Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da - The Lute Player

The Lute Player

C.1596

Oil on Canvas

100x126.5cm

Bir Tecavüz Kurbanı, Bir Sanatçı ve Bir Kadın - Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi 8 Temmuz 1593 tarihinde Roma’ da doğar.Ressam bir babanın Orazia Gentileschi nin ilk evladı , tek kızıdır.Ressam baba Orazia Gentileschi Artemisia yı ve erkek kardeşlerini atölyesinde eğitme isteğindedir.Artemisia erkek kardeşlerine göre daha yeteneklidir.Erken yaşlarda eğitimini babasının atölyesinde alır.Bu süreç boyunca genç Artemisia renklerin nasıl karşılaştırıldığını , nasıl resim yapılacağını öğrenir.Artemisia nın eğitimini aldığı dönemlerde Orazia Gentileschi , Caravaggio nun gerçekci çizgilerinden etkilenir ve bu tarzda resim yapmaya başlar.Artemisia da babasından dolayı bu tarz resimler yapmaya başlar.Ancak Artemisia nın yapmış olduğu eserler gerçekliğin farklı verilmesi yönüyle babasının yapmış olduğu eserlerden ayrılır. Annesi, 12 yaşında ölünce babasına sığınır.Fakat babası Artemisia üzerinde baskı kurar.Ona sanat kariyerinde çıraklıktan başka pay vermez.Artemisia ya okuma-yazma bile öğretmez.Aslında tarihsel sürece baktığımızda Artemisia nın kimliğini biliyor oluşumuz biraz da sanatçının babasının ressam oluşundan kaynaklanmaktadır.Çünkü o dönemlerde kadınların bir kimlik olarak kamusal alanda görünmeleri uygun karşılanmazdı.Sanatçının yaşadıkları olumsuzlukları babası yüzünden olmuş olsa da bir bakıma bir kadın sanatçı kimliği ile karşımıza çıkışı da yine babasının ressam oluşuna bağlı olduğunu belirtmek gerekir. Artemisia Gentileschi ilk çalışmasını 17 yaşındayken babasının yardımıyla yapmış olsa da gerçek anlamda ilk eseri olan Susanna ve Elders’ i 1610 da tamamlar.Bu eser Artemisia nın gerçekçi çizgilerden etkilerini göstermektedir.İki adamın bir kadını seks emelleri konusunda bezdirmelerini anlatan bu resimde sanatçının yapmış olduğu birkaç Susanna eserinden biridir.Bu eser sanki Artemisia nın seksüel anlamda rahatsızlığı yaşadığının görselleştirilmesi olarak da okunabilir.Bu eserde banyoda yıkanan Susanna yı taciz eden iki erkek figürünü sanatçı kendi hayatında baskı unsuru olan iki erkeği model alarak yapar: Orazia Gentileschi ve Tassi. Caravaggio nun ışık-gölge karşıtlığı tekniğini kullanır.Ancak Caravaggio gibi koyu tonların hakim olduğu resimler yerine daha açık ve aydınlık resimler üretir.Sonraki süreç içerisinde Artemisia başvurduğu sanat akademilerinden kabul alamayınca eğitimine babasının yanında devam etmeye başlar.Akademileriden kabul alamamasının nedeni ise basittir ; kadın olması.Buna rağmen pes etmez ve çalışmalarına devam eder.Caravaggio ve Michelangelo etkisinde resimler üretmeye devam eder babasının yanında.Eğitimi için babası kendi öğrencisi olan Tassi yi görevlendirir.Tassi Artemisia ya perspektif öğretecektir.Fakat Tassi Artemisia ya ders verceğine Artemisia ya tecavüz eder.Bu tecavüz olayı Tassi nin Artemisia yı evlilik vaadiyle kandırmasıyla sürer.Bu da olayın bir süre gizli kalmasını sağlar.Baba Orazia Gentileschi olayı öğrendiğinde Tassi tecavüz suçundan tutuklanır.Bu süreç içerisinde bütün yaşananlar duyulur ve tecavüz olayı kamu tarafından meşhur bir dava haline gelir.Tassi tutuklanır;fakat hakimin taraflı olur.Kamu da bu kadar bilinen bir dava olmasına karşının hakiminin Tassi yönünde karar alması ve Artemisia ya inanmayışı karşımıza yine kadının o dönemdeki rolü hakkında bize bilgi vermektedir.Davasının doğru olduğunu kanıtlamak için Artemisia kendisine işkence yapılmasını teklif eder ve haklı olduğu bir davada suçlu (Tassi) değil kendisi işkenceden geçirilir.Tabi bu da bir sonuç vermez ve mahkeme Tassi’yi serbest bırakır.Mahkeme kayıtları günümüze kadar ulaşmıştır.Artemisia Gentileschi nin yaşamış olduğu bu trajedi resimlerine de yansır.