Editing Caravaggio (section)

=== "Most famous painter in Rome" (1600–1606) ===

In 1599, presumably through the influence of del Monte, Caravaggio was contracted to decorate the [[Contarelli Chapel]] in the church of [[San Luigi dei Francesi]]. The two works making up the commission, ''[[The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (Caravaggio)|The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew]]'' and ''[[The Calling of Saint Matthew]]'', delivered in 1600, were an immediate sensation. Thereafter he never lacked commissions or patrons.

[[File:The Calling of Saint Matthew-Caravaggo (1599-1600).jpg|thumb|left|''[[The Calling of Saint Matthew]]'' (1599–1600), [[Contarelli Chapel]], [[San Luigi dei Francesi]], Rome. Without recourse to flying angels, parting clouds or other artifice, Caravaggio portrays the instant conversion of St. Matthew, the moment on which his destiny will turn, by means of a beam of light and the pointing finger of Jesus.]]

Caravaggio's [[tenebrism]] (a heightened [[chiaroscuro]]) brought high drama to his subjects, while his acutely observed realism brought a new level of emotional intensity. Opinion among his artist peers was polarized. Some denounced him for various perceived failings, notably his insistence on painting from life, without drawings, but for the most part he was hailed as a great artistic visionary: "The painters then in Rome were greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles."<ref>Bellori. The passage continues: "[The younger painters] outdid each other in copying him, undressing their models and raising their lights; and rather than setting out to learn from study and instruction, each readily found in the streets or squares of Rome both masters and models for copying nature."</ref>

Caravaggio went on to secure a string of prestigious commissions for religious works featuring violent struggles, grotesque decapitations, torture, and death. Most notable and technically masterful among them were ''[[The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Caravaggio)|The Incredulity of Saint Thomas]]'' (circa 1601) and ''[[The Taking of Christ]]'' (circa 1602) the latter only rediscovered in the 1990s in [[Dublin]] after remaining unrecognized for two centuries.<ref name="Barber 1999">{{cite book |last1=Barber |first1=Noel |editor1-last=Mormando |editor1-first=Franco |editor1-link=Franco Mormando |title=Saints & sinners: Caravaggio & the Baroque image |date=1999 |publisher=McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Distributed by the University of Chicago Press |location=Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts |isbn=978-1-892850-00-3 |pages=11–13 |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/saintssinnerscar00morm/page/n5/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater |access-date=5 March 2021 |chapter=Preface: The Murder Behind the Discovery}} For the details of the discovery, see this essay by eye-witness Noel Barber (superior of the Jesuit community in Dublin in which the painting was rediscovered.)</ref> For the most part, each new painting increased his fame, but a few were rejected by the various bodies for whom they were intended, at least in their original forms, and had to be re-painted or find new buyers. The essence of the problem was that while Caravaggio's dramatic intensity was appreciated, his realism was seen by some as unacceptably vulgar.<ref>For an outline of the Counter-Reformation Church's policy on decorum in art, see Giorgi, p.80. For a more detailed discussion, see Gash, p.8ff; and for a discussion of the part played by notions of decorum in the rejection of "St Matthew and the Angel" and "Death of the Virgin", see Puglisi, pp.179–188.</ref>

[[File:Caravaggio Judith Beheading Holofernes.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|''[[Judith Beheading Holofernes (Caravaggio)|Judith Beheading Holofernes]]'', 1599–1602, [[Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica]], Rome]]His first version of ''[[Saint Matthew and the Angel]]'', featuring the saint as a bald peasant with dirty legs attended by a lightly clad over-familiar boy-angel, was rejected and a second version had to be painted as ''[[The Inspiration of Saint Matthew]]''. Similarly, ''[[The Conversion of Saint Paul (Caravaggio)|The Conversion of Saint Paul]]'' was rejected, and while another version of the same subject, the ''[[Conversion on the Way to Damascus]]'', was accepted, it featured the saint's horse's haunches far more prominently than the saint himself, prompting this exchange between the artist and an exasperated official of [[Santa Maria del Popolo]]: "Why have you put a horse in the middle, and [[Saint Paul]] on the ground?" "Because!" "Is the horse God?" "No, but he stands in God's light!"<ref>Quoted without attribution in Lambert, p.66.</ref>

