What Caravaggio tells us about horrid and beautiful: two sides of the same coin
Medusa and her pervasiveness
A warning and a reminder, Medusa is a constant presence in the arts. In mythology, she is immortal and as a monster, she embodies fear. She is a mutable muse who over time takes on contrasting meanings: from a feminist icon to a symbol of atrocity, from a fashion logo to a fascinating figure that attracts the brushes of artists as tormented as herself, like Caravaggio.
Caravaggio’s Life
Arrogant, rebellious, and a murderer, Caravaggio’s brief but eventful life reflects the drama of his works. Characterized by theatrical light and red drapery, Caravaggio’s paintings were controversial yet popular, criticized yet continually sought after and incredibly influential, either in opposition or emulation, by generations of subsequent painters.
Born Michelangelo Merisi, Caravaggio took his name from his hometown. He began working in a workshop at a very young age: At just 13, he was sent to work in Milan at the workshop of Simone Peterzano, a painter of Lombard mannerism who professed to be a pupil of Titian. In 1592, at the age of 21, he moved to Rome, the artistic and cultural centre of the time, a magnet that attracted young artists eager to study classical works in that place. In the early years, Caravaggio dedicated himself to painting still lifes and later half-length figures (like the famous boy bitten by a lizard or the basket of fruit), all works he sold on the street.
The turning point came in 1595 when Francesco del Monte recognized the young man’s talent and became his patron. Thanks to the Italian cardinal and diplomat at the Holy See, Michelangelo was recognized for his talent and innovation, beginning to receive his first commissions. Some of Caravaggio’s most famous and controversial works date back to this period: The Death of the Virgin is an example.
Caravaggio was a fast worker, but he also liked to play and drink as much as he worked.
One of his biographers writes:
“After two weeks of work, he will swagger for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one field to another, always ready to engage in a fight or argument, with the result that it is very embarrassing to get along with him.”
Caravaggio was arrested several times for, among other things, cutting the cloak of an opponent, throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter, maiming a guard, etc.
Caravaggio’s technique had the same spontaneity as his temperament. He painted directly on the canvas, with minimal preparatory drawing. Sometimes he would abandon a disappointing composition to focus his energies on a new work above it.
As many critics pointed out to him, he was accustomed to using ordinary people as models, with irregular, dirty faces, who were also presented in contemporary settings.
In 1606 Caravaggio’s temperament got the better of him. Caravaggio wounded a man and, although he did not intend to kill him, the man died from the wound. So he left Rome and went to Naples. Caravaggio travelled to Malta, Sicily, and then returned to Naples where he was involved in yet another bar brawl that left him severely disfigured.
While he was getting ready to return to Rome for some unknown reason, he was arrested again and had to buy his way out of prison. When he was released, the ship for the travel and all his belongings had sailed without him. As he travelled along the coast, he fell ill, perhaps with malaria, and a few days later, alone and feverish, he died.
In the 20th Century
Since the mid-20th century, his violent exploits and fiery temperament have increased his popular appeal; he is seen today as an outsider and a rebel against conventions. His alleged but unproven homosexual tendencies, inferred from both his paintings and some historical documents, have added further intrigue to his legend. He could be described as the perfect Old Master for an era enamoured with the idea of celebrity and enslaved to the cult of a self-destructive condemned genius.
Caravaggio’s Medusa
Caravaggio painted two versions of Medusa, both in the late 1500s.
The first version is also known as Murtula, named after the poet who wrote about it.
Instead, the version preserved at the Uffizi was intended for the Medici family. The purpose of this commission was to praise the courage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany in defeating his enemies.
For the subject, Caravaggio was inspired by the Greek myth of Medusa, a woman with snakes for hair who turned people to stone by looking at them.
The theme of Medusa, dear to the Medici, does not seem to have been accidental. In the humanistic context, the head of Medusa or Gorgon had a symbolic value as an allegory of prudence and wisdom. Giving a work depicting Medusa was therefore considered auspicious, as it symbolized the acquisition of Prudence through Wisdom.
The Myth
Medusa was a Gorgon, a terrifying creature of Greek mythology that had already attracted artists and poets before Caravaggio: Medusa had an apotropaic value, warding off the evil eye so it was a recuyrring subject in history, always attracting and always the protagonist in different works of art.
The most famous version of the story is the one Ovid narrates in his work “Metamorphoses”.
Her beauty is such that it attracts the gaze of the god of the sea. Unpleasantly, but predictably, she is raped by him and thus breaks the vow of chastity made as a priestess of Athena. As a consequence, the goddess transformed her most beautiful part, her hair, into monstrous and frightening snakes that would petrify anyone who looked at her. Perseus then killed her, decapitated her, and used her head as a shield and weapon.
“It is said that the lord of the sea violated her in a temple of Minerva: horrified, the chaste daughter of Jupiter covered her face with the aegis, but so that the deed would not go unpunished, she changed the hair of the Gorgon into repugnant snakes.” (Ovid’s Metamorphoses).
