|
The feeling of tragedy comes to the fore in his canvases and clearly shows that the subject is human before being allegorical, carrying a tenebrous shadow still imperceptible but which in the future output of the painter would become gradually more precise, especially in the scenes of castration, in which the “catastrophe” is accomplished: Judith and Holofernes, Salome and St John the Baptist, David and Goliath.
The background of the paintings, always informed, neither empty nor full, allows an insidious menace which places in jeopardy the balance of the composition to stand out. Moreover, Caravaggio fundamentally renews the realism and naturalistic presence of the portrayal no longer in the manner of 16th-century painters, who descend into the depths of constructed perspective, clearly drawn, and insist on background motifs, and underline the tactile feeling of the third dimension. In contrast to these reassuring pictures, where are we really with Caravaggio? What space does he allow? Exterior or interior? A revolutionary, the painter demands an opposite approach, in a movement which is inverse. From the back towards the light, he makes figures and objects emerge from a disquieting light within an undefined environment in which landscapes are very rare. The relief of the folds, the modelling of the carnations seem to fall towards the surface and submerge the reality of the spectator.
Another question, more pertinent to this study, suggests itself. Why did Caravaggio not quote Italian madrigalists? The period was full of brilliant composers, initiators of the most audacious linguistic and musical researches. At the beginning of the 17th century, the madrigal underwent the final phase of its evolution. In Rome and in Venice, Arcadelt and Willaert shone. It seems that this favouring of the northerners was to be found in the taste of Roman music lovers. In Ferrara, Vicentino and De Rore employed powerful chromaticisms, to which Luzzacho Luzzaschi and then Gesualdo brought a final burst of brilliance. Girolamo Frescobaldi belongs to the period following Caravaggio’s departure from Rome: he was organist of St Peter’s from 1608, the year in which his first and only book of madrigals was published in Antwerp. At the time of the painter’s first Roman period, Luca Marenzio’s classicism reigned. Born in about 1553, Marenzio died during Caravaggio’s stay in Rome, the 22nd August 1599. His madrigals would be republished several times in the Eternal City. There were four re-editions of his Libro Primo between 1585, the date of its first publication, and the year 1608.
In parallel with the Roman works of Caravaggio, the publication of Monteverdi’s madrigals (his Book II was printed in Venice in 1592, the year in which the painter arrived in Rome) testifies to the same linguistic and musical reforms: singing the truth, expressing the meaning of the text, arousing the emotions of the spectator. A genuine musical laboratory, the madrigal evolved. It succeeded thanks to the genius of Monteverdi (then aged 38, that is, four years older than Caravaggio) in the 5th Book of madrigals published in Venice in 1605, the first absolute masterpiece including the principles of monodic writing, the promise of a rich future and which would be the constituent element of baroque syntax.
|
|
|
|