Çizdiği kadın figürleri sert ve güçlü kadınlar olmuştur.Bu olaydan sonra Artemisia yakın bir aile dostları ile evlenir,damadın adı ; Peter Antonio Stiattesi dir.Artemisia eşiyle birlikte Floransa ya yerleşir ki bu da bir bakıma babasının baskılarından kurtulmak için bir fırsattır. Tassi nin salıverilmesinden sonra Caravaggio nun yapmış olduğu Judith Beheading Holofornes i yapar.Bu eser Caravaggio dan esinlenerek yapmış olduğu bir eser olduğu kadar kadınlar Caravaggio nun kiler kadar güzel değildir.Belki de Artemisia bu eserde başına gelen olumsuz olayların intikamını alır. Judith ve Holfornes in hikayesi de ilginçtir.Anlatıldığına göre Holofornes Asurlu bir komutandır.Savaşmaktan başka bir şey bilmeyen bir başkomutan İsrail üzerine seferler düzenler ve neredeyse tüm İsrailli ele geçirir. Ancak bu bölgeye Judith gelene kadar.Judith güzel ve dul bir kadındır.Holofornes Judith den çok etkilenir.Judith de kavmini kurtarmak için bu durumdan yararlanır. Holofornes i sarhoş edene kadar içirir ve sonrasında hizmetçisi ile birlikte Holofornesin başını keser.Bu olaydan sonra Asur ordusu İsrail topraklarından çekilir.İşte bu tabloda Judith sanatçının kendisine benzerken, ona tecavüz eden Tassi ise Holofornes olarak resimlenmiştir.Bir bakıma bu tablo Tassi için utanç belgesi olur.Bu resim farklı birçok ressam tarafından yapılmış olsade etkileyiciliği ve derinliği Artemisia Gentileschi kadar etkili değildir. Artemisia kariyerine Floransa da devam eder.Böylece hem babasının hakimiyetinden hem de kendisi için kurmuş olduğu planlardan sıyrılmış olur.Dük Cosimo Medici nin iltimasına girer.Bu dönem içerisinde birçok çalışmaya imza atar.Şehrinsoylu ailelerinden siparişler almaya başlar.1613-1614 yılında Judith Beheading Holofornes in devamı niteliğinde olan Judith ve Bayan Maidservant’ı yapar.Yine bu resminde Judith elinde kılıcı vardır.Hizmetçisinin elinde de Tassi olarak resmedilmiş olan Holofornes in kafa bulunmaktadır.Artemisia yeni teknikler öğrenerek resim anlayışını güçleştirir.Hatta okuma yazmayı da öğrenir bu süreç içerisinde.Floransa da yaşadığı süre içerisinde sanatsal anlamda en verimli çağını yaşar.Ayrıca Accedemia Del Disegno ya ilk kadın ressam olarak kabul edilir. Sanatsal anlamda başarılı olduğu bu dönemde evlilik hayatı pek de parlak değildir.Artemisia nın eşi de ressamdır.Fakat Artemisia kadar başarılı değildir.Kocası resim yapmayı bırakır ve Artemisia nın yapmış olduğu resimleri pazarlar.Tabi elde ettiği kazancı ile içki ve kumarda tüketince kötü süren evlilikte derin kırılmalar olur.Ayrıca bu süreçte Peter Antonio kanunsuz bir işe karışarak ortadan kaybolur.Tek başına kalan Artemisia artık ailenin reisi olarak kaynaklarda adı geçer.Durumunun belirsizliği bir daha evlenmesi için engel çıkarır.1620 de Floransadan ayrılır.1630 a kadar Cenova, Roma ve Venedik te sanatına ve yaşamına devam eder.1630 yılında Napoli den Londra ya gider.1.Charles hizmetinde çalışır.Portre ressamı olarak babasından ünlü olur.Ancak 1641 de hayatının sonuna kadar yaşayacağı olan Napoli ye yerleşir.Ölümü hakkında kesin kaynaklar olmadığı için tahminen 1652 yılında öldüğü belirtilmiştir.Sanatçının mezarının yeri de bilinmemektedir. 
Kaynakça: Artemisia Gentileschi:
The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art
Mary D. Garrard
Mary D. Garrard--Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622 : Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity


Mehmet Kahraman

Caravaggio

Supper at Emmaus

                                                                                      

Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (1571-1610) achieved one of the most important revolutions in the history of painting. He inherited a world where the classical idealism of Michelangelo was still normative, especially in the depiction of the human body, and where the eccentricities of his successors, who did not paint from life at all, distorted the popular notion of what the eye actually sees. He rejected both utterly. He painted with an intensity of realism never before equalled, and his impact was so immediate, profound and lasting that it affected all the great painters of the first half of the seventeenth century. The genius of each transmuted the new realism in a variety of ways, making it both the climax and the golden age of European art.

