The buzziest new show in central London does not involve a Hollywood star treading the West End boards, or a glitzy blockbuster premiere in Leicester Square. Instead, somewhat surprisingly, it’s a dark room with two paintings in the National Gallery.
I was there on Thursday and couldn’t believe my eyes as queues snaked out of Room One of the Trafalgar Square site and down the stairs, while high vis-sporting staff were on hand for crowd control (well, maintaining an orderly queue – this is the National Gallery after all).
The Last Caravaggio is proving the most popular small-scale show in that room since two of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers were hung side by side there a decade ago. Of course, it helps that the display is free, but it also shows the power of the Italian old master to capture visitors’ imagination.
The show displays the gallery’s own Caravaggio, Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist, alongside The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, which has travelled over from Italy for the first time in 20 years – that was for a major exhibition of the artist’s late works and caused a similar frenzy at the National Gallery.
While the artist was an overnight celebrity in his own time, Gabriele Finaldi, the gallery’s director, told me that this renewed embracing of Caravaggio is relatively recent (in art history terms), since scholarship took another look in the Fifties.
Now, some four centuries after his death, why are crowds drawn to his work and in such numbers?
First, there is the undoubted quality and arresting nature of the paintings; the bloody scenes we’re dropped into – this is violence at close quarters – and the raw emotion they show.
There’s the bold way he puts those scenes together. Stand in front of Saint Ursula (good luck at getting a prime spot – sharpen your elbows) and you realise the painter has dropped you right into the middle of the action. You’re not a viewer, you’re complicit in the outrage that has just happened. It’s immediate, it’s emotional.
His style was also revolutionary at the time, the use of dark and light (impress your friends with the technical term chiaroscuro) making these figures loom towards you, only heightening the drama unfolding. It’s hard not to rear back at John the Baptist’s severed head being thrust towards you in the gallery’s own painting.
The works feel very modern. They are gritty, using real people with dirty faces, ripped clothes, with broken fingernails, not the idealised portrayals of scenes that were so common a the time. “It was totally revolutionary and not without criticism. People were shocked by this,” National Gallery curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper told me at the show’s press viewing earlier in the week. “There was a lot of moral panic.”
Centuries before the arrival of movies, it could be said that Caravaggio has a director’s eye for framing and action, and that has also kept him relevant. He’s been hailed by greats including Martin Scorsese, who once wrote, “He would have been a great filmmaker, there’s no doubt about it” adding his work influenced Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.
“The paintings are very cinematic,” Whitlum-Cooper told me. “They’re your size, and you’re right in front of them, there’s an immediacy and a punch – he obviously didn’t know about cinema – but it does speak to how we view things. It immerses you. You’re in it.”
Beyond that, Caravaggio had a lurid backstory, and that always burnishes a reputation, for good or ill. He was the archetype of the bad-boy artist. The National Gallery website talks about how he would swagger about with a sword “ever ready to engage in a fight or argument… Caravaggio was arrested repeatedly for, among other things, slashing the cloak of an adversary, throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter, scarring a guard and abusing the police.”
In fact, his life could easily justify a glossy prestige drama. How, one day, he pushed it too far, and killed a rival in a swordfight. He was forced to flee Rome, first to Malta and then Naples, even then with numerous examples of his temper getting the better of him – at one stage, he was permanently disfigured in a brawl. He was pardoned by Rome, only to be mistakenly arrested on his way back, released but died of malaria before he could return.
Whitlum-Cooper says his story “reads like a film script. The violence and everything else. There’s almost a tragic flaw about Caravaggio – he can’t let anything good happen, he’s so self-destructive.” To connect it to a contemporary of his over here, There’s something Shakespearean about his tale.
Speaking of prestige drama, Caravaggio is at the cutting edge there – he has heavily influenced the lavish new adaptation of Ripley, which arrived on Netflix earlier this month starring Andrew Scott. There are almost constant references to the works in the show, parallels with the artist’s life story, influences on how its filmed, and, in one episode, the artist even makes a surprise appearance3.
In fact, Whitlum-Cooper said she had to go and watch the show as so many people were asking her about it. Before she did I asked why Caravaggio is still so popular. “He changed the world and continues to do so today,” she replied.
The hottest (free) ticket in town was painted in 1610 and continues to inspire crowds today – though waiters will hope the artichokes are left off the menu in the National Gallery cafe.
