Baroque Art in Italy and Spain Part 1

Welcome back. Today we are going to be looking at the art of the Baroque in Italy and Spain. So first of all, let's just talk about this term Baroque. It is derived from a Portuguese word, barroco, which means a flawed pearl. We'll talk about the symbolism behind that a little bit later, but this is a period that is known for a very sort of extravagant art style. Although, as we will learn, that that style is not ubiquitous and there are actually lots of there are lots of variations of the Baroque style, but we often think of this sort of extravagant artistic style, emphasizing sort of a lot of kind of detailed ornamentation and that's very sort of luxe, right? That's very rich. And that is certainly going to be the case in a lot of the art we will see. This is art is very much a reflection of the period, a period in Europe of in many areas of growing and great wealth. This is due to this now being a period deep within the era of exploration and colonization as many European countries now are colonizing all parts of the world from the Americas to Africa to parts of Asia, where oftentimes they are exploiting their natural resources and the human resources there in the form of slavery. And these nations are becoming extremely powerful and extremely rich with very powerful monarchs, as we will discuss later in the effect of that. But what we are seeing is a sort of internationalization, a globalization that we hadn't really seen before due to this age of exploration. Also, really importantly, is we are now in deep in the throes of the Protestant Reformation. This is something we touched on a little bit earlier, but we're going to see the full effects of. So the Protestant Reformation, as you may recall, was a movement, a protest for reform that began in the middle of the 15th century, sort of spearheaded by this German monk named Martin Luther, who was looking to sort of bring, reign in what he saw as some of the more dangerous and extravagant impulses of the Catholic Church. What ends up happening is Martin Luther ends up getting excommunicated from the Church and begins his own sect, Lutherism, that is outside of the reach of the Pope and, in fact, rejects the authority of the Pope in Rome. And this, of course, creates a huge ordeal. This causes a split within the Church. And you see this Protestant movement, fueled in a large part by the invention of the printing press, and also in the 1400s and allowing for the dissemination of sort of anti-Catholic, pro-Protestant doctrine all across Europe, leads to a huge religious movement that causes more and more sects to form, these different Protestant sects, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. And what this means is that a lot of Europe is in turmoil. You have, you know, once where the Catholic Church was ubiquitous from basically all of Western Europe, was under the control of the Catholic Church and oversight by the Pope, is now divided into Catholic and Protestant areas. And, of course, this leads to political upheaval. This leads to war in many cases. This leads to a lot of problems. And also the Catholic Church isn't just going to sit idly by as more and more people leave the Church. This is why the Catholic Church sets up in the middle of the previous century, in the 1500s, something called the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent basically results in a series of reforms by the Catholic Church that allows for, you know, the Church to address a lot of the problems that the Protestant Church had with, that the Protestants had with the Catholic Church. And we're not going to get into the specifics of that here. But one of the things that this results in is a sort of reevaluation of the importance of art and imagery within the Catholic Church, which has always had a very central position throughout, you know, at this point, the, you know, more than, you know, 1200 year, 1300 year or so history of the Church. And it's had a prominent place. And this, there's sort of an impetus to create art that is appealing more and more to the individual, because I'm dumbing things down. I'm stripping things down to sort of their ridiculous essence here. So I apologize for the crudity of the simplicity of this argument. But one of the basic arguments that the Protestant Church has is that the Catholic Church, with all of its complicated hierarchy, and its pope, and its archbishops, or cardinals, and archbishops, and bishops, and this, these sort of complex laws, plus also the fact that the Catholic Church didn't really allow your average lay person, your average Christian to really read the Bible for themselves, but instead it had to be interpreted by a priest, felt that they were, there was a disconnect between your average person and God. Once again, this is an oversimplification, but one of the arguments for the, of all these various Protestant reformers is that all you really need to be a Christian is sort of faith in God, belief in, you know, the sacrifice of Christ and the Bible. The word of the Bible is the word of God. And that's really the basis of everything. But there's a feeling that, that the Church, the Catholic Church had sort of taken away this personal, intimate aspect of kind of religious practice. And the Catholic Church is trying to address that, and they address it in different ways. But for our purposes, they're sort of attacking it in a lot of the way through imagery, to create an art that is more emotional and inviting. And if you think about it, the art of the Renaissance and late Renaissance, especially into mannerism, had gotten incredibly intellectual. It