Caravaggio Calling of St Matthew Use of Light and Color
Let's take a look at…the "Calling of St. Matthew" painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, located in the Contarelli Chapel in the church of the French Congregation San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome between 1599/1600. Majestic work, oil on canvas, 322 x 340 cm.
" As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him. Mt. 9,9. This is the Gospel passage that Caravaggio masterfully depicts in his work.
The painting is part of a group of three paintings commissioned by the heirs of Cardinal Mathieu Cointerel (in Italian, Matteo Contarelli), for the chapel that bears his name and is the last on the left aisle of the church. The other paintings in the triptych are: "Martyrdom of Saint Matthew" and "The Inspiration of Saint Mattew". The contract signed by the rectors of San Luigi dei Francesi and Caravaggio was for the side panels of the chapel and contains the following: "" Al lato destro dell'altare, cioè alla banda del vangelio, si facci un quadro alto palmi dicesette et largo palmi quatordici di vano, nel quale sia mededimam [en]te dipinto San Matteo dentro un magazeno, o ver, salone ad uso di gabella con divere robbe che convengono a tl officio con un banco come usano i gabellieri con libri et danari in atoo d'haver riscosso qualche sommao, come meglio parere. Da qual banco di San Matteo, vestito secondo che parera convenirsi a quell'arte, si levi con desiderio per venire a N.Sre che passando lungo la strada con i suoi discepoli lo chiama all'apostolato; et nell'atto di san Matteo si ha da dimostrare l'artificio del pittore, como anco del resto".
Given the basic historical coordinates of a work, it is very important to try to understand its vital essence that makes it a fundamental representation for a community becoming , as time passes by, an universal constant. In history of art, Caravaggio was a very interesting artist, but probably mistreated by his contemporaries. Poussin went so far as to say: "…he managed to kill painting", and he was hardly considered by critics until one of the greatest art historians in the world, Roberto Longhi, rehabilitated the artist and relaunched him to the attention of science and art-historical critics almost recently! Roberto Longhi set up a very demanding method of analysis that framed a work of art as pure form, that is, his consideration that goes beyond, disregarding history. The practical aspect of how art is done is fundamental for him and it is possible to tell the story of an art work without facts and figures, but only as a formal dialogue. Caravaggio for Longhi is the one who has revised the shape of bodies through the modelling by light. Studying an artwork studio has to be first of all a relationship with the real, what the eye perceives leads us to know intentions and actions expressed by artifice and instruments. From here we find ourselves able to evaluate the artist and his work, to see its contents, to find the most wonderful connections art is conveying to us. The purpose of analysis of the artwork lies in discovering its meticulous expressive force, it is in recognizing a living, concrete, unitary construction. Through Longhi, Caravaggio becomes a paradigm
for art, and this also leads us to an important reflection: how important is the criticism and the critical genius of those who study and propose an artist? How much does the voice of the meticulous study of a historian or art critic influence the commercial value of an artwork in space/time? Questions that have so many answers, certainly related to the historical context in which things happen, certainly also in relation to social / political relations that have always concerned art. Getting back to Caravaggio's masterpiece we'd like to give some indication for what the artist has done. Caravaggio painted the characters in the clothing of his day and this was one of the first paintings to transpose a sacred event into the present with extreme realism, the revolutionary realism of this artist. Here is proposed an important figure in the meaning because Matthew was a tax collector, an occupation as to the Gospel despised worse than usurers, working with money and thus considered a sinner. Matthew is the old man who pointing with his hand seems to say "me?", whereas the other characters sitting at the table are traders who pay their duties. Jesus is on the other side, on the right in the painting, and all of a sudden breaks into the scene feeding amazement and action, making everything changeable, everything in motion. The whole picture shows an action that upsets the hieratic "photography" of Merisi, from right to left and back again in terms of the fundamental formal aspects such as light, gestures, realism of attitudes.
The artist constructs the painting as a scene, superimposing the models that he illuminates with an artificial light to underline the effects of chiaroscuro. He uses the most important element in iconography, light, as a fundamental and vital expression. The contrasts of the colours are as striking as light and shadows. Caravaggio aims straight at the soul, he affects the deep-rooted elements of the viewer, he creates pathos. The beam of light that cuts the composition is not an overlap, it is not real, but it has the strength of a symbol. Caravaggio decides to visualize the relationship with the divine through light. And through light it achieves a clear separation: it divides the human world from the divine, Good from Evil, the past from the future, the conscious from the unconscious. It is the poetics of light as divine grace, that make you perceive how God really enters into the hearts of mankind. It is the light that the spectator must follow according to the gesture of Christ's call to St. Matthew. There is a communication that indicates a strong moral tension, an immediate and descriptive plot of the sense of true enlightenment, a call that draws through the intercession of Christ and the Church, this is the obvious sign. The hand of Christ is a reminder of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.
In the red box we have a scene almost on its own, a whole group that will be filmed by all the painting of the '600 in the genres of "Bamboccianti". There is a double journey of the divine through the light to the awareness that brings back to the gesture of Christ, we pass from unconsciousness to awareness, from indifference to salvation. Caravaggio uses models that he sets as shapes, illuminates them with artificial light and then composes an entire scene. It acts like in a theatre where it sets the work by looking at the effect first. This is Caravaggio's first work for a broad, not
private audience, and he, who had been a genre painter, is therefore still very attached to details; and these details can be better understood from close up and obviously also in the natural light of the chapel in which the work is located; interpreting the artist here in his less evident elements requires commitment to great contemplation. Caravaggio in the Call of San Matthew is the artist who interprets himself on the way for a new redemption through the compositional use of a new light, a direct beam that statically imposes another reality. The artist always brings within him the irreconcilability of his own existence, poised between good and evil, and for this reason he will be condemned by the official culture; Giovan Pietro Bellori, theorist of seventeenth-century classicism, claimed that his religious painting did not respond to the edification principles required by orthodoxy. Merisi in his evolution is an artist of today and always; he was a man whose personal contradictions were not in line with the academy, a man who produced art changing himself probably without awareness of giving something away, which would change part of the world of those who undertake to have a closer look.
WHERE THIS ARTWORK IS LOCATED:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Luigi+dei+Francesi/@41.8994213,12.4720621,17z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x132f60502e82012d:0x22b3fa4bf22984b9!8m2!3d41.899581!4d12.4745405
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiesa_di_San_Luigi_dei_Francesi
Caravaggio Calling of St Matthew Use of Light and Color
Source: http://art-zone.it/?p=707&lang=en