Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity
Troy Thomas, Reaktion Books, £14.95

NOT another book on the life and work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio! 

Troy Thomas’s admittedly attractive and easily transportable book on a Renaissance painter whose theatrical paintings insist upon attention, so different from the static biblical masterpieces that for the non-expert gallery visitor demand no more than a passing glance, may seem superfluous.

Even adding “the Creation of Modernity” would appear to promise a journey over well-trodden ground, given the ready recognition of Caravaggio’s influence on many modern artists, film-makers and art critics. 

Troy disarms criticism by his introductory acknowledgement that Caravaggio was seen “in his own time to be the most original artist of his generation.” 

It was not, however, his contemporaries’ recognition of his innovatory realism and tenebrism (his characteristic strong contrast of light and dark) but the profound ambiguity with which Caravaggio’s art now challenges the beholder that establishes his “modernity.”

Troy’s examination of the many aspects of this questioning ambiguity covers all the familiarly discussed features of experiments with form and content evident in the paintings, but also their display of “self-consciousness, self-reference, introspection, subjectivity and scepticism” — all, he claims, now recognised as “quintessentially modern.”

Caravaggio’s Italian world was, despite the emerging philosophical/scientific findings challenging Catholic dogma, nevertheless rooted in religious faith and Troy does not believe, as some modern commentators have suggested, that the artist was a social or political rebel, let alone a non-believer.

Although not born into poverty, he was clearly fully aware of the poor who, in the 1570s, were starving in the streets. Troy maintains that Caravaggio “emphasises in his art, from a class perspective, a rejection of courtly elegance in favour of proletarian simplicity. His eschewing of artificiality is linked with the positive image of poverty.”

Although he was “determined to make a name for himself by dint of ambition and novelty,” his lifestyle led to a reputation of being a haughty and belligerent troublemaker with a police record including jail sentences and the murder of a rival in a brawl.

The stark realism of his biblical scenes, often commissioned by churches and as often rejected, instead of treating the divine as an essential part of the human experience, views the metaphysical from a human and earthly perspective, difficult for his characters to comprehend.

This realism is achieved through working from living models — his madonnas being prostitutes from the streets, his peasants and even often saints clearly working men and women in torn clothes and with dirty feet. The prevailing darkness of the backgrounds focused the viewer’s attention on the action of the moment with a power that seems to reach out of the frame.

If the church, seeking piety and naturalness in painting, did not approve of aspects of his works, including possibly in some the homoerotic overtones, the emerging art market recognised Caravaggio’s innovative style. 

His work continued to develop the “psychological expression of character and dark settings, but also subtle and clever ambiguity of genre and meaning.” He used the religious texts, subjects of his paintings, as living dramas, more modern than mystical.

The ambiguity of his paintings is mirrored in his self-portraits where he used his own face to model unflattering images of severed heads. As with all Troy Thomas’s claims for the profound questioning of Caravaggio’s art, he illustrates this here with David With The Head Of Goliath, one of the 60 photographs of the paintings. The viewer is urged to note that the young David “shows a pensive mixture of compassion and regret.” 

The careful placing of the illustrative photographs is surprisingly, and possibly unintentionally, one of the book’s strengths. As Troy does not move from individual painting to painting but from aspect to aspect, the reader has continually to move backwards and forwards to examine and concentrate on the work chosen to demonstrate different aspects supporting the author’s developing arguments. 

Caravaggio was a man of his time but an artist whose work has classic stature in so far as it speaks through time to our troubled and anxious age.  

The claim of Troy Thomas’s well-written and well-organised book that Caravaggio calls upon his viewer “to interiorize and interpret” makes the reader anxious to take any opportunity to see his actual work.