Michelangelo Caravaggio (Alejandro Dolina)

Tonight we'll talk about Caravaggio. Caravaggio is a painter. Some of you may know him or have seen reproductions of his paintings, or perhaps his paintings, those who have been lucky enough to go to the Louvre. Well, he was a great painter. Michelangelo Merisi, his name was, was Caravaggio. He was born in Milan in 1573. His parents died when he was five. There was a plague. He survived as best he could. He was an orphan with his three brothers. One day, it seems he met a painter who lived near his house. His house was in Caravaggio, a small marquis house in Lombardy, near Bergamo. Well, this painter put him to work in his workshop. They used him to mix the colors. When he was eleven, he went to Venice alone and became an apprentice at the workshop of a painter named Simone Petersano, a well-known disciple of Titian. Petersano promised to have the boy with him for four years in order to teach him everything necessary to become a painter. And so it was. He did his studies very well with Petersano, but Caravaggio, that's what they called him, for the place where he came from, began to show a personality a little complicated. So much so that he fought with the teacher and he stuck a piñazo in his nose and broke it. Then he went to Rome. To be able to eat, he painted copies of religious paintings for a man named Pandolfo Pucci and portraits of saints in the store of a merchant named Antibeduto della Grammatica. How I would like to call him Antibeduto della Grammatica. And there in Rome they just began to call him Caravaggio for his ancient origin. Not only in the artistic circles, but also in the police, because Caravaggio was a rascal. One day it seems that he was arguing about a painting with the painter Girolamo Stampa and Caravaggio chased him with a baton to break his arm. In the end, two butchers saved him, who came to separate him. One day the painter Giuseppe Cesari called him who had painted two medallions of the St. Peter's dome and Caravaggio entered Cesari's workshop as a waiter, as an assistant. And so he had his last lessons, which ended definitively when one day a horse kicked him in the head and he took a long time to heal. Almost no one has horse kicks in the face, right? When I was a boy it was more frequent because there were more horses. The horses were closer to the people, well, in Baigorrita too. And every now and then a gil was put behind the horse, the horse kicked him and there was the guy with the gil marked. Now that does not happen because the horses have been replaced by cars that among so many advantages as they present can be credited with not kicking people. Once he was cured of that terrible blow, he got a very good job, a very good commission. It was about painting the Capilla Contarelli of Saint Louis of the French. Caravaggio painted the side canvases which were the vocation and the martyrdom of Saint Matthew. But he had to redo them because his interpretation of these themes aroused controversy. Normally Caravaggio's painting, which was anti-classical and anti-academic, rather aroused indignant attitudes by the authorities. This is Maniarism. Not him, but we are in the middle of Maniarism. Maniarism is what comes after the great peaks of painting and other arts. For example, Michelangelo, Raphael. Then the painters who followed him began to look at themselves, not as painters, but to look at the painting itself and to twist a little, to differentiate themselves by the detail, by the ornamentation, by a certain twisting. That was Maniarism. There were no great Maniarist artists, but Caravaggio was not a Maniarist, but he had a strangely naturalist way of conceiving. Look, I was born in the fourth century. Almost all of them had a black background. It was difficult. A picture on the radio is half as difficult. Black background. And the lights, generally they enter through the window, or sometimes you don't know where, but it is quite common that there is a window and a very unnatural light enters, as if it were a reflector. And there were no reflectors. And everything is illuminated like this. And the models he chooses, and the way he works them, are very carnal. They have like three dimensions. And there is a lot of shadow. The light-dark, right? Something like the light-dark. Exactly. But besides, the guy chose the models with the face of a rascal. And there were the saints. Do you see the saints? And he said, I'll find this one at night. Do you know how I get drunk? There were the saints, the virgins, escorted. And all of that, evidently, did not go well in certain media. Caravaggio had fallen in love with a girl named Elena. And she was very beautiful. A notary named Mariano Pasqualone of Accumulo, chased Elena everywhere. It must be said that Pasqualone was in love with her, the same as Caravaggio. It happened that the girl's mother did not want her to marry the notary, and offered her daughter Caravaggio because Caravaggio also had money, he had good commissions, a certain position. And Pasqualone, the notary, indignant, insulted Elena's mother because he said he had given his daughter to a barbarian, a cursed painter. When Caravaggio found out, he went to Pasqualone's house and beat him up. And the notary did not speak anymore, but the thing ended tragically, because some time later, Elena appeared drowned in the Tiber. Now, what does this have to do with painting? It has to do. Desperate Caravaggio used Elena's lifeless body to paint the Virgin's transit. It's a painting he did. So he painted her a little swollen, with her legs naked, almost half of her calf. And it was a big scandal for having taken the dead as a model, and they forced him to destroy the painting. But he did not destroy it. He sold it to Ruben, who was looking for works of art for a guy, for a count. And he bought that work. Then, to paint the Resurrection of Lazarus, Caravaggio