Michelangelo Merisi was a quarrelsome young man renowned for his hot headedness and talent for insults. In Rome in the 1600s he lived a licentious life, frequenting taverns and brothels and was known to parade around public squares with a sword on his belt, looking for fights.
It was no surprise then at 33 that he should get into a drunken argument that would end with him stabbing a man to death. Rather than face justice Merisi took the coward’s way out and fled Rome with a bounty on his head. He found work in Naples and Malta, although the latter ejected him later for yet more of his brawling ways.
In any age Merisi could be accurately described as an ardent sinner on the road to perdition. But in this man existed the duality of saint and sinner. This was apparent to anyone seeing the paintings he produced as his alter ego, “Caravaggio”.
This Caravaggio meditated on God’s redemptive power greatly. His aspiration was to show the transcendent in a world debased by human failings. His oeuvre was mostly all religious paintings depicting scenes from the scriptures fed by commissions from the Church at a time of new building in Italy.
Although he had studied painting under a master who himself had learned from the great Titian, Caravaggio’s daring was to break with the stolid forms of classicism and introduce a new realism that shocked the sensibilities of his day. Like no other paintings before, the operatic moments captured in his canvases appear as alive as news photography.
His mastery was painting the effect of light penetrating darkness and how this was reflected by human flesh or as a gleam in the eye. His models were all street people dressed up and posed and his saints look like real people too. But it is the candid emotions in their faces that startle, as if the video freeze frame rather than the brush had caught an unguarded moment.
Nowhere is Caravaggio’s talent better displayed than in the cycle of paintings he did on the life of St. Matthew between 1600 and 1602 for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi de Francisco, Rome.
The Calling of Saint Matthew illustrates a single line of scripture: “He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him.”
Caravaggio places this scene in a darkened tavern with Christ standing in the doorway pointing with outstretched arm. Across the room Matthew is a red bearded man in contemporary garb sitting in the middle of five men at table. It is the millisecond before Christ’s transforming grace pulls Matthew to his feet that Caravaggio has caught.
Matthew’s long face is bathed fully in white light, his expression is disbelief involuntarily pushing his index finger into his chest as if to say, “You mean ME?” Caravaggio leaves us in no doubt that this is Matthew’s redemptive moment alone. The two men sitting next to him do not even lift their calculating gazes from the coins stacked on the table!
It is another major Caravaggio, St Matthew and the Angel, that appears in the month of September in the 2012 Columban Calendar. Why the angel poised above Matthew looks so insistent and why the Saint’s fingers should be stained in black ink are elements explained in a commentary provided online that is available with the 2012 Columban Calendar.
Art lecturer Claire Renkin of Melbourne provides the illuminating script that explains the symbolism and allegorical allusions in all of the religious art featuring in the 2012 Columban Calendar. Besides Caravaggio, Claire Renkin gives insight into major works on religious themes by Filippino Lippi, Giotto, Duccio, Gozzoli and others.
The special presentation, literally a talking version of the 2012 Columban Calendar, heralds the 90th anniversary of the arrival of Australia’s favourite liturgical timepiece. It is well worth having as a “code-breaker” to beautiful paintings offered up to the Glory of God.
Dan McAloon works in Catholic Media as a freelance journalist.
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