had gotten rather obscure with, you know, deep references to biblical theology, to Greek and Roman mythology. And it was very difficult to understand by your sort of average person. And so in many ways, the art of the Baroque, especially in Italy and Spain and other Catholic countries, is going to sort of aim for this mass appeal. So the Counter-Reformation is what this sort of whole set of reforms is called, that is spearheaded by the Catholic Church to get people back into the Church. All right, so how does that look? Well, in some ways it starts and ends and begins in Rome. Rome being the center of the Catholic Church, the Vatican City, the location of the St. Peter's Basilica, the Church of the Pope is here. And this is really sort of the heart and soul of the Catholic Church. And already in the 1500s, we saw a push by several popes to sort of re-establish Rome as a center of power. After several centuries of it sort of losing its prestige and losing its power. And we saw that with several popes, you can go back and learn about them, who kind of re-established Rome as a center of power. And one of the ways they do this is by tearing down the old St. Peter's, the old, at this point, 1200-year-old church that had been the center of the Catholic faith, that had been the center, the Church of the Pope, and they build a new one. And this is a process that is taking now quite a while. This is about a hundred-year process. And we've already seen guys like Borromini and Michelangelo already contribute to this. But also in the Counter-Reformation, this becomes really important because the Church is looking at a way of sort of reasserting its power. And by building this new version of St. Peter's Basilica, what will eventually be called New St. Peter's, the Pope's Church, the center of the Catholic faith, this is kind of a way of saying, look, we are reasserting ourselves. We are still the place to go if you're looking for a particular brand of Christianity, right? We are the Church. And look how powerful and beautiful and grand we are. They call on an architect named Carlo Moderno to provide the façade for the Church. And so what we're looking at here on the right is the image of New St. Peter's, or St. Peter's Basilica, with the dome, which was originally designed by Michelangelo, referring to, once again, sort of also this classical Roman past. We see a church that draws very heavily, just like all Renaissance art did, from Greek and Roman architecture, with its use of Corinthian columns, its use of a Greek-style pediment. But Moderno started to experiment with a style that was a lot more dramatic than traditional Roman or traditional Renaissance art. And we started to see this in the late Renaissance and the Mannerist period, if you remember, in the last chapter. But here especially, you can see the use of light and shadow that Moderno is creating. And on the left is an earlier church he did called Santa Susanna, which the Pope saw and kind of fell in love with and pulled in Moderno to create a similar sort of look in St. Peter's. But notice how the columns here are starting to play with shadow and depth. And instead of sort of the flat façade we saw in the Renaissance, where everything's sort of perfect and geometric and kind of plain, we're seeing now a sort of dramatic use of light and shadow within these forms. We're also seeing a lot more variation and variety. You can see above some of the windows an alternation between triangular and semi-circular or semi-ovular really pediments, creating a sense of variety and visual excitement. Here's just an overlook of Vatican City and St. Peter's, sort of where it is located here. Here's our buddy the Sistine Chapel kind of right next door. But it's not really until we look at the piazza, this plaza in the front, that we also start to see even more sort of dramatic changes. And this piazza was designed by a guy named Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who's a name you're going to probably get really tired of before the end of this lecture. Gian Lorenzo Bernini is a guy who, especially through not only his architecture, but through his sculpture, is going to really set the tone for art and architecture in the Baroque period. His art is going to be dramatic, it's going to be exciting, it's going to be unexpected, and it's going to sort of display a technical virtuosity that builds upon the innovations of the Renaissance, and it takes everything to a whole new level. And we can see that play out here in this piazza, which upon an initial appearance looks in some ways very traditional. It seems very Renaissance-based. We see a sort of a classical Greek and Roman sort of set up with a colonnade, with these classical elements. But if we look at it from above, we can see something is rather strange. First of all, the whole piazza is designed using, instead of our sort of Renaissance circles and squares, we see ovals. And this is where that term Baroque really comes in, because Baroque, like I said, comes from the idea of this sort of oddly shaped pearl. And instead of the sort of platonic shapes that were espoused by guys like Alberti in the Renaissance, creating this very regular, rational kind of environment, we're seeing the use of ovals, we're seeing the use of trapezoids, we're seeing the use of these kind of irregular geometric forms, creating a sense of drama, excitement, and irregularity. But also there's a technical reason for this. Bernini designed the piazza here and the colonnades, which are actually a series of two double colonnades on each arm, to create a feeling that these are like kind of the arms of