looked in the cemetery for a four-day corpse to be faithful to the story of the Gospel. All the representations in his paintings came from his sentimental relationships. When he was with a woman, he used her to paint virgins and saints. There was another one, the courtesan Philida, a girl from the street, who played the role of Santa Catalina of Alexandria, Magdalena and Judith in different paintings by Caravaggio. A little after that episode with the notary Pasqualone, Caravaggio fought with a soldier in the castle of Sant'Angelo and wounded him with a sword. They sent him to Cana. Actually, they were not going to put him in jail, but during the trial, he insulted the judge and then they sent him away. The following year, he had another two trials. It seems that he was out of control because he had a certain impunity. As he was a friend of the powerful, his clients paid the bail, and then the guy made all kinds of troubles, and when he was in Cana, someone was always going to get him out. Well, a biographer of the 18th century, Susino, said that Caravaggio ate on the fabric of his portrait, which was used as a tablecloth, which is not very funny, but there is another thing, which is that he was going to polish footwear, not armed, with a dagger on the side. In reality, he seemed more a fancier than a painter, this type. It seems that he had a lot of aim with the stones. One day he broke the windows of a lady who rented it to him In the year 1606, something terrible happened to him. It seems that Caravaggio loved to play ball in Campo Marcio, Campo de Marte. And one day he led a team of four who were losing against a guy named Tomassoli. What are you doing, Tomassoli? And some differences arose because of the results. Everything ended in a field battle. They broke their swords and the painter, in the middle of the fight, pierced Tomassoli. He inserted him like Churrasco and Croto. He killed him, Obama. Yes, yes. For a matter of a ball game. And then he had to flee from Rome, where he was sentenced to death. He fled to Naples, then to Malta. It is not known what happened on the way, but he arrived in Malta with half an ear and a very deep wound in the elbow. There he was received by the great master of Malta, Alof Dignacour, who was a member of the French nobility. And Caravaggio began to paint him. It must be Dignacur, but it is not written like that. Well, Caravaggio began to paint him some portraits to subsist, and he was so successful that he was named Knight of Malta. He was able to enter the famous order of Malta. However, shortly after, he was caught with a knight of justice, and they put him in jail and they expelled him. And they threw him out. They named him Membrum futidum et fuetidum, that is, rotten and gory member. It is still not known how he managed to escape from jail, but he got on a boat and went to Sicily. There he walked through Syracuse, through Messina, through Palermo, so as not to fall into the hands of the affiliates of the order of Malta, who pursued him to kill him. During the escape, he wanted to paint Salome with the head of St. John. Do you remember Rita Hayworth with the head of John the Baptist and Charles Laughton looking from here? All this to see if he could appease the anger of the knights of the order of Malta, but it did not help him at all. On August 24, 1609, Caravaggio was savagely stabbed in the face by his enemies and was almost unrecognizable. They left him alive, but disfigured. Recovered from the wounds, melancholic, he decided to travel to Rome and ask the Pope for forgiveness for the crime of Tomasoli, the one of the ball. But another mess occurred. A Spanish garrison from Puerto Hércules stopped Caravaggio's boat. They had confused him with another guy they were looking for. They made him get off near the promontory of Monte Argentario under the jurisdiction of the Spanish king in Naples. That's why a Spanish garrison. The Spaniards were at that time in Naples. They put him in a prison to confuse him with another. He left there completely annihilated. He had lost all his belongings and decided to walk along the coast to the north to escape from his pursuers and arrive in Rome. But in the year 1610, already dressed as a beggar, malaria ravaged him in the swamps and his unrecognizable body was thrown into a pond. The joke is that he was 37 years old. That was Caravaggio. There are paintings of him everywhere. There is a Saint Jerome, we spoke the other day about Saint Jerome, who is writing with a face of a torrent, of a bad old man, it seems. And he had to be. Remember, he was the one who said that women, if they wanted to be spiritual, had to run away from their sex because women were carnal and sinful. That old man. Let's dedicate this to Caravaggio, who was a torrent, a very bad guy, but it is always preferable to do that, and not to those painters who get along with everyone but paint badly. Well, we went to the disco and he brought me an album that is good, I think it rhymes a lot because there is a description of a guy like that. Bad-tempered, violent, violent like a torrent. And a torrent is the story of a violent man, of a handsome guy from the mountains, from the beginning of the 20th century. And there is a nice tango, very nice, very beautiful, very well built, that we will listen to in Carlos Gardel's version, and obviously it is a tango composed for Caravaggio Yes, that's right. by a lettering artist who was a friend of painting. But naturally, in order not to reveal a theme that, after all, was not very popular, he concealed it. To conceal it, he put a letter referring to a guy who lived in Pompeya. But would it be Pompeya, the neighborhood of Pompeya? Or would it be Pompeya not far from Naples? No, I think it's Pompeya from here. Ah, we'll have to see. Let's listen anyway to this wind, this wind, the beautiful tango that Carlos Gardel sings right now.