Dark Shadows: Caravaggio at the Art Institute of Chicago

October 11, 3:47 PMItaly Culture & Travel ExaminerLucia Mauro

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Italy Culture & Travel Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus.

Despite a tumultuous and anguished life, early Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (a.k.a. Caravaggio) revolutionized his art form to encompass an arresting sense of realism and a dramatic entangling of light and shadows. This intense man of the flesh was capable of putting viewers into a profound spiritual state by carving out pockets of inner enlightenment in the darkness. The Italian artist, born just outside Milan in 1571, worked extensively in Rome, Naples and on the island of Malta. He left a sumptuous and controversial legacy - one that swirled together sexual crises, a penchant for self-destruction, the desire to cast ordinary people as saints, the violence that led to real-life murder, escape, treachery on a near-geopolitical level, and death at the young age of 38.

I first discovered Caravaggio's soulful genius almost 25 years ago in Rome's Church of San Luigi dei Francesi through his painting, The Calling of St. Matthew, in which the former tax collector is selected by Christ to join him. St. Matthew is ensconced in darkness, with a single source of light illuminating him - a divine punctuation mark amid the gritty realism of the scene. Since then, I have come into contact with a substantial number of Caravaggio's work and am always enraptured by his ability to humanize the exalted and, therefore, make these figures more revered by virtue of their personal understanding of the human condition.

Over the weekend, the Art Institute of Chicago opened a special exhibit, Caravaggio and The Supper at Emmaus, running through January 31 at 111 S. Michigan Ave. This 1601 masterpiece is on loan from London's National Gallery and is not to be confused with Caravaggio's 1606 version of The Supper at Emmaus in Milan's Pinacoteca Brera. The earlier canvas is the centerpiece of an exhibit that posits Caravaggio against artists he influenced, such as Bartolomeo Manfredi, Francesco Buoneri (Cecco del Caravaggio) and Giovanni Baglione. And though the chiaroscuro elements made famous by Caravaggio are evident in their mythological- and religious-themed paintings, Jusepe de Ribera's Penitent St. Peter (1628-32) comes closest to wrapping the apostle in a shroud of dark Caravaggio-esque remorse.

As I studied Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus, with its subtle religious clues (from the black halo cast behind Christ by the unsuspecting inn keeper to the outstretched crucifix-like gesticulating of one of the apostles), I realized that the painter crafted his own transubstantiation in art. As an artist during the Counter-Reformation, when the Roman Catholic Church embarked on a massive campaign to commission authentic ecclesiastical works as a rebuttal to the Protestant Reformation, Caravaggio naturally created numerous religious paintings. In The Supper at Emmaus, we witness the moment when the resurrected Christ reappeared briefly to his disciples. Here, in addition to wearing a red tunic, Christ sits at a table where it's implied that he is enacting the transformation of bread and wine into His own body and blood (an act reaffirmed by the Council of Trent in the mid 16th century). But Caravaggio quite literally fashions previously inaccessible saintly beings into flesh-and-blood individuals.

And while Caravaggio is often praised for the theatrical arrangement of his models, this Supper at Emmaus feels very real and in the moment. Compared to the lovely, but still rather wooden and pale renderings by his contemporaries, Caravaggio's aesthetic ceased to be representational and rose to the realm of being. The viewer, especially in this painting where the scene is pushed up to the extreme foreground, can't help but be pulled into the action. But, most importantly, the beauty rests in the surrounding darkness. After all, it's often in the dark and lonely place of contemplation where epiphanies occur.

END