Caravaggio was so named after the ancestral seat of the Sforzas from which the Merisis also came. But he was probably born in Milan. North Italian painters, with their transalpine connections, had always had an element of realism, which Caravaggio naturally inherited. But he had no precursors. The only painter who may have set him on his chosen path was Giovanni Battista Moroni (c. 1525 1578), the brilliant portrait painter from Brescia, whose penetrating studies (Il Cavaliere dal Piede Ferito, The Tailor, The Lawyer) are among the treasures of London's National Gallery. Essentially, however, Caravaggio created himself. He was antinomian, despising all laws of life and art. But his fatal propensity to break all the rules, which turned his life first into anarchy, then tragedy, also made him an artist of astonishing originality and creative power. He destroyed the old order and imposed a new one.

Caravaggio was always in trouble. In 1592, when he was not yet twenty, he fled Milan after 'certain quarrels' and the wounding of a police officer. He went to Rome and was there, for the most part, until 1606, when he again had to flee. His life in Rome was of growing financial and professional success, but it was also punctuated with crime. In the years 1600-1606 alone, he was brought to trial no less than eleven times. The charges covered a variety of offences, most involved violence. It is significant that, despite his posthumous reputation for homosexuality, and his endless brushes with the police, he was never charged with sodomy, then a capital offence. But he was charged with murder. On 29 May 1606 he killed one Tommasoni in a brawl after a disputed game of royal tennis, and had to flee to escape execution. He went first to Naples, then to Malta, where he was feted and made a Knight of St John. Then, after 'an ill considered quarrel' with a senior knight, he was on the run once more, all around Sicily, then on to Naples again. But this time there was no hiding place. The knights, known for their relentlessness, pursued him, and Caravaggio, now thirty nine, in an attempt to seek forgiveness and refuge in Rome, tried to get there, but died at Porto Ercole, apparently of a fever.

What is remarkable is that the artist, despite his hunted and, in the end, desperate life, always contrived to go on painting, often without a proper workshop of any kind. He was variously described, even by admirers, as a man of 'stravaganze' as 'uno cervello stravagantissimo' (exceptionally odd) and a 'cervello stravolto'. His father died when he was six, his mother when he was eighteen, which may help to explain his anger. His paintings show that he was a man of the most profound religious convictions, of a humble and contrite heart, and with a fanatical devotion to his art. His fundamental ideas were always absolutely clear, though he continually changed and improved his techniques. He believed in total realism, and he always painted from life, dragging poor people in from the street if need be. Only two of his surviving paintings are on wood, which he hated, preferring canvas which he could treat himself and cut to his exact specifications. Analysis shows that he experimented with various oils for his paints, to achieve the smoothness, luminosity, transparency and chiaroscuro he required.

He began to make himself a great realist by painting flowers and fruit, in a variety of lights, sometimes pure still lifes, sometimes with street boys (Sick Little Bacchus in the Uffizi; Boy with a Basket of Fruit in the Borghese, Rome; Boy Bitten by a Lizard, in the Longhi Foundation, Florence, though he painted a replica of the last, which is now in the National Gallery). Like all the greatest artists, Caravaggio loved painting from nature. There is no direct evidence that he ever tried pure landscape, but he painted leaves, fruit and flowers with a truth and delicacy that has seldom been matched, as his Basket of Fruit (Milan, Ambrosiana) and Boy with a Basket of Fruit demonstrate. In two early masterworks, the enchanting Rest on the Flight into Egypt and Penitent Magdalene (both Rome, Doria Pamphili), he got his current mistress, a beautiful young golden redhead, to pose as the Virgin and the Magdalen, and it seems quite possible that in the Rest he painted her outdoors, for the light on her flesh is so delicate and natural. Normally, however, he made studio arrangements to get the light exactly as he wanted it. To achieve realism, he liked to pull his subject out of surrounding darkness into strong lateral or overhead light, as close to the viewer as possible. In some cases this was simple - The Lute player (New York, Metropolitan), for example. It was one of a number of works showing handsome boys (in this case a castrato singer from the Vatican choir) which Caravaggio did for the Florentine ambassador in Rome, Cardinal del Monte, a dissolute man who in old age had turned from women to youths. To get the right tones on the boy's flesh, contrasting with the score of the music in the front, Caravaggio needed a simple light behind himself and to the left. But when he did realistic genre scenes, such as The Cardsharps (Fort Worth, Kimball Art Museum), The Gypsy Fortune-teller (Rome, Capitoline) and The Concert of Youths (Metropolitan) he would put up a studio stage set and light it with elaborate care, both naturally and artificially.

