Rebuilding The Renaissance

In 1605, Caravaggio painted an image of St. Jerome for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and the painting is still located in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, Italy. Caravaggio’s depiction of the Father of the Church is a very quiet and intimate one, where we see a scholar in a sparsely furnished room consumed with the enormous task of translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin.

Painted in 1605 for the chapel of the Papal grooms, known as “Palafrenieri,” in the new Basilica of St. Peter, Caravaggio’s painting was removed after only a few days because it was considered indecorous. The stark nudity of the Christ Child, the bulging breasts of the Virgin Mary (who was modeled from a well-known prostitute!) and the unflattering representation of St. Anne (patron saint of the grooms) were most likely the reasons the painting was thought to be inappropriate for the most important church in the Catholic world.

Located in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican Museums, Caravaggio’s “Deposition” was thought by many of his contemporaries to be the painter’s greatest work. The dramatic representation of very real-looking biblical characters handling the dead body of Christ in a shallow, tenebrously-lit foreground space makes for a very moving visual narrative.

Commissioned in 1601 for a chapel in the Roman church of Santa Maria della Scala, Caravaggio’s “Death of the Virgin” was rejected by the Carmelite friars of the church. While some believe it was because of the stark and indecorous representation of the dead Virgin Mary, one of Caravaggio’s biographers suggests instead it was because Caravaggio used a well-known courtesan as his model for Mary.

Located in the Augustinian church of Sant ’Agostino in Rome, Italy, the “Madonna of Loreto” is one of Caravaggio’s most beautiful paintings. It was painted for the Cavalletti family in 1604 and depicts a barefoot Virgin Mary (who was modeled from a well-known prostitute) standing in a rundown contemporary Roman doorway carrying the Christ child who blesses two peasant pilgrims. The stark realism and lack of pretense made it very popular amongst the masses, who, according to one of Caravaggio’s biographers, “made a great cackle over it.”

In the summer of 1602, Caravaggio painted what one art historian described as “the most nakedly libidinous of the painter’s secular mythological works.” Employing the same model that he previously used for his “St. John the Baptist,” Caravaggio creates a disturbingly realistic sexual metaphor of the power of love.

It was for one of his most important patrons, the fabulously wealthy banker, Vincenzo Giustiniani, that Caravaggio painted one of his most moving works – the “Incredulity of St. Thomas.” The skeptical apostle Thomas probes Christ’s wound with his finger in a disturbingly graphic way that only Caravaggio could represent.

From the source of the canvases used for large Venetian paintings in the Renaissance, to the death and burial of Masaccio, to the tradition of Madonarri in the Renaissance, to the difference between chiaroscuro and tenebrism, and much, much more - this episode answers the veryquestionsthat you ask me about the great art, artists and history of the Italian Renaissance.

After the “Supper at Emmaus,” Caravaggio produced two more paintings for the Mattei brothers. The first was the unorthodox “St. John the Baptist” that today is in the Capitoline Museums in Rome and is a rather unabashed representation of a naked youth embracing a ram and lacking any conventional imagery. The second painting is the dramatic “Taking of Christ,” which was thought lost for centuries before being rediscovered in 1990 in the dining hall of the house of Jesuit fathers in Dublin, Ireland.

Located in the National Gallery in London, Caravaggio’s “Supper at Emmaus” was painted in 1601 for the influential Cardinal Girolamo Mattei. The painting depicts the episode from the Gospel of Luke where two apostles dine with a traveler and realize to their astonishment that their companion is the resurrected Christ once he breaks bread.