The aristocratic collector [[Ciriaco Mattei]], brother of Cardinal [[Girolamo Mattei]], who was friends with Cardinal [[Francesco Maria del Monte|Francesco Maria Bourbon Del Monte]], gave ''The Supper at Emmaus'' to the city palace he shared with his brother, 1601 ([[National Gallery, London]]), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, {{Circa|1601}}, "Ecclesiastical Version" (Private Collection, Florence), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas {{Circa|1601}}, 1601 "Secular Version" (Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam), John the Baptist with the Ram, 1602 ([[Capitoline Museums|Capitoline Museums, Rome]]) and ''[[The Taking of Christ]]'', 1602 ([[National Gallery of Ireland]], Dublin) Caravaggio commissioned.<ref name="sammut" />

The second version of ''The Taking of Christ'', which was looted from the [[Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art|Odessa Museum]] in 2008 and recovered in 2010, is believed by some experts to be a contemporary copy.<ref name="CaravaggioPomella2005" />
[[File:The Incredulity of Saint Thomas.jpg|left|thumb|upright=1.3|The Incredulity of Saint Thomas]]
''[[The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Caravaggio)|The Incredulity of Saint Thomas]]'' is one of the most famous paintings by Caravaggio, circa 1601–1602. It entered the Prussian Royal Collection, survived the [[Second World War]] unscathed, and can be viewed in the [[Sanssouci|Palais in Sanssouci]], Potsdam. 

The painting depicts the episode that led to the term "[[Doubting Thomas]]"—in art history formally known as "The Incredulity of Saint Thomas"—which has been frequently depicted and used to make various theological statements in Christian art since at least the 5th century. According to the [[Gospel of John]], [[Thomas the Apostle]] missed one of Jesus' appearances to the apostles after his resurrection and said, "Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands, and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it." A week later, Jesus appeared and told Thomas to touch him and stop doubting. Then Jesus said, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

The painting shows in a demonstrative gesture how the doubting apostle puts his finger into Christ's side wound, the latter guiding his hand. The unbeliever is depicted like a peasant, dressed in a robe torn at the shoulder and with dirt under his fingernails. The composition of the picture is designed in such a way that the viewer is directly involved in the event and also feels its intensity.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Marini |first=Maurizio |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/915922456 |title=Caravaggio "pictor praestantissimus" : l'iter artistico di uno dei massimi rivoluzionari dell'arte di tutti i tempi |date=2014 |publisher=Newton Compton |others=Caravaggio,?-1610 |isbn=978-88-541-6939-5 |edition=4ª |location=Roma |oclc=915922456}}</ref>

[[File:Death of the Virgin-Caravaggio (1606).jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|''[[Death of the Virgin (Caravaggio)|Death of the Virgin]]'', 1601–1606, [[Louvre]], Paris]]

Other works included ''[[The Entombment of Christ (Caravaggio)|Entombment]]'', the ''[[Madonna di Loreto (Caravaggio)|Madonna di Loreto]]'' ("Madonna of the Pilgrims"), the ''[[Madonna and Child with St. Anne (Dei Palafrenieri)|Grooms' Madonna]]'', and ''[[Death of the Virgin (Caravaggio)|Death of the Virgin]]''. The history of these last two paintings illustrates the reception given to some of Caravaggio's art and the times in which he lived. The ''Grooms' Madonna'', also known as ''Madonna dei palafrenieri'', painted for a small altar in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, remained there for just two days and was then removed. A cardinal's secretary wrote: "In this painting, there are but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust...One would say it is a work made by a painter that can paint well, but of a dark spirit, and who has been for a lot of time far from God, from His adoration, and from any good thought..."

