Book Review: Franche Prose

Caravaggio was not even his real name.

Michelangelo Merisi is thought to have been born in Milan in 1571. Caravaggio is the town where he was raised by his mother after his father, a builder and architect, died of plague.

At 13, he began his apprenticeship with a painter of religious scenes and former pupil of Titian, in Milan. Why did he choose art? Why did he abruptly leave Milan for Rome in 1592, in what would be the first episode of a long series of abrupt departures? Little is known of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, for he did not like to write; he did not even draw, or sketch. Or, if he did, he destroyed all traces, as if he had been afraid of someone following him, trying to figure him out.

That is exactly what novelist and Wall Street Journal arts critic Francine Prose tries to do in “Caravaggio.” In this work, she often refers to the words of Caravaggio’s 16th century biographers (and more recent ones, too), and integrates all opinions about his work and his life, in order to paint her own admiring and sometimes contagiously enthusiastic portrait of a brilliant, yet quite shady, character.

Caravaggio was “mercurial, hot-tempered, violent,” according to his contemporaries. Eventually, he was also a convicted murderer, and spent the last four years of his life in exile outrunning the charges: “he slept fully clothed, with his dagger by his side,” and wandered across an Italy in full bloom, “painting almost constantly.”

Prose does not hide that Caravaggio killed people during the tavern-fights which he loved to instigate, and that his competitive spirit—particularly with other artists—earned him an incredible collection of enemies. But somehow these behaviors get lost in the magnificent descriptions of the artist’s work. Somehow, in Francine Prose’s biography, the violence of the character is camouflaged in the tumult of Renaissance Italy.

But can his behavior really be forgiven, just because he was a great and “tortured” artist? Shouldn’t the voice of a biographer sometimes assume a critical tone, no matter how passionate the author is about her subject? Instead, Prose seems to exculpate Caravaggio, describing him as a “preternaturally modern artist who was obliged to wait for the world to become as modern as he was.”

According to the author’s interpretation, Caravaggio’s modernity lies in his ambitious manner of portraying “a flawed and imperfect nature.” He grabbed “Gypsies” or courtesans on the street and made them his models. He painted overripe fruits and people with down-to-earth faces and expressions. His saints almost stepped out of the canvas, into the art galleries of the rich patrons who commissioned his paintings. The style she finds, of flaws leading to near-perfection, almost mirrors the portrayal of the artist’s personality.

His fame was largely due to his masterful painting of scenes charged with emotion. Much of it was sexual tension: while female models did not seem to arouse any particular passion in the painter, young boys with dreamy and inviting looks are a recurrent theme in his work.

Caravaggio’s paintings speak to a modern audience more than the work of many of his contemporaries, perhaps because Caravaggio’s characters are not drowning in a sea of “baby-blue skies, clouds and cherubs.” Yet it might be an exaggeration to say that he speaks to us “without any need of translation from a distant century.” Does the painting of Judith killing Holofernes, for example, really “speak” that much to someone who has never heard the story? Doesn’t the viewer need some translation, no matter how “eloquent” Caravaggio’s work is?

This dialogue of Caravaggio with the modern world was unfortunately cut short by a particularly negative turn in his life’s theme of fights and flights. He collapsed on a beach at Port Ercole, while trying to run after the ship that had left with all of his most recent work. While the 39 year-old’s body remained on that beach, his paintings sailed away: Caravaggio’s work outlived him. For centuries, his art was largely criticized as vulgar and lacking imagination. Only in the 1950s, after an exhibit of his work in Milan, was Caravaggio rediscovered.

It took three-and-a-half centuries for the world to catch up with Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.