Caravaggio works reveal its echo in European painting – La Razon

is not the same Caravaggio a “caravaggista” and the difference is not only in the pictorial skill, the underlined technical mastery of color and brushstroke, but on a deeper and more remote breath, very visible in the painting, but impossible to acquire in a workshop.

theirs is to take the dust of the street and the picaresque games to the sacred altarpieces that adorn the churches. With it, for the first time, the apostles are what they were simple men, people without much intellectual cantilevers, as that San Mateo painted for one of the Chapels of St. Louis of the French, an angel has to guide his hand ágrafa so you can write his gospel.

the Thyssen Museum in Madrid inaugurates an ambitious exhibition that has met twelve paintings by Michelangelo Merisi, and showing the profound influence that makes this revolutionary painters north of Europe. “It is an exhibition of awe, wonder,” he said during the presentation Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the museum.

“Caravaggio and which drags behind it is very simple to understand for us because it is the first artist modern in every sense of the word. With it comes the cult of genius, which is built around his figure, which is marked by the speed with which consumed his life, disorder always prevailed in it, its ability to break with tradition, being outside the law, “he said.

According to Solana himself, the painters who have now reached their rooms not only set in chiaroscuro, but mimicked his biography. “In fact, many identified with historical figures representing, especially felt some personal involvement by the violent scenes, martyrdoms and beheadings, like Goliath”.

In rooms they appear the names of artists that followed the path opened Caravaggio but not so are lower for the history of art. There are Dirk van Baburen, Gerrit van Honthorst, Hendrick ter Brugghen, Nicolas Regnier, Louis Finson, Simon Vouet, Claude Vignon or Valentin Boulogne, among others.

Sea Borobia, head of the Department of Old Master Paintings, Thyssen He acknowledges that “Caravaggio was a revolution that affected everything. What it was often imitated compositions and forms which innovated and faced reality. Not only it attracted attention for the treatment of light and shade, also because renewed part of the thematic range that existed then, incorporating new issues “.

One of the first to recognize the immense talent of Caravaggio was another large painting, Rubens. The echo can be traced Italian altarpieces Rubens made for the Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. The route is almost a symphony of echoes, resonances, games between Caravaggio and those who would “steal” the composition, how to approach a subject with ease, but seriously.

The exhibition closes with a disconcerting picture, The martyrdom of St. Ursula, which rarely can be seen. A canvas dated 1610 and belongs to the last year of Caravaggio. A sad work, spread from a deep pessimism. The painter seems to sense the end is coming and draws a fuertísimos backlights, more than usual, with black shades that devour environments.