The king of chiaroscuro

These days, it is easy to take it for granted that Caravaggio (1571-1610) is the most popular of the old masters, yet it was not ever thus. In my Baedeker’s Central Italy (published exactly 100 years ago), he is acknowledged as having been ‘the chief of the Naturalist School’, but it is pointed out that from the outset ‘it was objected that his drawing was bad, that he failed in the essential of grouping the figures in his larger compositions.’ The first major exhibition of his works — in what has only very recently been established as the city of his birth, Milan — did not take place until 1951. Its catalogue contained an introduction by Roberto Longhi, the greatest Italian art historian of the 20th century, who had done so much to champion his work. In the intervening years, a whole array of very different knights in shining armour, ranging from the late Derek Jarman to Sir Denis Mahon (still going strong at the age of 99), have pleaded his cause, to such an extent that his triumph is now entirely and rightly assured.

With the wisdom of hindsight, the combination of a luridly colourful life and a genuinely remarkable body of work meant that it was inevitable that Caravaggio’s day was bound to come. In these terms, the biographical high point was his murder of his tennis opponent Ranuccio Tomassoni on 28 May 1606, which makes the tantrums of John McEnroe seem distinctly half-hearted. In defence of McEnroe, it is worth adding that the row was in all probability over a bet rather than a line-call, since tennis players commonly gambled large sums of money on the outcome not just of matches, but of individual points.

As for the paintings, anyone inclined to doubt Caravaggio’s genius need only spend an afternoon in Rome wandering from San Luigi dei Francesi, via Sant’Agostino, to Santa Maria del Popolo to see what all the fuss is about. If they were to divide the next morning between the Borghese and Doria galleries, they would add no fewer than eight pictures to the six of the previous day, and have seen nearly a quarter of his generally accepted oeuvre in one fell swoop.

Given Caravaggio’s fame and the endless monographs that have already been written about his art, some of which are absolutely excellent, one might legitimately ask whether we really need another offering on the king of chiaroscuro. The simple answer is that this is no ordinary book, above all for its illustrations. Indeed, I am sure its lucky author, Sebastian Schütze, would be the first to agree with this judgment, since it is no criticism of his contribution. On the contrary, he is to be congratulated on having produced a short but exemplary text, which scrupulously resists all of the wilder attributional and interpretative fantasies by which the study of the artist has of late been blighted.

Taschen are justly celebrated for the beauty of the best of their books, but on this occasion they have really pulled out all the stops. This is not simply because Caravaggio is a bookshelf-defying monster volume (it measures approximately 16 x 12 inches), which means that it is possible to include spectacular close-ups, but more tellingly because so many of the transparencies or scans are new, with the result that the book as a whole effortlessly surpasses all previous attempts to capture the magic of Caravaggio’s surfaces.

It also underlines the extent to which the physical condition of the works, even when they must be of much the same date, differs as a consequence of their varying fates across the centuries. If it is a minor source of regret that there are not details of all of them (I was hoping to have a chance to test my heretical suspicion that the flowers in the Hermitage Lute-Player are by a Flemish still-life specialist such as Jan Brueghel, and not by Caravaggio), then it should be added in conclusion that overall — and in spite of the eye-watering price — this is a book no serious lover of art will wish to be without.