40 Days, 40 Moments in Art — Day 2: Caravaggio’s Apostles
One of my favorite classes that I took in high school (and one of my favorite classes ever) was AP Art History. First off, the fact that an inner-city school in Tucson offered an Advanced Placement course on the history of art was a miracle in of itself. Second, the teacher was amazing and engaging. Third, it happened to have just the right mix of nerdy jocks and popular-crowd rabble-rousers to be fun for everyone.
Like most classes about culture taught in this country, it did have one fatal flaw: it focused almost exclusively on “Western Art” (which for some reason started in the Middle East and Egypt, but then quickly migrated north by northwest and never looked back). I can only hope that someday I can learn more about the artistic traditions of Africa and Asia and Latin America and develop a broader appreciation for art in all its various shapes and forms.
One of my favorite buzzwords that came out of this class was chiaroscuro, which has to do with the contrast of light and darkness. If you’ve ever seen a Rembrandt painting, you probably get the gist. When I was in film school, a cinematographer showed us the way to get a similar effect on film. The key, apparently, is to have one large, broad source of light, like a white board reflecting the light of a Tungsten lamp onto the subject.
My cinematographer teacher described this style as the “Dutch Masters” look. The Dutch seem to get a lot of love in film school, with the term Dutch Angle also thrown around quite a bit. I suppose this makes sense, given the rich tradition of painting that came out of the Netherlands. We should not forget, however, that chiaroscuro is an Italian term. We can see shades of it in the Renaissance, in the three dimensional shading of Da Vinci’s portraits and the draped togas of Raphael’s Greco-Roman philosophers, but in my opinion, the concept really took off with Caravaggio. If Rembrandt was the master of light, Caravaggio was the grandmaster of shadows.
When I first say Caravaggio’s painting of “Doubting Thomas” shoving his finger into the side of Jesus, I was… disgusted. It was too real, and frankly too gross: the sort of thing that would make a high school kid toss his cookies all over the shoes of the cute cheerleader in the next row over (which thankfully never happened… or maybe it did happen and I’ve since blocked the memory from my mind). Caravaggio doesn’t give our eyes much wiggle room. The contrast between light and dark is so severe that the background fades to complete black, which forces you to focus on the four figures and nothing else. This is next level chiaroscuro: tenebroso as my AP Art History teacher called it, a style the Caravaggio is said to have invented.
Caravaggio was a fairly shameless shock artist. His depictions of David and Goliath are gruesome and graphic as is his painting of Judith cutting off the head of Halofernes. He had the audacity to hire prostitutes as models. If none of this sounds like proper conduct for a painter of treasured Judeo-Christian traditions, we should remember that most of the Bible is undeniably rated “R” and a decent amount of the text talks about a guy named Jesus who hung out with beggars, leapers, tax collectors, and prostitutes.
Perhaps it is the shock factor that makes this painting so real. Bible stories are often colored in such rosy, Sunday school cartoon simplicity that it’s easy to forget what a wound looks like and how oddly disturbing it would be for a man to place his finger into another man’s scar. Yet Caravaggio stays true to the text and the result is undeniably powerful. My brow might not be quite as furrowed as Thomas’s, but the fascination and and horror at the sight of this living dead man remains in much the same vein to this day.
Caravaggio’s shadows don’t hide human faults. If anything they reveal them. Every wrinkle, every bump, anything that can cast a hint of shadow is given texture and definition. Perhaps that is, in fact, the point. His focus on human frailty actually reveals a certain type of redemption, a beauty made all the more miraculous by the way in which it emerges from and coincides with that which we consider ugly or shameful. After all, if there was no incredulity and no doubt, faith wouldn’t have much meaning.
