Caravaggio
or Bust

What I Did on My Vacation
While America Went to Hell

by Doc Cuddy, Editor

There are seven, possibly eight, paintings by the artist known as Caravaggio (1573-1610) in the United States:

One in New York City is privately held and cannot be seen. The Princeton painting is of questioned authenticity. Having attended the two at the Met and the one in Fort Worth, I was left with four Caravaggio's to be sought out: Kansas City, Detroit, Cleveland, and Hartford.

They seemed worthwhile goals for an otherwise typical American driving vacation, though this one, in October, 2004, with greed littering the landscape and the clouds of war ill-lit in the distance, was hardly carefree.

Always, always the figured bass in the background: is American fascism coming, full-blown American fascism? Or is it here already and we just haven't recognized it? I would drive through lovely, sun-lit pastoral landscapes, mile after mile, and think about how German vacationers in the booming, optimistic 1930s must have driven through lovely, sun-lit pastoral landscapes. The feeling was of nostalgia and loss, that Chaos and Old Night were descending on America. Bigtime.

Note: All images are thumbnails, and can be enlarged by clicking on them.

1. Before: Everything’s Up-to-date in Kansas City
To the right, a small river, on the other shore a horizontal waterfall with fountain. In the foreground an amphitheater 50 feet below me. To the left up a green hill, a quarter of a mile away the neoclassical columns of the Atkins-Nelson Museum in Kansas City.

A Sunday in early October. The traffic on the Interstate had been ferocious, line after line of shiny SUV's on the way to see the Chiefs and the Texans play. The bright sunshine pouring out of the pure blue you get in the middle latitudes had picked out the red Indianhead logo on vehicle after vehicle.

Exiting well before the stadium, I quickly found what I wanted: this lovely plaza with its small river and fountains and a bench on which to wait in the sun for the hour till the museum opened.

On the plaza below, oddly, three young gymnasts are practicing. They slowly entwine themselves, balance for a moment, then release. Again and again. This with no pads on what must be a very hard surface. Not once do they slip or fall though now and then they have to try a particular pose several times before achieving balance.

Finally, reluctantly, I leave them to it, and go into the museum. In a gallery at the end of a long hall I find a magic chamber. You don't find many magic chambers in this world, especially not in public spaces with no admission charge.

The font from which this particular magic emanates is hanging on the wall of the small room and has a name: "St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness." It's a painting dating from around 1605 by Caravaggio. The work was commissioned as an altarpiece for a small, remote Italian chapel. Never installed, it went from Rome to Spain and--no more unlikely than other figurations in the dance of time--eventually to Kansas City.

Robert Hughes famously remarked, "There was art before Caravaggio and there was art after Caravaggio. They were not the same."

Indeed.

How to specify "magic"? Is it "presence"? Not just. The Queen of England has presence but is of no importance beyond the surface rituals surrounding her.

Is it antiquity? No; Barbara Bush has antiquity and is of no interest other than as an unpleasant example of a life mis-lived.

Is it beauty? Well. Maybe. Partly.

There sits a youngish John--no doubt one of Caravaggio's rough-trade boys--ostensibly in the wilderness. Draped in a truly outrageous (and outrageously lovely) red cloth (satin? silk? in the wilderness???), his loins warmly and modestly covered by a shockingly photo-realist sheepskin, he sits in a strong light coming from the upper left, light that--in the manner that was part of Caravaggio's genius--conceals as much as it reveals. The light shows us a lot, especially if we're willing to look: the boy-man is at the cusp, fading from the Greeks' much-admired fuzzy-cheekedness into the already slightly care-worn dilapidation of early manhood, a face both troubled and baffled by the proximity of a myth too large for anyone to bear.

A barefoot boy, yes, but no cheeks of tan here--such a pallor!--and beware those feet (lest such is your fetish) because Caravaggio gives us the right foot complete with dirty toenail and dirty toes stuck right in our face. Yet, look up and there is that glorious body with, even, one nipple--too large and just a shade too pink--peeking out from the edge of an arm's shadow.

Farther up we come to the face unlined. Serious? Or merely bored from the long pose? We can't tell. As he denies us the penis, Caravaggio denies us the eyes.

The gaze is cast downward, and the devilish—or is it heavenly?—light causes the eyes to disappear in darkness under the brows. Almost. You look, and look again. Wait, yes, the eyes are there, barely painted in. And they are looking out of the frame, out of the plane of the picture where what awaits? Hope? Love? Death? You?

He’s holding the cruciform stave and the appropriately signifying plants are growing at his feet. Officially, orthodoxly, we are supposed to contemplate this young John contemplating not only the sorry ways of the world but the very coming of one who will save the world from its sorry ways.

That Caravaggio. Of course he paints the one who will baptise the alleged savior of the world, paints him to a T to delight the eye and console the heart of the believer. So rich and so convincing is the surface story that none of the comfortably pious for whom he painted could doubt, not for an instant.

Come to the painting from outside the framework of belief that commissioned it and it is a work of profoundly beautiful sadness. This, remember, is not only the boy that will baptise. This is also the boy that will drive Salome mad with desire, and whose head will roll before Herod himself. While latter-day bodies cavort outside in the sun, this one sits trapped, stopped for a moment's pause on a path of near-divinity leading quickly to a brutal end.