Saint Peter himself welcoming people into the church. And this is part of what the Hell Counter-Reformation is about, is sort of welcoming people, getting them back into the church, and creating this sort of personal loving experience. But also notice how when we look at these arms, really, these colonnaded protrusions, what we are seeing is actually kind of an optical illusion, because they appear to be straight, but they're actually not. They bend outwards, forming this more trapezoidal shape, but because of the way your eye bends light, when things are further away, they appear to narrow. So to counteract that illusion, he's had them sort of push outwards as they get closer to the church itself, creating a sense that they're actually straight. It's really a cool little optical illusion. Bernini also had to incorporate a fountain. He had to incorporate an obelisk, which was already here, an obelisk that was taken from Egypt in conquest, and then a pope set here in the middle, representing really Roman might. He had to sort of incorporate a lot of things, plus just allow for lots of traffic for people arriving and whatnot. And so what we are seeing here is this rather innovative use of space and geometry to create really kind of a whole new sort of environment that is dramatic, that draws from the traditional Greek and Roman with its Tuscan style, which is a variation of Doric style columns and its use of colonnades and Roman and Greek features, but in a whole new dramatic sort of way. This is inside the church, inside St. Peter's. Bernini created a lot of architectural elements and environments here. For example, this is the Scala Regia, the royal stairway, which he created that leads to the pope's private apartments. But what I really want to focus on here is what is called the Baldacino, which is in the nave of St. Peter's itself. To give you an idea for scale, a person standing here, I mean, this thing is a hundred feet tall, so a person standing here would be, you know, it's hard to put into context, isn't it? About the height of this sort of little wooden object here, this little choir area here, or lectern, I should say, here in the front. So this thing is massive. It's just built on an almost unreal scale, and it required a whole new set of way of building things. It is made from bronze. It is cast bronze, but each column had to be cast in five sections. And notice at the top, we have a traditional sort of Greek Corinthian column, but the column itself is a dramatic variation of a traditional Greek and Roman column, where it has been twisted almost kind of like a pretzel, right? Also, the Baldacino, and this comes from a term meaning sort of a silk canopy. It literally means silk from Baghdad. But the Baldacino itself, this sort of big bronze canopy, is massive, topped with this cross and this globe representing the power of the church over the world. Also, in the background, and here's a close-up of it, you see this chair sort of underneath this open or this stained glass window surrounded by images of light. This is something called the Cathedra Petri, the Chair of Peter, because the popes see themselves as the heirs of Saint Peter. And this is meant to read, this is the pope's church, right? This is Saint Peter's Basilica. So this is meant to sort of represent the power of the pope, the power of the church. If you see this canopy sort of representing the power of the church over the world, and then you stare through it, and what do you see? You see the Chair of Peter, the Throne of Peter, representing sort of the power of the pope's position on earth. And then where does that power come from? Well, it comes from God, as we see the stained glass window with a dove in it, a dove representing the Holy Spirit, the Holy Word of God. So this power comes from God. So this whole thing is sort of a glorification of the pope, the glorification of the church, and an expression of the dominance of the church over the world. And it's designed by Bernini in a way that it is overwhelming. It is massive. It is technically sort of cutting edge. It is virtuosic in the way it was constructed. Nothing like this had really sort of existed before. And it is massive. It is meant to be literally awesome. It represents the triumph of the church. Bernini is dramatic. This is a guy who was a child prodigy. He was recognized from a very young age as, you know, a pope called him the next Michelangelo when he was still a kid. And he brings with him a theatricality. Bernini was interested in the theater. He directed and acted in plays. And he brings a theatricality, a drama, emotion into his artwork. These are some earlier works by him. This is made for a cardinal named Scipione Borghese. The powerful Italian family. And this is his version of the David. And I'm actually going to put this side by side with some other Davids we have seen. On the far left, of course, is Donatello's early Renaissance David. In the middle is Michelangelo's high Renaissance David. Then we have Bernini's David. So we have almost 200 years of Davids here. And you can see sort of a progression from this, well, in many ways. First of all, David is getting older. He's growing up through time. We also see, you know, a change in the point of the story that is being told. The earliest Donatello's David is very sort of told the traditional story of David's victory over Goliath. Whereas Michelangelo shows us this contemplative, thoughtful David before the battle. And we talked about how this represents this concept of potential, the potential for greatness, human beings sort of contained within us. And on the far right, we have