we can see that the urgency of the Caravaggian project is as strong as ever for any writer, thinker or painter capable of articulating the felt human experience of this historical moment.

These two strategies are clearly primary to the artistic project of Caravaggio.

James Denison