Caravaggio, Bad-Boy of Baroque
Mad, bad and dangerous to know! Long before the Romantics made it fashionable, Caravaggio templated the tear-away artist.
In the first of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s religious paintings, Stigmatisation of Saint Francis, the forms of Saint Francis and an angel are picked out from the darkness by a strong light from the upper left. Saint Francis has just received the wounds of Christ known as the ‘stigmata’, after his vision of Jesus crucified, and is being comforted. However, the wounds of Christ have not yet manifested on his body…
(c.1595) by Caravaggio [view license]If you look carefully at the dark half of the painting, you will see another, barely discernible figure. This is Brother Leo, a fellow monk, who witnessed the fateful moment. He describes a spectacular event as a fiercely glowing seraph with fiery wings and the face of Jesus appeared from a swirling starry portal in the sky and fired beams of light into the Saint’s hands, feet and heart. There was fire and fountains of blood, cries of anguish and joy, before Francis collapsed in a pool of his own blood…
The scene that Caravaggio gives us is undeniably dramatic, though a lot less explicit than the events described. He has chosen not to show the stigmata and the angel is portrayed as a very humanoid being. Caravaggio was not…