Bernini's David, David that is shown in the middle of action, in the middle of the battle. So this is not the sort of victorious David we saw on the far left, or the contemplative David we see in the middle, but a David of action, a David of intention, a David of emotion. Notice how his body is twisting and turning. We see a rejection of that sort of stayed, those stayed simple Renaissance forms. And instead we're seeing spirals and twists and turns, just like we saw in the facades by Moderno, just as we saw on the twisted columns by Bernini. We can see this drama in other works like his work, Apollo and Daphne, a story from Greek mythology, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, where we see this nymph, Daphne is being turned into a tree as Apollo pursues and attacks her. She is to pursue her, sort of preserve her virginity and her innocence. She is turned into a tree by the gods. It seems like a weird thing to do. Why wouldn't you turn David and Apollo into a tree? But anyway, she turns into this tree, but look at the way Bernini has sculpted her, twisting and turning. And look at his technical mastery. Look at the way he's sort of rendered this marble to where it looks as if it is flowing garments, as if the figures are almost suspended in the air. And when you look at the hands of Daphne and you see these tiny, thin, delicate branches and leaves stemming from her fingertips as she morphs into this tree, it's astounding, you know, thinking that this came from a solid block of marble and he was able to carve such delicate and intricate features and a really intricate and involved interplay of figures out of one piece of solid marble is incredible. Bernini is standing on the shoulders of giants, of course. He's standing on the technical innovations of guys like Donatello and guys like Michelangelo, but he is pushing what they started into even further, more difficult, technically difficult realms. I think if you really want to understand Bernini and understand the art of the Counter-Reformation, this work called The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is a really good place to start. Saint Teresa of Avila was a nun, a Carmelite nun, who had visions of angels and she published a book about these visitations and this became a huge best seller. And the Catholic Church really used Saint Teresa as kind of a model for the concept of the Counter-Reformation as being a way of personalizing interactions with God. And you can see by reading here where she says, beside me on the left appeared an angel. He was not tall but short and very beautiful. His face was a flame that he appeared to be one of the highest rank of angels who seemed to be all on fire and in his hands I saw a great golden spear and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire and this he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails and when he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. And the pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans and the sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain though the body has some share in it, even a considerable share. So we see Bernini showing Saint Teresa in this moment of ecstasy falling backwards with her eyes halfway closed and her mouth agape as she moans as this angel penetrates her heart with his spear. And it is dramatic, it is impersonal, it is intense, and the way he sculpted it is virtuosic with the way he's turned this hard marble stone into this flowing windblown garment. The way he's carved the the tunic of the angel into this almost organic flowing liquid kind of material and the way he's carved the emotion and the expression and their bodily movements and their faces is unreal. And the way he's using these sort of special effect elements. First of all, this is carved for a chapel called the Coronaro Chapel made for a wealthy family, the Coronaro family, and it is literally theatrical. And I told you that Bernini has this theatrical background, the chapel, the entire sculpture is carved to resemble a stage. In fact, the Coronaro family are carved in balconies as if they are watching this whole event as a play. And then Bernini has suspended the entire sculpture from the wall so it appears as if it is literally floating in the air as if we are seeing a vision itself. And then hidden behind this pediment is a window that the window will light upon these gold bars creating this, you know, sort of illusion of this intense light of God coming down. Every single inch of this environment, because it's not just a statue, it's like an entire environment that he's created here, an architectural space that is meant to create this feeling of emotional awe. If we look at the facade of a contemporary architect named Borromini, we can see that drama also continue. Borromini took what Moderno did and pushed it even further. That play of light and shadow, and you can see on the left a really good example of it, that play in light and shadow pushed to the extremes. Look at the way Borromini has taken this facade of the small chapel called San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, St. Carlo of the Four Fountains, as look what he's done with the front of it. It appears to undulate. It's this undulating serpent-like form with these classical Greek and Roman style features, columns and things like that, behaving in this way as if they almost appear to be liquid, creating this sense of drama, but also creating a sense of deep recesses and then bold projections that when the sun hits at a certain angle creates a sense of drama. Also, if you'll look up at the top, you'll notice our friendly