Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi)
Italian; 16th-century, 17th-century
London, England: The National Gallery
96%
The Supper at Emmaus. 1601. Oil on canvas
The painting shows the moment at which the resurrected Christ allows his dinner hosts, several disciples, to recognize him as their Lord — it is a painting about revelation, and it is structured as a sequence of illusions revealing themselves as fictions. The punctum of the picture is Luke's right elbow in the left third of the image, which collects a bit of light (as if cast from the tips of Christ's fingers, pointing in Luke's direction) and with the strength of that illumination appears set to pierced the painting's surface. That's where the painting resolves itself. But the drama begins at the center of the image with the loaf Christ is blessing, which in a forward march melds with the chicken which melds with the fruit bowl which teeters off the table and would thereby seem to be defying its own nature as a depiction (this is how things teetering on tables usually work in European painting), were it not for the fact that this back-front extension of victuals from bread to basket finds an analogue in the similar recession into the picture's belly of the outstretched arms of Cleopas, whose left hand, grazing the outskirts of the canvas and pushing out towards its face, seizes the projectile force of the row of food and shoves it back (the tilt of his head into the center facilitates this) into depth where, eventually, it meets Christ's left arm, from where it moves along the slight concavity of the Lord's throat and shoulders down his other arm to... those pointing fingers, which cast their bit of light at Luke, who throws it at the picture plane. There are more singularly dramatic effects in Caravaggio's oeuvre, but he was in such total command of no other painting he made. There is not an unwarranted stroke, not a single passive object or gesture. At every level it is painting implicating itself in the deceptions of painting, but also averring that there may in fact be substance behind the skein of fakery. (TFS, 2025)
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
93%
David with Goliath’s Head. c1600. Oil on canvas
Caravaggio's better pictures tend to have pure, unelaborated grounds, which is not in itself a boon so much as it's a necessary precondition of the quality that really makes him great. Namely, the way space and dimension in his pictures appear to emerge not as some preexisting field but as a property, exclusively, of how his figures lithely move but then fix themselves in firm relation to each other, and of the individual presences these figures have. Here, David thrusts not only Goliath's head, but with it all of the light that concentrates upon his own (David's) right arm and shoulder and glances up his neck and down his other arm before alighting on the little plane that is his left thumb's nail — he thrusts this all straight towards the surface of the picture, where two globs of white on the giant's tooth and nose (Caravaggio was a master of selective paint handling, building it up only ever where he needed to) serve as both a transgression of the whole illusion and an affirmation of its strange efficacy. There, too — just beneath Goliath's head, at the canvas's bottom right corner — a breath of luminosity, almost imperceptible, starts sneaking into the image, as if in tempering response to the extravagances of light on Goliath's face. This bit of illumination, once you notice it, turns the whole field of darkness behind David and his prize into an actual inhabited space. Yet it's Caravaggio's genius that the "spatializing" force of this bit of light is made to seem subsidiary to David's actions, a result and nothing more of the way he's pushing Goliath so impossibly near the point of destroying the picture. (TFS, 2025)
London, England: The National Gallery
90%
Boy Bitten by a Lizard. c1595. Oil on canvas
Caravaggio would go onto develop a greater economy of means — there's some unneeded pomp in the vase and the greenery on the table — but never would he do much more than match the best moments of this picture. Namely, that exposed right shoulder is echt Caravaggio, concentrating all the energy in the subject's weird scrunching and contortion and pushing it as if outside of the image, past the front edge of the table that's abutting the painting's surface... but then the subject's right hand — which is less of a brilliant plane of flat paint than the shoulder, more modeled and recessive — is actually, spatially, positioned a bit ahead of the shoulder, as is by implication the table and everything on it. So the painting ripples or pulses towards and then away from and then back towards its own outside. This pulse is what's great about Caravaggio's paintings, though in his later works he would enhance it by admitting more breath and emptiness into his compositions without, nevertheless, lessening the perilousness of their density and contractions. (TFS, 2025)
London, England: The National Gallery
86%
Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist. c1610. Oil on canvas
This painting lacks some oomph, but it's still a stunner. The lack lies mostly in the way it dials back the very thing that distinguishes so many of Caravaggio's pictures: their barreling towards the surfaces that hold them back from our reality, their building up to a punctum of identity with the picture plane but then their turning around right upon the threshold of worldly actuality to plunge back into illusion. It works differently here. The executioner's shoulder is the would-be inflection-point in the picture, but then his arm extends past it and, improbably, the baptist's head is pushed out even further. In its shadowed obscurity and slight tilt backwards, the head refuses to consummate all this forward movement (as does, say, Goliath's head in the Vienna Caravaggio) and instead seems to undo it. If this moment of refusal, perhaps reticence, gets the piece demoted to a tier below Caravaggio's best, it nevertheless is so thoroughly responded to by the rest of the composition as to leave the painting in large part redeemed. See: Salome's head, how it counteracts the sway of the baptist's with a tilt towards the frame; the maidservant's counter-counter-tilt, which brings your eye down to the swordsman's bright knuckles; the upturned pyramid of open space these slight movements create, whose pinnacle would be the back of John's head; the base of this pyramid opening onto the infinitude of the painting's black background, which injects an arbitrariness into the actions of the characters before it. (The decapitated's gaping mouth is a silent echo of this.) (TFS, 2025)
London, England: The National Gallery
84%
Crowning with Thorns. c1603. Oil on canvas
The clear and direct source of light, even though it comes from without the scene, somewhat limits this painting. Caravaggio is at his best when the light in his pictures appears immanent, an emergent and placeless property of the bodies he depicts in contest and in processes of self-creation. In this painting, however, radiance is marquee: all the action becomes its effect, not, as in the best of Caravaggio's pictures, its cause. Functionally, this means that the festering masses of light and dark that comprise the figures, especially Christ's crumpled body, seem sort of explained-away; it also means that the glint on the soldier's armor, the elbow of which is poised to puncture the front of the image, has to compete for visual supremacy with all the active illumination taking place behind it. That said, it's Caravaggio we're talking about, so this is still a great picture, if qualifiedly so. Things like the bannister in the lower left, the tension caused by the soldier's inward- and the other three figures' outward-facing bodies, and the geometrical drama of the angled beating sticks, are more than worth the price of admission. (TFS, 2025)
London, England: The National Gallery
75%
Madonna of the Rosary. c1603. Oil on canvas
Caravaggio's greatness lies in the way he isolates forms — especially those comprising bodies and their parts — and sets them into raw, pulsating relationships with each other within the vaguest of spaces, relationships that imply depth and fullness and the sinews of actual physical reality while also, always, somehow negating these qualities as well, affirming their status as illusions. So, the more Caravaggio sets his figures in "real" space, the worse his pictures tend to fare. Here, the drapery and the column and the darkling wall at back make all the would-be frothing corpulence in the foreground seem fixed, almost stagnating — too positional and placed. (Even so, the fullness of any one figure and the abyssal slots of darkness between them all are echt Caravaggio; they're the saving graces of this otherwise middling picture.) Beyond this, the arrangement is sturdy but perhaps too much so. Everything crests very squarely with the Madonna, who's almost pinioned there at the top of the pyramid. (TFS, 2025)