L
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Vendég
Caravaggio loved to paint streets - the real, dusty, dark streets of Rome and Naples at the beginning of the 17th century. Shadowy doorways with worn lintels, square windows covered by iron grilles, gates leading into obscure courtyards, inner rooms with bare walls and men hunched at rough tables. The Seven Works of Mercy is the most ambitious of all his street pictures. It palpably portrays a Neapolitan street corner at night, with a man bearing a torch that illuminates the narrow way behind him and the crowd of benevolent people making their stand against poverty, cruelty and evil. An old man puts his face to the metal grille on the window in the right foreground. A young woman is - can she be doing that? It is the painting's great double-take. With perfect naturalism, Caravaggio makes her give her breast to the old man to suckle.
The scene comes from an ancient Roman story in which the daughter of an imprisoned man breast-fed her father - an instance of filial piety. But Caravaggio includes no evidence that man and woman are related. Her generosity seems more basically and desperately human.
So does that of the man beside her who is carrying a dead body to be buried. You can just see the corpse's pale feet by torchlight, poking out from under a shroud. In times of plague in old Europe, or after battles, bodies might lie unburied. The early Renaissance story-teller Boccaccio described the horrors of the Black Death in Italy; people failed to visit or help the sick, they avoided and betrayed even their own wives or husbands. Community failed; the collective disintegrated. In the folkloric Dance of Death, the rich man, the poor man and the king all stand alone before Death. In Caravaggio's painting we are not alone, if we have compassion for one another; Misericordia.
The mystery is, not all the people in this painting look like merciful types. The woman breast-feeding the prisoner, sure; the man in priest's vestments; even the labourer carrying the body. But who are the well-dressed and armed men who congregate as if outside an inn? They wear the feathered hats and leather gloves of cavaliers; there is something very hard about them. Yet they perform acts of kindness, too. Most dramatically, one draws his sword - not to kill the beggar who sprawls naked at his feet but to cut his own cloak in two and present half to this man he calls brother.
Again, it's an ancient emblem of charity, to cut your own cloak in half and share it with a beggar. It was folkloric and universal in Europe, and still current in St Petersburg in 1866, when a supposed progressive character in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment reveals his heartlessness by denouncing the folly of cutting up your own cloak. It is an image of charity - yet in the painting what you see is the flash of a sword blade in the night, slender steel glinting like the moon. This is a personal confession, a clue to a man's soul.
>>>>>>
more:
Click Here: Thursday February 17, 2005
yesterday's paper: The Guardian
The scene comes from an ancient Roman story in which the daughter of an imprisoned man breast-fed her father - an instance of filial piety. But Caravaggio includes no evidence that man and woman are related. Her generosity seems more basically and desperately human.
So does that of the man beside her who is carrying a dead body to be buried. You can just see the corpse's pale feet by torchlight, poking out from under a shroud. In times of plague in old Europe, or after battles, bodies might lie unburied. The early Renaissance story-teller Boccaccio described the horrors of the Black Death in Italy; people failed to visit or help the sick, they avoided and betrayed even their own wives or husbands. Community failed; the collective disintegrated. In the folkloric Dance of Death, the rich man, the poor man and the king all stand alone before Death. In Caravaggio's painting we are not alone, if we have compassion for one another; Misericordia.
The mystery is, not all the people in this painting look like merciful types. The woman breast-feeding the prisoner, sure; the man in priest's vestments; even the labourer carrying the body. But who are the well-dressed and armed men who congregate as if outside an inn? They wear the feathered hats and leather gloves of cavaliers; there is something very hard about them. Yet they perform acts of kindness, too. Most dramatically, one draws his sword - not to kill the beggar who sprawls naked at his feet but to cut his own cloak in two and present half to this man he calls brother.
Again, it's an ancient emblem of charity, to cut your own cloak in half and share it with a beggar. It was folkloric and universal in Europe, and still current in St Petersburg in 1866, when a supposed progressive character in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment reveals his heartlessness by denouncing the folly of cutting up your own cloak. It is an image of charity - yet in the painting what you see is the flash of a sword blade in the night, slender steel glinting like the moon. This is a personal confession, a clue to a man's soul.
>>>>>>
more:
Click Here: Thursday February 17, 2005
yesterday's paper: The Guardian