neighborhood Baroque oval. No circles here in the Baroque, no sir, we got ovals, and there used to be a mirror here that would literally reflect light, so it's all drama all the time. Everything's a special effect. If we go inside, we can see that same sort of drama played out, and we look up at the dome, but we're not seeing a spherical or semi-spherical classical dome, but instead we're seeing a series of interconnecting ovals and semi-ovals. Inside the dome itself are what we call coffers. These are little niches carved to alleviate the weight of the dome. In a traditional Renaissance dome, these would be regular squares or circles, but what we see is various octagonal shapes interplayed with crosses, creating this very complex, dramatic, notice how deeply carved these are too, creating this dramatic sense of use of space. We look at another work by Borromini, The Small Chapel of Saint Ivo, also in Rome. Look at the way he's playing with the shadow here in the courtyard, creating, once again, a sense of drama as part of the church projects outward, yet part of the facade of the church is concave while the upper part is convex, where one is sort of a more simplified semicircular shape, and the other one is a more complex set of nested semicircles. It creates this really intense, dramatic, moving facade. Here's the dome of that. Once again, it's not even really a dome so much, but a series of interconnected forms, some semicircular, some not playing with the both convex and concave forms alternating, creating a sense of drama. There's a lot of play of light and shadow. Let's look at some painting now. Let's talk about a guy named Annibale Carracci, and even more importantly, let's talk about his family, because he was from a family where he had actually two brothers who were also well-known painters, but the Carracci family form in their native Bologna, the Bolognese Academy of Art, or the Bolognese Art Academy, we can call it, which is the first of its kind in Europe. Before this, artists trained through the apprentice system. You would send your child off to study with an artist at a young age. We've already talked about this process. The training and the benchmarks of that training were overseen ultimately by the guild, but of whatever trade it was that your child was learning. What we see here is an academic situation where instead of learning on the job, we see a more classroom environment, an academic environment. The idea is that art is a skill that can be taught in the same way that mathematics could be taught. It is a set of principles that could be learned in a regimented sort of way. This was very novel thinking at the time. The best way to learn art was through studying classical examples, studying Greek and Roman art, and then Renaissance art, of course, but also drawing from life. It always goes back to nature, doesn't it? It always goes back to nature as being the model. The Carraccis have a rather sort of different style. We think of Baroque as often being dramatic, and the Carraccis certainly could paint that way, but they could also paint in a way that is very sedate, very calm, very what we call classicizing, meaning that it draws heavily from Greek and Roman sort of rational forms. If we look at this image called The Flight Into Egypt, this is a biblical scene after Herod goes to kill all the children. Mary and Joseph flee into Egypt, taking Christ with them. This is a very common scene depicted in Christian art. First of all, look how small he's made the Holy Family. Instead, we're focusing more on this beautiful landscape that is laid out in a very rational way, in these even sorts of layers, creating a sense of calm, creating a sense of peace and order as the landscape recedes back into space, creating this sense of sort of layered areas almost stacked on top of each other, creating a sense of order and rationality and calm. Even though this is a scene of escape, of fleeing murder, there is a sense of calm and reason and rationality. The Baroque isn't all drama all the time. It kind of depends on who you're looking at, and even who you're looking at depending on who they're painting for, because certainly the Caraccis and Nibale Caracci could be extravagant. This is a large fresco that he did of a series of paintings for the Palazzo Farnese. The Cardinal Farnese, who was from a very powerful family, commissioned Nibale to paint this ceiling. You'll notice that we have this trompe-l'oeil effect. Trompe-l'oeil, remember, is French for fool the eye. We're looking at these faux architectural elements. We're looking at sculpture that is actually not there, but instead painted and painted in a way to look real. Also, we're looking at fresco painting, painting in plaster on a ceiling, but it's painted in a way to look as if we are looking at a framed oil painting. This is a technique called quadro riportato, faux frames. This is, once again, one of those special effects techniques that were so popular in the Baroque that creates a sense of excitement and drama and shows technical virtuosity. This is a Nibale Caracci showing off his ability to create these illusionistic paintings that appear as if they are framed works of art, but they're really painted on the wall. Michelangelo Mauricio, better known as Caravaggio, is one of the most influential artists of the Baroque period. In fact, in some ways, he's sort of the opposite of the Caracci. The Caracci comes from a well-respected family. They were a family that began an art academy. We're going to see Caravaggio as an artist who didn't have necessarily the long-term training that a lot of the artists at this time