[[File:Amor Vincet Omnia.jpg|thumb|left|''[[Amor Vincit Omnia (Caravaggio)|Amor Vincit Omnia]]'', 1601–1602, [[Gemäldegalerie]], Berlin. Caravaggio shows [[Cupid]] prevailing over all human endeavors: war, music, science, government.]]

''[[Death of the Virgin (Caravaggio)|Death of the Virgin]]'', commissioned in 1601 by a wealthy jurist for his private chapel in the new Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala, was rejected by the Carmelites in 1606. Caravaggio's contemporary [[Giulio Mancini]] records that it was rejected because Caravaggio had used a well-known prostitute as his model for the Virgin.<ref>Mancini: "Thus one can understand how badly some modern artists paint, such as those who, wishing to portray the Virgin Our Lady, depict some dirty prostitute from the Ortaccio, as Michelangelo da Caravaggio did in the Death of the Virgin in that painting for the Madonna della Scala, which for that very reason those good fathers rejected it, and perhaps that poor man suffered so much trouble in his lifetime."</ref> [[Giovanni Baglione]], another contemporary, tells that it was due to Mary's bare legs<ref>Baglione: "For the [church of] Madonna della Scala in Trastevere he painted the death of the Madonna, but because he had portrayed the Madonna with little decorum, swollen and with bare legs, it was taken away, and the Duke of Mantua bought it and placed it in his most noble gallery."</ref>—a matter of decorum in either case. Caravaggio scholar John Gash suggests that the problem for the Carmelites may have been theological rather than aesthetic, in that Caravaggio's version fails to assert the doctrine of the [[Assumption of Mary]], the idea that the Mother of God did not die in any ordinary sense but was assumed into Heaven.<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kUE3AQAAIAAJ&q=Carmelites|first=John|last=Gash|title=Caravaggio|publisher=Chaucer Press|date=2004|isbn=1904449220|pages=17–18|access-date=11 July 2019}}</ref> The replacement altarpiece commissioned (from one of Caravaggio's most able followers, [[Carlo Saraceni]]), showed the Virgin not dead, as Caravaggio had painted her, but seated and dying; and even this was rejected, and replaced with a work showing the Virgin not dying, but ascending into Heaven with choirs of angels. In any case, the rejection did not mean that Caravaggio or his paintings were out of favour. ''Death of the Virgin'' was no sooner taken out of the church than it was purchased by the Duke of Mantua, on the advice of [[Rubens]], and later acquired by [[Charles I of England]] before entering the French royal collection in 1671.

One secular piece from these years is ''[[Amor Vincit Omnia (Caravaggio)|Amor Vincit Omnia]]'', in English also called ''Amor Victorious'', painted in 1602 for [[Vincenzo Giustiniani]], a member of del Monte's circle. The model was named in a memoir of the early 17th century as "Cecco", the diminutive for Francesco. He is possibly Francesco Boneri, identified with an artist active in the period 1610–1625 and known as [[Cecco del Caravaggio]] ('Caravaggio's Cecco'),<ref>While Gianni Papi's identification of Cecco del Caravaggio as Francesco Boneri is widely accepted, the evidence connecting Boneri to Caravaggio's servant and model in the early 17th century is circumstantial. See Robb, pp193–196.</ref> carrying a bow and arrows and trampling symbols of the warlike and peaceful arts and sciences underfoot. He is unclothed, and it is difficult to accept this grinning urchin as the Roman god [[Cupid]]—as difficult as it was to accept Caravaggio's other semi-clad adolescents as the various angels he painted in his canvases, wearing much the same stage-prop wings. The point, however, is the intense yet ambiguous reality of the work: it is simultaneously Cupid and Cecco, as Caravaggio's Virgins were simultaneously the Mother of Christ and the Roman courtesans who modeled for them.