Attending Caravaggio

Musing on research as part of the novelistic process.

Caravaggios at the National Gallery in London

I love research and do quite a lot, though most of it does not land in the story. It forms the 98% of the story’s ice berg invisible to the reader, a presence that is felt rather than read. Now, I find that a shift in perspective has transformed how I do research. Let me explain.

  When I was a younger writer, the protagonist of the story was central to my thinking. They were the instigator of action, the agent of knowing. As I've continued to write, and continued to age, I realize that there is more to the picture than meets the eye. These days, I know that whatever action the character takes, the milieu in which it occurs is just as important. Maybe more so. And not just the milieu of the present. We humans are slow animals, still fighting over ideas that have been with us for decades or even centuries (looking at you, evolution). I am more familiar with cycles, repeating patterns in time. These might be social cycles or rhythms of nature. What I've learned is that the action of a character in the now of a story begins in their childhood home. It begins in the childhood of the person raising them. What ideas were they raised on? What innovations changed the way they lived? These questions now drive my research efforts.  

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Boy Bitten by a Lizard - Caravaggio painted this around 1593.

I never paid much attention to the painter Caravaggio in the past. In fact, I bolted right past his dark, brooding paintings on my way to the sunnier climes of the Impressionists. Caravaggio was neatly summed up with the art historical term chiaroscuro – using light and dark to create contrast. Check! He certainly does.

But through a series of unfolding, interconnected events – a long ago visit to the Frick in New York that gave me the seed of the story I’m working on; a more recent trip to Sicily where I met a particular painting of his with a captivating backstory; an airport transfer in the town of Caravaggio just when I was wondering what to do next! Eureka! The universe speaks! – through all these things I find myself deeply immersed and fascinated by all facets of his work.

Caravaggio’s life story is brief and violent. One of the original bad boys of art, he was a brawler, a gambler, and a connoisseur of prostitutes (apparently both male and female). Quick with a sword, a skill that would be his undoing, he lived hard and died young. But as interesting as his biography is, what really captures my imagination is how he approached his subjects.

  And this is where the context becomes so important. When he arrived in Rome, in the waning years of the 16th century, the city had been sacked and taken over by the Spanish – it was a lawless garrison town. Just as important to the world Caravaggio entered in the 1590s were events that happened 80 years prior, when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and effectively launched the Protestant reformation. This challenge to the primacy of the Catholic church could not go unanswered. The Church in Rome was coming back strong, armed with both the carrot and the stick.

Guercino painted this Counter Reformation doozy in 1626, a little after Caravaggio's time.

Art was the carrot. Huge paintings reconfirming the apostolic succession, the legitimacy of the faith due to the purity of its origins. Baroque architecture, corners plastered with putti, angel wings fluttering – all engineered to overwhelm doubt with awe.

On the stick side, this was when the Inquisition came into being, with its particular means of extracting confessions of faith.

Doctrine was in, humanism: Out!  

  Into this stew comes Caravaggio. What he painted, how he painted it – context sheds the light (pun intended) needed to understand how very revolutionary his work truly is.

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A character based on him is entering a story that I'm writing. Doing my research, I let him marinate in my imagination, as I try to see the streets he walked down, smell the paint cleaner in his studio, or feel his boredom as he cranks out flowers and fruit as a young apprentice. I look over his shoulder as he prepares his colors. I chase down the seller of canvas to feel its texture and weight, to know its cost. I want to bring his world to life, because the more I learn about it, the more I hear echoes of our own times.

I took the various photos on research trips to Paris and London. It seems every museum of note has three Caravaggios, an early, middle, and late work. I have come to love sitting with them, studying their corners, the urgent action he depicts, and gazing into the impenetrable dark of those shadowy spaces.

Photoshoot in front of the Caravaggios at the Louvre in Paris.