The Mystery Of Faith
January 27, 2015 11:27 AM   Subscribe

"In creating a work that portrays real internal struggle and transformation, Caravaggio converted painting.

A Painting Only You Can See
I haven’t gone quite so far around the bend yet, but for about a decade now I’ve kept up a more or less regular appointment of my own with a single painting — an intensely dark, brooding scene at the Metropolitan Museum of Art depicting St. Peter’s denial of Christ. The Met bought the painting in 1997, and one of the things that drew me to the work was that it didn’t immediately announce what it was: a Caravaggio, only the second to enter the museum’s permanent collection and one of fewer than a dozen on public view in the United States.
Consider Two Decapitations reviews Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and his Legacy at LACMA.

previously: Thug: A Life of Caravaggio in Sixty-Nine Paragraphs
posted by the man of twists and turns (4 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Criminal Genius of Caravaggio
In one of the last pictures he ever painted, a grim and startling “Resurrection” altarpiece, Caravaggio showed a scrawny, bedraggled Jesus Christ slipping out of the tomb and making off alone by night, “like a criminal escaping from his guards,” in the words of an 18th-century Frenchman. Shock was the conventional response to this painting (eventually destroyed by earthquake, along with the church where it hung). The artist himself was on the run at the time, wanted for murder and so jittery that he slept in his clothes with a dagger always at hand. “Whatever he set out to paint,” Andrew Graham-Dixon writes in his gripping biography, “he always ended up painting himself.”
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:30 AM on January 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


Thank you for this.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 4:10 PM on January 27, 2015


I found this post fascinating. Many thanks.
posted by On the Corner at 11:48 PM on January 27, 2015


Yes. Much thanks.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:28 AM on January 28, 2015


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