Walking down the nave to the very back and standing before the Contarelli chapel, you can barely make out the figures of the Caravaggio painting on the left-hand wall. That is, not until you've positioned yourself diagonally, torso strained over the railing, and placed a 50-cent Euro in the adjacent machine. A light begins to whir and -- as if at some antique carnival sideshow -- illuminates the figures, which seem to breathe with sinister drama and dimension.
The paintings of Caravaggio make you want to look at nothing else. Once you've stared down the strobe-lit drama and arresting vulgarity of the Baroque artist's saints and sinners, everything else looks flat and idealized for a while. Eventually the fervor wears off, but for a time, looking at other paintings is like watching a PG movie after you've seen your first rated-R.
His work is a little like the Dartmouth bubble, actually -- a heightened reality that makes it hard to look elsewhere. On campus we live as cinematic versions of ourselves, and with the aid of the Facebook we crop our reality into a reel of highlights.
But critics have said that Caravaggio's famous chiaroscuro (his highly exaggerated use of light and especially shadow) was not only a mechanism for creating ambience and interest but also a way to conceal his artistic shortcomings. He left an astonishing amount of negative space. His characteristically dark but internally spot-lit paintings are often swathed in shadow -- like "The Calling of Saint Matthew" in Chiesa San Luigi dei Francesi.
In our online versions of ourselves, we too illuminate areas of interest and leave plenty of the canvas in the dark. This is especially obvious from abroad, where the clicks of our mouses reveal tan, springtime-thin versions of our friends sunning on the Green or clutching paddles in the basement. From off campus, we only see idyllic Dartmouth from highlight to highlight.
Perspective changes with lighting: The difference between a professor in lecture versus office hours, say, or a fraternity by day, instead of in the dark. This metaphor only extends so far -- of course our privileged bubble of late adolescence is a long way away from the melodramatic universe that Caravaggio renders. His is a world of saints and sinners, death and resurrection, of green-tinged corpses, spilling blood and divine light.
But the controversial muddy feet of the pilgrims in "The Madonna of Loredo" aren't so far away from my feet after a basement-heavy weekend.
Discovering the handful of Caravaggios that remain in Rome is a classic tourist adventure, and one that the art history Foreign Study Program has rightfully adopted. Moving beyond the delicate Raphael and the virtuosic Michelangelo of two weeks ago, we spent last week discovering the works of the great 17th-century, 'seicento' masters that have only recently come back into academic and popular favor.
Caravaggio had an affinity for elevating street people (his people) to the status of the divine. He was faulted in his day for the grim quality of his subjects, who were a far cry from the idyllic saints of the previous century. Though his critical contemporaries were briefly silenced by his celebrity, Caravaggio quickly fell into obscurity after his death. If his work was discussed at all, it was regarded as vulgar and laden with "sin." Not until the 1950s did his art gain newfound attention, maybe a credit to the renewed crassness of our culture.
It's easy to explain but hard to believe that Caravaggio was ever disregarded -- the magnetism of his painting in person is almost undeniable. It is exactly its vulgarity, though, that explains a lot of its appeal -- his ability to reveal a hint of divinity within the realm of the dirty. His religious depictions are luminous, but shine through human filth and fault. This melding of the sacred and the profane makes the paintings so effective and accessible.
Caravaggio's revolutionary approach to painting, his desire to lend spiritual significance to the ordinary, is an extreme version of what we do daily on Facebook and at Dartmouth -- dramatizing reality, embedding it with significance. He showed divinity in the least typical of places. He too would've found beauty even in the basement.