This was a new kind of art, which was to have momentous consequences. It has led some modern writers to speculate that, born into the twentieth or twenty-first century, Caravaggio would have been a photographer or a film maker. But that is nonsense. Caravaggio, it is clear, adored the feel and line of a brush on a slightly springy surface, prepared with grey (as a rule), and the sheer creative excitement of using the brush to bring the real world out of the darkness of the canvas. Not a single drawing by him has survived and it is likely that he never did any. He simply stood up to the canvas and painted directly onto it, from the living model. He also enjoyed the sensual pleasure of working up his colours to match not necessarily nature but the effects of light he had conjured up through his spectacular illuminations.

The word 'spectacular' is not amiss because, although Caravaggio aimed at total realism, he wanted drama too. It was the secret of his instant, direct appeal to the Church, to collectors, to fellow artists, to the public, then and since. He depicts dramatic moments, whether cheating at cards or the very second a miracle occurs, in such a way that the viewer feels he is present and can step into the picture. The Church, which bought more than half his output, recognised the huge popular appeal of his vivid presentation of the faith. But it sometimes found Caravaggio too real for comfort. It rejected at least five of his commissioned works or forced him to repaint them, because (as one cardinal put it) he 'crosses the borderline between the sacred and profane' His Death of the Virgin, a work of marvellous sadness and pity (Louvre), shows her as an old woman, already a corpse. This was done from life, from the body of a prostitute found in the Tiber. His two versions of The Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery; Milan, Brera), each in different ways essays on truth, show ordinary people rather than holy figures. His Christ in The Crowning with Thorns (Prado) is in horrible pain. In his St Matthew and the Angel (Berlin, Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, destroyed), the evangelist looks too stupid, the angel dictating to him too delicious. Judith Beheading Holofernes (Rome, Barberini) is a terrifying mass of blood and horror. Even in the most touching of his works, The Madonna of Loreto in St Augustine, Rome, showing the Virgin accepting with reverent gratitude the prayers of two old peasants, the soles of the man's feet are filthy. The Counter-Reformation accepted this new realism as exactly what it wanted in general. And ordinary people loved it because it made them part of the dramas. But sometimes the cardinals and bishops shuddered at what Caravaggio was doing: it was too close to life.

On the other hand, Caravaggio told the story of Christianity as it had never been told before, as an actual happening. In Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, two great canvases in a family chapel - hard to see properly without breaking the rules of the church - St Paul tumbles off his horse at Damascus almost into the lap of the spectators, who feel in genuine danger of a kick from the frantic animal, while the men crucifying St Peter upside down are so close that the viewer is tempted to try and stop them from doing it. In perhaps Caravaggio's most popular canvas, The Entombment (Vatican), the viewer can peer into the yawning sepulchre. The viewer again feels personally present in The Calling of St Matthew (Rome, S. Luigi), a masterpiece of lighting and narrative drama. In its companion, The Martyrdom of St Matthew, he is appalled at the horror of the murder, and made to feel a guilty participant.

What in effect Caravaggio is doing systematically and deliberately, for the first time in the history of art, is destroying the space between the event in the painting and the people looking at it. He is giving us direct windows into life, whether religious life or ordinary life. Indeed, they are more than windows; we are in the same room or manger or tomb or prison where the events are taking place. Even we, whose vision and sense of reality has been blunted and distorted by television and the cinema, still get tremendous impressions of participating when we see his great canvases close to. What then must it have been like in the early seventeenth century, for people who had never come across anything approaching this blast of actuality, to be brought face-to-face with a reenactment of sacred events in two dimensions? Artists were particularly struck, or perhaps shocked is a better word; but horribly stimulated too, and stirred to find out exactly how the man did it. This was no easy matter, either, for Caravaggio's work was already becoming scattered in his lifetime. He was changing all the time, and in his last canvases, such as The Beheading of St John the Baptist (Valletta Cathedral) and Adoration of the Shepherds (Messina, Musee Regionale) he was using black space as a powerful character in the composition, threatening to overwhelm the lit areas, sometimes crowded into a mere quarter of the canvas. These experiments were the most important happenings in art, at least so far as artists themselves were concerned, since Leonardo painted. Moreover, Caravaggio, despite all his difficulties, always finished each piece of work if he possibly could, then went directly on to another, with fresh ideas and new experiments.

