Rediscovery of a Florentine Master

...And how incongruous...

...Reviewed by Ernesto Valentino Italian artist and critic, now living in the United States "B.B...

...we must still ask ourselves: Given the dualism in art, which is, after all, the "vin" of painting...

...tells us that until recent years he had not managed to place himself "on intimate terms" with the sixteenth-century Florentine painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio...

...What, then, is the historical importance of an artist...

...But what intrigues Berenson above all is the "incongruity," the extravagance in composition, which characterizes Caravaggio's work...

...But for a certain critical school, which Berenson calls "German-minded," "a work of art is only a springboard from which to plunge into turbid depths of the subliminal subconscious or to rise with leaden wings into an empyrean when they bring down theories, treatises, pseudo-histories, misinterpretations, romances, gnosticism, occult theologies, ponderous treatises on the relation of art to the class struggle, to plagues and epidemics, to the trade in paintbrushes, to the price of canvas, to the rent of studios, to the kindness of hostesses, to the mothercomplex, etc...

...A new notation is not a new vision...

...What, for example, gives a work like Guernica its importance...

...Berenson says that the excitement Caravaggio caused in these "German-minded" critics was due to the dramatic character of the painter's life, which was squalid, disorderly, and led to a sordid death...

...On the one hand, the author methodically reconstructs and restores the painter to a classicism which brings him close to a Greek of the sixth century BC, and defines him as "the most serious as well as the most interesting painter that Italy produced between Tintoretto and Tiepolo...

...The dead Madonnas were really dead, and the saints were men like any others...

...Here Berenson is adamant not only that it is a fallacy to seek to read into the quality of a painter's work the elements of his private life, but that it is even worse to hope to read in the work of artists the character of their times...

...Anne is represented as a "tall, wizened, harsh-featured peasant woman...

...For St...

...Several of the major ideas expressed in this protest form so vivid a definition of the principles of artistic creation that they are worth quoting: "There will be no rational study of the visual arts (not to speak of the others) until it is assumed as axiomatic that, although it can flourish only when wind and rain are not adverse, art has its own principle of growth almost as much as any vegetable or any animal...

...in that kind of vital irradiation which influences contemporary artists and those of succeeding generations...

...Yet, as one reads this study of Caravaggio, it becomes difficult to credit the "accident" theory...

...Thus, we see what the author of Seeing and Knowing wishes to get at when he dwells repeatedly on the theme of calligraphy, and we know that he is holding himself in check so as not to overstate the case...

...Was Caravaggio purely a technical phenomenon...

...The author then sets up a not entirely convincing parallel between Caravaggio and Courbet, which, it seems to me, does not place the French painter in a particularly comfortable position: "In every work of art and in the number of them that constitutes an artistic personality, one may ask how much is new as concept, and how much is merely a new way, a new technique, a new palette, a new vocabulary and phrasing, a new sonority in expressing what has already been told before, and before, and before...

...Matthew," Berenson exclaims, "I am at a loss to know where I am, how I got there, and what I am seeing...

...No matter what tricks you play with grafting the seed of a carrot, it will not grow into a banana or a pear...

...the book's appearance at this time seems so obvious and it is written with such a lively sense of contemporaneity that Berenson appears, in this acute and lucid examination, to be deliberately placing Caravaggio on the current agenda...

...Only bull'seye lighting interested the painter...

...Naturally, he was accused of being a materialist, insufficiently religious...

...The very tone of this book is, in the last analysis, polemical...

...I doubt," says Berenson, "whether it can be said that he brought a new visual world into being, as Giotto or, turning to the modern, as Cezanne has done...

...he asks about the Virgin with St...

...Though the author affirms that this founder of realism "has ceased to be a class or kind and has become as much of an artistic personality as Leonardo, or Giorgione at least," Caravaggio's fate remains, as it did in his time, that of being the center of an artistic controversy...

...Because of his love of plasticity, he painted a horse as more important than a saint...

...In order to remind painters of the rigors of form, he had recourse to the "novelty" of realism...

...Obviously, Caravaggio "enjoyed introducing incongruities...

...For Berenson, the answer lies in the vitality of the work, or rather, I should say...

...These elements, the author indicates, do not meet with his approval even if they are justified pictorially...

...The young Italians of North and South imitated him, but in Holland, Spain and even France, where artists like Rembrandt, Rubens, Vermeer, Velasquez, Ribera, Le Nain and de la Tour were painting, the profound value of his work was understood, too...

...an art historian asked of Berenson when the latter was visiting an exhibit in post-World War I Berlin...

...Don't you see how the lacerated, bleeding heart of my country is expressed in these masterpieces...

...Before the Martyrdom of St...

...Possibly he enjoyed being different, being original, and disposed to epater le bourgeois...

...Of the Eros of the Pitti Palaca, he vituperates: "No alleviating surrounding, no cradle, no bed, no room, no landscape...

...But we are baffled when he then pours a bucket of cold water over poor Caravaggio, at the same time seeking to free him from the tag, completely unacceptable and unaccepted by Berenson, of being the creator and hero of the Baroque...

...certain of his paintings were not accepted by the Church...

...Then what the noted critic describes as a "happy accident" took place: "The opaque film that kept one from seeing the whole of the hitherto fragmentary acquaintance" disappeared, and he could draw near the painter and "know" him in his entirety...

...But even Bellori, a contemporary who was both a formalist and academic in his work, had to agree that Caravaggio came on the scene when painting needed him most...

...When Berenson concludes, "Qu'importe le flacon si le vin est bon...

...This is an interesting reaction, and one may guess with what horror and rage it would have been greeted by the artist's contemporary partisans...

...Is it important because it represents a human tragedy or because of its intrinsic value as a painting and its esthetic inventiveness...

...Caravaggio, sensational innovator and "troubler of stagnant waters in his own time," a rebel from the conventional academism and "graceful, pretty, sugary, sentimental Raffaellesque ideals that were in vogue," carried his lesson to the most artistically mature painters of Europe...

...Why this contrast, this incongruity...

...suggested syrups and jams of raspberry, strawberry, greengage, plum, blackberry...

...Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Caravaggio brutally voiced the importance of pictorial content, spurred by a violent need to take issue with manierisme...

...Space is ignored...

...Among other things, the author voices a "protest against ignoring esthetic value in favor of general history and its interest...

...To my eye," writes "B.B.," "they were daubs imitating Parisian fashions: their pigment, seemingly not vet dry...

...Anne, of the Borghese Museum...

...On the other hand, he leaves the reader with the implication that his art was not, after all, much more than "a fresh way of presenting the commonplace...

...Nor did he consider the artist an arranger of "shapes and colors," as Berenson implies...

...But Berenson fails to add that the painter, by his very use of incongruity, wished to stake out a claim for creative freedom...

...Anything to avoid looking at the art object first as itself, individual and specific...