Mold breaker

Italy's 16th-century iconoclast sets the standard at the Wadsworth Atheneum

by Leon Nigrosh

CARAVAGGIO AND HIS ITALIAN FOLLOWERS At the Wadsworth Atheneum, 600 Main Street, Hartford, Connecticut, through July 26.

Michelangelo Merisi was born in Milano, Italy, on September 29, 1573. Thirty-six years later, he died tragically (some say from a dose of bad drugs) on a beach near Rome. During his short, turbulent life, he was a heavy drinker and a street-brawler. He had numerous sexual encounters with young boys and is known to have murdered at least one person. All the while, he received generous stipends and major commissions from the Church as well as from some of Italy's wealthiest aristocrats. Although he never opened a formal school, he fostered a new style of painting and garnered a large artistic following, which spread throughout Italy and well into the rest of Europe.

While Merisi sounds like a key figure in Margaret Truman's, novel Murder at the National Gallery (which he is), he did exist -- under the better-known appellation of Caravaggio.

After a short stint in a Roman studio workshop painting fruit-and-flower still lives, Caravaggio gained recognition for his naturalistic representations of genre subjects, such as his famous 1594 canvas The Cardsharps. His brilliant use of single-source lighting, color, and triangular composition accentuate the scene, a moral tale on canvas that warns against the folly of gambling, in general, and lambastes cheaters, in particular. Caravaggio brings an intimacy to the moment that makes the viewer feel like an unwitting accomplice.

A bold break from the preponderant Mannerist artificiality, Caravaggio's style was a breath of fresh air. His innovation became so popular that other artists had to adopt his approach simply in order to survive. The current exhibition in the newly renovated Morgan galleries at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum provides a particularly exciting and very rare opportunity to view five of Caravaggio's masterpieces (10 percent of his total output) along with 36 paintings by a score of Italy's most prominent artists from the 16th/17th-century Baroque era.

Not only do we have the chance to compare Caravaggio's own works and note the maturation of his style, but we can see just how well, or poorly, his contemporaries fared in their attempts to emulate the raw power and vivid naturalism that infuse his subjects. In his The Ecstasy of Saint Francis, Caravaggio portrays the saint in a languid swoon cradled by a caring celestial attendant -- both bathed in a shaft of warm, heavenly light and surrounded by a profusion of accurately depicted flora. Orazio Gentileschi's (1563-1639) Saint Francis and the Angel, while equally passionate, seems to be set in cramped quarters, illuminated by an earthbound light, and displays too much attention to the play of shadow in the drapery folds -- a leftover symptom of Mannerism. An unfortunate gilded inscription ultimately flattens the entire picture plane.

Rutilio Manetti (1571-1639) comes much closer to realizing Caravaggio's virtuoso style in the handling of his large canvas Lot and His Daughters. This elaborately colored image recreates the scandalous Biblical story of Lot's seduction by his daughters after losing their mother near Sodom. Although Manetti, like Gentileschi, is still too involved with drapery shadows, he actually incorporates his single light-source -- a candle -- into his composition, bringing a greater air of reality to the scene.

Gentileschi's daughter, Artemisia (1593-1652) is represented in this exhibit by a self portrait. One of only a handful of 17th-century women to gain prominence for anything, particularly within the arts, she is seen facing the viewer, dressed to the nines with an expensive jeweled necklace, and wearing the laurel wreath of victory. It is supposed by some that the mustachioed young man whose portrait she is painting is the Spanish painter Velázquez (15991660), who was himself greatly influenced by the strength of Caravaggio's painting.

It took almost 30 years of sporadic negotiations with the Italian government to bring the majority of these priceless artworks to the Wadsworth. Do not let the occasion to view this one-time only concentration of "Caraveggesque" paintings slip away. Who knows when such treasures will be brought together in such a comprehensive and visually appetizing manner again?

The Wadsworth Atheneum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call (860) 278-2670.