Caravaggio’s Medusa
However, when it comes to Caravaggio’s Medusa, the story is not of interest. The shield, yes, seems to refer to the same shield that Perseus would have used, but the image is frozen, everything has already happened, and Medusa has just been decapitated. However movement is not lacking: the eyes are wide open, the mouth is lettingo go a loud scream, and the movement of the snakes fills the shield’s screen.
In this moment of oscillation between life and death, Caravaggio describes the terror and surprise of the woman: the scene is dynamic because of the moment of inbalane depicted.
Caravaggio’s distinctive features are noted by his use of light and depth, and this technique is evident.
Caravaggio, with an illusionistic device, annulled the convexity of the shield. The shadow painted on the background suggests a concave surface against which Medusa’s head appears. The convexity highlights its reference to the shield and the aegis of Athena.
Athena’s aegis is perhaps her most recognizable attribute. The aegis is indeed a shield, a protective armour that Athena, Zeus, and sometimes other gods of Greek mythology carried into battle. The shield is also described as adorned with the head of Medusa, emphasizing the goddess’s association with victories in battle and the death of her enemies. Like in all of Caravaggio’s works, the strong contrast of brightness determines great expressiveness. Indeed, Medusa’s screaming face is rendered with clear, warm, and bright tones that stand out violently against the background of green and cold tones.
The Eyes
A head that at first glance seems to be looking at the viewer, almost frightening them. But Caravaggio’s Medusa does not have the full effect of frightening the viewer, because she does not look at us, thus transferring the power of the gaze to the viewer and emphasizing her imminent death. Caravaggio chose to depict his Medusa with lowered eyes, in contrast to the early Renaissance devoted to perfectly frontal or profile figures. This is also a realistic aspect: in the myth, no one could look her in the eyes without being petrified.
As mentioned earlier, the models chosen by Caravaggio have always aroused perplexity and criticism. In this case, according to some art historians, Caravaggio modelled Medusa after his own features. The features are indeed harder than delicate, and the terrible expression does not seem so feminine. His brown eyes are slightly sunken into the downturned face, the eyebrows are bushy, and his face cannot be traditionally defined as beautiful. Caravaggio therefore plays with the concept of the subject-matter: he paints Medusa, known for her gaze and her eyes, while looking his own visage in the mirror.
He is the only one safe from Medusa’s fixed gaze, but in the same way that Medusa captured her own image moments before being killed, Caravaggio continues to mirror himself and paint himself on the shield, somehow approaching his death.
The grotesque, terror, horror, and blood are evident in Caravaggio’s work as he seeks to distance himself from the regularity and firmness of the Early Renaissance.
Caravaggio had already painted horrific beheadings in works like Judith Beheading Holofernes. Yet in these paintings, the same decapitated head is seen concerning other figures, settings, and situations, while Medusa is portrayed exclusively, as the image of an isolated head, further intensifying our attention on her and on her gaze. Caravaggio’s Medusa is unique in the sense that it was meant to evoke horror in the viewer, making the severed head the main subject. We don’t see Medusa’s body or Perseus beheading her. Medusa’s head is the only focal point of the painting.
After Caravaggio
Medusa has inspired various artists who came before Caravaggio, and Caravaggio will inspire several who came after him. Rubens will treat the same subject, distorting Caravaggio’s representation but always inspired by Merisi.
In Rubens’ Medusa, the face of the Gorgon shows all the despair, all the terror of being caught off guard and killed without even having the chance to react, to oppose. A shadow of disbelief seems to indeed cross the disfigured, already cadaverous, face of Medusa.
Medusa’s despair is transmitted to the snakes that inhabit her head. The numerous, slimy, and colourful reptiles, as if mad, tangle, twist among themselves, and even bite each other.
Madness leads them to blind fury.
In the Flemish painter’s painting, the macabre, the grotesque, fascinating but repulsive, triumph.
Compared to Caravaggio’s Medusa, Rubens captures and shows without mediation all the disgusting side of the myth by contextualizing the event in a specific space and time. Caravaggio’s influence on Rubens is evident in the use of colours and light, and in the increasingly Baroque attempt to represent the soul and to make a still scene as dramatic as possible.
Caravaggio and Rubens, in representing Medusa, resort to a horrible beauty that fascinates and repels, seduces and kills.
The Beauty of Medusa
Medusa, an incarnation of beauty in Greek myth, becomes a monster and repulsion.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she is the possessor of disarming beauty. But gorgon derives from the Greek “gorgos”, terrible. It seems an oxymoron to define the gorgon Medusa as a dangerous beauty deserving of punishment. Still, this of representing the monster, humanizing it, is a recurrence in history. Caravaggio fully immersed himself in this deformed being, and Rubens’s grotesque hides an attempt to involve the viewer emotionally.
Today she has become the symbol of the femme fatale, an archetype developed in the film noir of the 1950s (but existing already much earlier with Munch’s flame-haired women) and surviving until the 1990s, when Gianni Versace made the seductive woman his brand and Medusa his logo.
When people look at Versace, they must feel terrified, petrified, just as when they look into the eyes of Medusa.
Caravaggio with his shield showed a vulnerable, grotesque, macabre but real Medusa, a Medusa in which he saw himself and which attracted and seduced him, and which he showed to the public as an immortal entity encapsulated in an instant.