"My face for the world to see." Two martyred saints by Caravaggio.
The Martyrdom of St. Matthew
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The Martyrdom of St. Ursula
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Caravaggio famously -- and perhaps desperately -- painted his face into works depicting a barbaric homicide in these two paintings. At the same time, he implicated himself in the scenes.
In his Martyrdom of St. Matthew, the artist’s turned head, looking back at the terrifying moment before the assassin’s sword would fall on the helpless elderly Matthew, was more than an autobiographical gesture. It is his acknowledgment of appalling suffering witnessed and deeply feared. The viewer catches his remorseful face, a black cape thrown over his shoulder. Caravaggio is with a group of young toughs in plumed hats, the sharp types on Rome’s streets who could sense trouble and knew when it was time to leave.
It had been Caravaggio’s first church commission in Rome, a prize he had finally won. As art critic Helen Langdon tells us, no “earlier painter dared to break so dramatically with long-established studio traditions, painting his figures from nature, directly on to the canvas, with complex effects of studio lighting.”
He would also be an onlooker in the Martyrdom of St. Ursula, at that moment when an arrow pierces her heart for refusing the richly dressed, but ugly toad of a Hun who coveted her and was enraged at her rejection of him.
Caravaggio biographer Peter Robb describes this moment of death:
"Ursula had the look that was really unknown in art until
war photographers made it familiar three and a half centuries
later -- the mildly puzzled look of people in the instant they
are killed."
The artist stands behind the mortally wounded saint, his face catching the light, a bystander, his mouth open, as if to say it all happened so suddenly. He was here in this small intimate scene, again as a witness to the terrible things that come in the night, both deserved and undeserved.
He could not know at the time that it was to be his last painting.
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heading back to hospital shortly; they're still there. Likely out tomorrow. I've tried not to crowd them, so didn't go yesterday.
I DO miss longer pieces from you,
Later!
With Julie!
I don't know about what is going on lately, but when I was doing my research for my master's it was considered his. That was in 2002-2003...
I love Saskia as Flora and Caravaggio's boy with a lute...great master woriks...I scour the art section of the NYT every day, esp. on weekends, to see all the museum offerings around the country...I actually re-arranged a trip to LA to see my daughter to coincide with an exhibit at the Getty of Bernini's bust of Costanza...
then I saw it when I went to Florence two years later...yep, I did...