had. In fact, this is an artist who, although he spent four years as an apprentice in Milan, spent a lot of his early career teaching himself how to paint. This created several deficiencies in his art. He was not necessarily great at backgrounds and perspective. This changed the way he painted, and so he focused instead on the action in the foreground and the human figure. He often took what some would see as a negative and developed a new style out of it. What this artist does is change the way painting looks. He's referred to as the first modern artist because what he does is he focuses more on human action and emotion, and in some ways, the psychological behavior of his characters in a way that no artist had really done before. This is going to create an artist who was incredibly controversial in his day because he had many, many fans. He was a favorite of the Catholic Church. He was a favorite of popes and cardinals and very powerful people. He was loved by many, many people, but also there were others who saw his style as sort of an affront to good taste. He was very famously called by another artist the antichrist of painting. This is a guy who also had a lot of enemies not just within the world of art but in the world because Caravaggio is a guy who grew up sort of rough. He grew up on the streets. He spent a lot of his early days in Rome after coming in from Milan where he worked in a workshop sort of as a hack artist creating work there. He spent a lot of his time though in bars, in gambling, fighting. He was known for violence, threatening people. He was arrested several times. In fact, this is a guy at the height of his career. He kills a man in a fight. It's either described sometimes as a brawl or a dispute, but it was a guy he actually had some problem, had had some encounters with before, but he kills this man and then he flees. He was so well loved that he still, even though he was wanted for murder and could not return to Rome, he spent about six years under the protection of wealthy and powerful patrons where eventually he dies and his death is somewhat mysterious. Either he died of disease or natural causes or perhaps he was murdered in retaliation for the death he caused. There's a lot of sort of question marks over Caravaggio's life and a lot of his life, his reputation might very well be exaggerated, but what's not exaggerated is his influence because he is without a doubt one of the great artists of the Baroque period. Let's take a look at an early work of his. We'll come back to this work. This is called the Card Sharps. We are here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where I teach my courses and this is located in the Kimbell Art Museum. If you want to see an early Caravaggio and you want to see a work that sort of puts him on the map, this is a good place to start. This is an early work by Caravaggio that helped gain him the attention of a cardinal named Francesco Maria del Monte who really introduces Caravaggio to other members of the church and starts getting him a lot of commissions and really helps get his career started. This is indicative of a lot of Caravaggio's earlier works. It sort of depicts sort of scenes of the people of the streets. Caravaggio often associated with sort of a rough crowd often with prostitutes and gamblers and drunks and this is a rather humorous image that shows these two card sharps, these two cheats, these two grifters, conmen, whatever you want to call them, playing cards against this young nobleman and here he is in his finery completely unaware that these two guys are cheating him as one of the guys stands behind and gestures to the other revealing the cards that the young guy is holding. There's a sense of humor here but also there's a sense of realness. Caravaggio often drew from his models, the people who are around him. Oftentimes this sometimes a criminal element, sometimes elements of images of the sort of local drunks or whatever but often just people off the street because as a young artist he couldn't often afford a model and so he uses these regular everyday types of people as opposed to you know when you look at most traditional at this point renaissance art and then through the Baroque period there's this idealized form, right? Everybody's sort of beautiful and perfect but Caravaggio's characters looked like us but there's a real sort of sense of realism in Caravaggio's early works that will carry through his later works. This is another work called The Musicians. He often painted pictures of sort of rather young beautiful men in his early images when he was not doing really a lot of religious commissions but these were the kinds of things that people would put in their homes and they were often either humorous or sort of somewhat sensual kinds of scenes. But Caravaggio starts because of his association with this cardinal starts to get some really important commissions for his works and this is made for the Contarelli Chapel. It's an image for the Calling of Saint Matthew and in this we start to see Caravaggio's more mature style. You'll notice first of all the lighting. This is one of the key characteristics of Caravaggio. This is a technique called tenebrism. This is like that Renaissance chiaroscuro technique but on steroids. The contrast is extreme. The lights are extremely light and bright and the darks are almost black with not a whole lot of sort of mid values in between creating this very high contrast dramatic scene. It does several things. First of all it adds a sense of drama. We've already seen in the use of architecture or in a sense of drama with actual shadow. Here Caravaggio