2. After
We're jaded aurally. We've heard Beethoven so often that it’s almost impossible to hear him at all now.

We think we're jaded visually (all these images--print, movies, TV, internet), but we're not.

Beethoven badly performed and badly reproduced still has tremendous power. If can you still hear, even a weak performance on a bad CD can communicate powerfully. The magic can come through.

Paintings are a different matter entirely. Paintings are one-off jobs: A reproduced Rembrandt is nothing more than decorative.

A visual reproduction gives us content, sort of. We look and say, Oh yes, that's the famous Mona Lisa with her famously enigmatic smile. Or: Of course, those are Van Gogh's famous--and extremely valuable--sunflowers.

A visual reproduction never gives us greatness. Only hints, reminders of greatness. Take away whatever the x-factor is--magic, dimensionality, planar realities, metaphysical funnel, and all you're left with in a reproduction is pretty sunflowers and a sweet little smile.

Could it be that the commodification of art is a primitive attempt to control and cage—and for the very rich to try to possess—the power of the one true original object? Think of poor Giocanda in her bullet-proof, bomb-proof tourist-cage in the Louvre: layers of plexiglas or whatever miracle-substance, velvet ropes to keep the hordes at a safe distance. Add in the billion reproductions of the image and what's left of the encounter with the real thing? Very little.

Go to Kansas City. Find the Nelson-Atkins Museum. Walk into the room where John hangs. Sit on the convenient leather-cushioned bench. And there is nothing between you and—ten feet away—Caravaggio. Nothing to shield your weary 21st-century eyes. And, given the many other attractions of the museum, there's a good chance there'll also be no one to interrupt whatever happens in the presence of a great work.

3. Cleveland: In Extremis
I arrive early and sit in the park in front of the museum waiting for it to open. A quiet, bright early-October Friday. Squirrels, birds, and trees keep me company.

Admiring the adjacent, old buildings of Case Western Reserve University, my restless eye spots a glimmer of curved, shiny silver beyond one of the old buildings. Instantly I intuit I am in the presence of Gehry. I didn't know he was here too.

Sighing, I get up to explore. Gothic buildings and a sea of students part before me until the hugely breaking titanium surf of the Peter B. Lewis School of Management engulfs my eyes. A 21st-century folly of considerably less grace and far more eye-raping presence than the tinier ones of a technologically less-advanced age a few centuries back. I watch students enter with their card-keys, to learn, amazed that for them this false sun is just another classroom building.

I take my recovering retinas back museum-ward. Reception directs me to a distant gallery. Naive, ignorant (surely not innocent!), definitely unsuspecting because the blind scholars had not prepared me, I walk into revelation:

It--this ostensibly Christian painting--is a fucking self-portrait. Clear as those days I had spent driving through bucolic, lost America, across four hundred years Caravaggio speaks and says, Here I was, here I am, near the end of a difficult life, a human of incomparable talent, much put-upon by mythmakers and their monied minions, here I am, crucified by blind dilettantes (see that finely clothed one in the lower right, his plump, spoiled hand ready to grasp whatever it wants) who know nothing except what's hot this moment (as, God help me, I was, wasn't I?), fighting to own that painter du jour as if that gave them the keys to a heaven on earth, crucified, yes, by them, and by me too, by my own hands, the very ones that can do stuff like this direct-on-canvas with no preliminary sketching, by my own hands and of course, let us not forgot, my big old Caravaggio cock which I finally here near the end paint life-size (suitably shadowed), and of course (woe is me) by one beautiful boy (there, I'll paint only his back and let you imagine the impossibly seductive beauty of his face) who stands in here for the rather long line of those who, so to speak, came before, and one lone true spectator, she elderly and of the goiter, my Mary who once was kind when she didn't have to be (what was she? a landlady, a mother, a fishmonger, a whore? I cannot remember, all I can remember is that face which, with mine too, I've rendered here for all you late-coming snivelling neer-do-wells seeking to ponder what I have here wrought).

Driven to look and—God help him—to see, and then to show us what he saw. And in the St. Andrew he turns the table on us, putting us in his place: We see him—in extremis—looking at US and he paints himself as he—what? thinks? hopes? wants? believes we see him. The artist at the end of his tether—of his life!—still (no choice) looking, seeing, showing.

The paradox of facing mirrors, because of course he is imposing his vision of our vision of him coolly, obsessively contemplating us and this sorry world that has finally put him literally on the cross on which he has figuratively lived his entire life: Drug along by one big penis (center of the composition!), physically crucified by one beautiful boy (here standing in for a long series of beautiful boys), goaded on by a rich sybarite, with only one face of merciful concern (lower left).

Velazquez, in much more comfortable circumstances, did the same thing a few years later in Las Meninas, but he used an actual mirror to pull off the trick.

For Caravaggio, as for Shakespeare, we are the mirror, and he is the reality which he here, for the first time, as Shakespeare was doing in England, by revealing himself, reveals us. It's not a pretty picture.

END

You'll find our review of the Robb book here.

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