Seen and Heard Art Review

Caravaggio: The Final Years - National Gallery, London WC2, Until 22 May, 2005 reviewed by Alex Russell

 

Caravaggio: The Final Years is a major event of truly contemporary art, despite there being just 16 paintings. Yet even this relatively small group of works was far too much for me to take in, so I found myself concentrating on, and returning to, three paintings which made an indelible impression. It was an exhausting challenge physically as well as aesthetically.

 

I say contemporary for Caravaggio’s faces, images and sensations are those of today, having far more immediacy, cutting edge and brute realism than anything by Damien Hirst or recent Turner Prize winners. Caravaggio was obsessed with the violence of life and painted the violence of sensation as the sensation of violence. Experiencing Caravaggio in the flesh is an entirely different sensation from seeing these images in dead reproductions. You have to experience them ‘live’ to get the brute, violent immediacy, the primordial frisson, the sensation of the sublime shudder.

 

The element of revelation lies in how the actual images have so much more dramatic power and stark contrasts between light and dark than mere flat reproductions can convey: this was most noticeable in three particularly mesmerising images - David Holding the Head of Goliath, Salome receives the Head of Saint John (1606-7) and Sleeping Cupid (1608) which all had a sculptural quality, made even more acute by the admirable spacious lay-out of the exhibition, with pointedly dramatic lighting.

 

 

 

David Holding the Head of Goliath (1606-1610) depicts a self-portrait of the artist as the severed head in an unflinchingly honest manner. The severing also suggests Caravaggio’s ‘abjected alienation’ decapitated by society. For Caravaggio, the shuddering jouissance of being beheaded is a sensation of an absolute abjected alienation: – the abject sublime as sublime alienation: this is the heart – of rather the head - of Caravaggio’s alien art. It lives on its own – survives its own severing; it lives on at the behest of its beheading and death. David offers us Caravaggio’s Head as a Gift in the guise of Goliath. By accepting the gift of his head we offer him his pardon from a murderous and murky life.

 

Caravaggio’s genius is to give the sensation of weight to the severed head: the human head is very heavy and Caravaggio paints that heaviness, allowing us actually to feel the sheer weight of the giant’s severed head. One can also sense the tautness of David’s lean but strong muscles holding the head. The painting is not on one plane: the decapitated head severs the picture plane.

David Holding the Head of Goliath was isolated in its own room, making it even more stark and startling, with no other images to distract or detract from it. After confronting the severed head close up and face to face – I could not face another painting and had to make a quick exit in order to savour the sublime shudder of this indelible image.

Salome receives the Head of Saint John (1606-7) depicts another of Caravaggio’s self-portraits, this time as the severed head of St. John the Baptist. The sensuous severed head has a lingering and luminous iridescence as if lit from within, giving an auratic alteric glow of still being alive and not quite dead - too much for Salome to gaze upon, so she looks blankly at the viewer with an abject bored dullness. The three figures radiate their sublime alienation, absolutely cut off from one another severed by shadows. This is an enigmatic image: the severed head seems to have a life of its own.

 

Caravaggio’s Sated Cupid (1608) - with his bloated belly - looks truly sated – but with what? With wine, semen and sex? There is something desiccated, debauched, and dejected about this sexually gratified degenerate cherub. Sated Cupid is strikingly similar to Egon Schiele’s watercolour drawings of shrivelled, aged babies where senility is grafted on to a baby body.

 

Caravaggio has stood the usual tradition on its head and instead of using a baby as a symbol of pretty innocence has chosen to show us a cherub which symbolises depravity, excess and decay: in its inversion it is intriguingly disturbing, even repellent, provoking a macabre and rather shameful sexual fascination. Is there something rather paedophilic in our sexual fascination by this louche and seedy old baby? Is it the molester or the molestee?

Caravaggio comes across at the height of his powers at the National Gallery: this is essential viewing. Caravaggio stripped bare and beheaded before you.

Alex Russell