There is no doubt about the impact Caravaggio's work had on other artists. In the years immediately after his death, he was imitated by more artists than any other master of whom we have records. Caravaggism was a kind of fever which spread over the art world. In the last century, the art historian Benedict Nicolson spent much of his life collecting photographs of early seventeenth century works in the Caravaggio manner which eventually filled three large volumes. Caravaggio had a direct or indirect influence on all the greatest spirits of the century: Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velazquez and Bernini.

- From Art: A New History, by Paul Johnson.

Baroque Art

"An art-historical term used both as an adjective and a noun to denote, principally, the style that originated in Rome at the beginning of the 17th century superseding Mannerism. The Council of Trent (1545-63) had strongly advocated pictorial clarity and narrative relevance in religious art and to a degree Italian artists such as Santi di Tito (1536-1603) had responded with a more simplified style which has been called 'Anti-Mannerism'. Yet it was not until the 17th century, with the groundswell of renewed confidence and spiritual militancy in the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church that a radical new style, the Baroque, developed. Rome was the most important centre of patronage at this period and the return to compositional clarity was facilitated by a renewed interest in the antique and the High Renaissance in the work of Annibale Carracci and his Bolognese followers, Domenichino, Guido Reni and Guercino. Their work is characterized by a monumentality, balance and harmony deriving directly from Raphael. Carracci's great rival, Caravaggio, by contrast modified his Classic style with an early naturalism, using for his strongly-felt religious subjects characters who appeared to have walked in straight from the streets, the spiritual meaning of the narrative heightened by dramatically theatrical chiaroscuro."The era known as High Baroque covered the period c1625-75 and is best represented by its leading artist, Gianlorenzo Bernini. In High Baroque all the visual arts - painting, sculpture and architecture - are forged together to make ensembles intended to exert an overwhelming emotional impact (e.g. the crossing of St. Peter's and the Cornaro Chapel, Sta. Maria della Vittoria, Rome). Reposeful balance is forsaken for dynamic movement and the integrity of individual materials is subsumed into the all-important illusionism calculated to impress upon the faithful the actuality of the spiritual experiences of the Catholic saints represented before, above and all around them. After Bernini, the greatest architect of the period was Borromini, and this was also an age when some of the greatest masterpieces of illusionistic ceiling painting were executed, the leading artists being Pietro da Cortona, Lanfranco, Baciccio and, slightly later, Andrea Pozzo. Contemporaneous with these exponents of the High Baroque, however, was a continuance of the Classical strand, characterized by the work of Algardi, Sacchi and Maratta.

"Although Baroque art had its origins in the Catholic church the possibilities for propaganda afforded by the involving and illusionistic techniques of the Baroque style were not lost on secular patrons. The Barberini family employed Cortona to proclaim their divine right to the papacy in his ceiling painting for their palace in Rome, while Colbert, chief minister to Louis XIV of France, was instrumental in the adoption of Baroque in France for the sole purpose of exalting the reign of Louis XIV. Consequently, Versailles is one of the most grandiose of Baroque palaces. Indeed, French Baroque is, by virtue of its use chiefly as political propaganda, characterized by a certain pomposity. With its codification by Lebrun, the director of the French Academy, it also moved more towards a rather ossified Classicism based on teachable rules and precepts derived largely from the paintings of Poussin who had spent almost his entire active life in Rome.
"Baroque art soon spread through the other Catholic countries of Europe. Rubens in Flanders produced religious and secular works with equal success, while in Spain religious art reached new heights of religious fervour and in South Germamy and Austria the beginning of the 18th century saw some of the most remarkably elaborate and overwhelming church architecture ever erected (e.g. Neumann and Hildebrandt). Because of its base in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Baroque was resisted in Protestant countries such as Holland and Britain, although Rembrandt in Holland and the painter John Thornhill and architect Vanbrugh in Britain are exceptions. During the 18th century, Baroque gradually gave way to the lighter, more decorative Rococo style."


- From The Bulfinch Guide to Art History