is painting those shadows but it also isolates the characters from the background. Sort of putting the background well in the background and focusing on the interactions of the characters and really putting in some ways a literal spotlight because he often uses this light as a way to highlight the characters he wants us to focus on. Highlights their actions, their motivations, their emotions, their reactions. Whatever it is he's trying to show us. Here we see the image of Saint Matthew who was a tax collector. A man who was called by Christ and can't believe that he's being called because you know tax collectors especially in sort of the biblical tradition are these characters that were often kind of mafioso types who would rough up people to collect their taxes and there's a real kind of thuggish sort of quality often to the way these characters are depicted and you can see that here. Here's Matthew in this back room you know then this dingy place wherever he is surrounded by these sort of rough hooligan types with their swords. Once again the kinds of people that Caravaggio would have been associating with maybe in some cases. I love this character here who's so unaware of all the other actions because he is focusing and concentrating on counting the money and as Caravaggio is using this light not only to highlight Matthew but also to sort of represent the concept of divine light. As Christ stands and points towards Matthew I think if you notice Christ's hand you'll immediately recognize this as a nod to Michelangelo's depiction of Adam's hand in the creation from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo certainly was an influence on Caravaggio but you know Matthew can't believe that Christ is calling a sort of low life like him for this divine purpose. So here we have sort of the basics of all of Caravaggio's later works. We have this tenebristic lighting we have this use of these familiar regular looking kinds of people. We have sort of also something I forgot to mention a lack of sort of divine or biblical kinds of special effects. It's rare in Caravaggio to see angels or heavenly hosts or sometimes even halos although we do see a halo on Christ here. Certain angel wings those kinds of things everything is very grounded in reality because that's what he is about. He wants to make these biblical stories resonate in a realistic sort of way. So we have this lighting we have these regular looking people we have this lack of sort of theatrical special effects but we do have drama we have an intensity we have emotion. Let's move on this is his version of the conversion of Saint Paul. I'm going to show you another version of Saint Paul really quickly. This is Michelangelo's version of Saint Paul from the Sistine Chapel and this is you know painted in you know Michelangelo's sort of later style. It's very sort of bombastic and dramatic and in a typical Michelangelo fashion everybody is strong and beautiful and buff. This is like a Michael Bay film isn't it? It's special effects everywhere. We have a cast of dozens and dozens of people. We have Christ flying through the air you know shooting lightning out of his hand. We have Saint Paul falling to the ground and everybody's sort of naked and beautiful and awesome. This is like CGI city right? But look at Caravaggio's version of this. So the story of course is Saint Paul who's a persecutor of Christians is on his way to Damascus in Syria and he is hit by this light. He falls to the ground. He's blinded. Three days later he is healed and he changes his name. He becomes a new man. He is no longer Saul as he originally was known but he's now Paul and he has new mission. Instead of persecuting Christians he is spreading the gospel and of course Paul goes off to write a significant part of what becomes the New Testament. But look how Caravaggio has portrayed him. First of all tenebrism. The background is pretty much obscured. This light is representing both divine light but also helping to highlight the actions which is Saint Paul falling from his horse. But notice we have no halos. We have no angels. We have like no naked buff dudes flying through the sky. But where you have a very quiet intimate realistic sort of moment where these religious scenes have now become literally realized. They have become realistic. They've become they have been stripped of their sort of pageantry and they have been stripped of their extravagance and they have been whittled down to the bare essence which is stories of human beings behaving to situations that are often beyond their comprehension or their control. And he portrays that those reactions in a very human way and for some critics it was too human. One critic very famously said that this doesn't look like Saint Paul but it looks like a drunkard falling from his horse. We can see that same sort of those exact same things in another work made around the same time called The Entombment. But Caravaggio by this point in his career is starting to really build quite the reputation there. He's building a really kind of a fandom among many artists. In fact there's going to be a whole group of artists sort of coming out of the wake of Caravaggio who refer to themselves as Caravaggisti, little Caravaggios. We're going to see them adopting this dramatic high contrast tenebristic style. We're going to see them using these sort of regular looking people. But this is these this especially this use of regular looking people is one of the things that caused some critics to call him the anti-Christ of painting because it was considered almost blasphemous to picture Christ or the Virgin Mary or whoever it was as looking anything other than beautiful and perfect. But for many many many people many many Romans the the fact that these figures were now relatable and identifiable and felt and looked like them was what was the appeal to Caravaggio's painting. But also it fits right in with that whole Catholic counter-reformation and the edicts coming down of the Council of Trent which is kind of calling for a pictorial program by the Catholic Church that that resonates with people on an emotional level. I think if we really want to understand Caravaggio's ability to get down to the deepest roots of human emotion personally I think his his image of the death of the Virgin is remarkable. This was a work that was created for a and was originally rejected partially because it was there there was a story that Caravaggio used the body of a prostitute as a model for the Virgin Mary and that may be more hearsay than actual fact. Caravaggio had such a bad reputation among so many people that a lot of things that while certainly he was capable of some fairly terrible things there's a lot of things that are sort of obscured by this kind of his reputation and it's hard to sort of cut through fact from fiction sometimes with Caravaggio. So whether this is true or not certainly this image is unconventional. The death of the Virgin while there were images of it it was it was a rare image it's something that we don't see a lot of in art from this period. And the way Caravaggio painted it especially was disturbing. Instead of showing the Mary in a sort of a peaceful repose he has caught her kind of right after her death throes. Her arm sort of lies on the pillow in this unnatural sort of way. Her feet are stick up crudely from underneath the the blanket and she has this bloat to her this kind of greenish pale cast to her skin. On top of that sort of indignity of her position she is surrounded by this group of the apostles but these aren't the handsome strong men of sort of traditional painting but instead these are old weak feeble balding bearded kind of geezers right. Weeping and bawling and losing their their repose you know losing their their kind of losing their stuff guys you know overwhelmed by emotion and sadness and loss. Because what Caravaggio is getting at here is not just the death of the Virgin Mary but he is he is contemplating the real effects the emotional ripples that emanate from the death of anyone and on their and the effect of that on their loved ones. And here we are seeing true and genuine sorrow. And for me the most moving part of this painting is the image of Mary Magdalene who he has in the foreground and even though she is the character the figure closest to the viewer she is also the most removed because of her position. She falls she crumbles really into her own lap emitting these heavy sobs as she is so devastated by the death of her friend that she can't even look up. This isn't a you know like a lot of paintings and a lot of sculpture at this time is very posed right the the characters kind of look up at the viewer as if they know that they are part of a drama or a play that is being observed and they are literally playing to an audience sort of looking at us but we don't see that here what we see instead is something intimate and real and devastatingly sad it's almost like we have intruded we have walked into the wrong room and we have seen this incredibly private personal horribly sad moment and we are our interlopers here and we they do not notice us nor care to notice us because they are so lost in their own grief and if you look closely at Mary Magdalene's sort of tableau around her if you see a wash basin with a with a rag hanging from one corner of it this tells you that this is a woman who was caring for her friend as the Virgin Mary was lying in her deathbed for days weeks months we don't know the Magdalene was sitting next to her holding her hand telling her stories bathing her giving her you know baths when her fever gets too much keeping her company and the entire time sort of being strong for her friend holding in her sorrow and being a rock that her friend can depend on and then when the Virgin Mary does pass away the Mary Magdalene loses it she she can't even cope she is so overcome by this intense sorrow that we don't see her face we just see this sort of effect this wake of her sadness as her body heaves with these sobs and that is that is what makes Caravaggio Caravaggio is his ability to cut through the pageantry that was so inherent in this kind of art and get to a a sort of reality that goes beyond the the religious tableau of these stories and focuses instead on the human element and the effect is devastating and it's real and it's emotional and it is relatable because the if the truth is is that this is an experience that if we you have not experienced it you will experience the loss of someone you love deeply it's devastating it is gutting it is incomprehensible and Caravaggio has created this in a real way and notice there is no religious sort of grandeur or the kind of references to any kind of of that typical religious pageantry theological pageantry we often see with a small exception of the thinnest of halos over the Virgin Mary's head and once again we have that lighting we have that dramatic lighting isolating the figures and pushing them to the forefront so we are confronted with their emotion that's it for this lecture we're going to continue in the next lecture looking at those influenced by Caravaggio and we're going to start with father-daughter team of the Gentileschi's Orazio and his daughter Artemisia all right we'll see you next time