A friend recently sent me a link to an article about the great Baroque master Caravaggio that tells of recent “research” into his techniques. This new work was done by Roberta Lapucci, who teaches at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy, a school where I too have taught. I don’t recall having met Lapucci — it was some years ago — and I have a high regard for SACI, but I’m surprised to hear, once again, of this notion that Caravaggio used any such technology to make his paintings.
A professional dilettante named David Hockney first raised this issue seven or eight years ago. To make a long story short, Hockney recounted that he was troubled by how “realistically” many old masters could draw, and apparently in order to rationalize his own inferiority as a draftsman he espoused a theory that many old masters used systems like the camera obscura to achieve greater believability.
The principals and workings of the camera obscura have been understood since ancient times and led to the development of the modern camera. The first such device was reportedly built more than a thousand years ago by an Arab scientist named Alhazen. In short, it enables a viewer to see a projection of an image flattened onto an opposing surface. This image can then be traced, producing accurate perspectives and proportions. Lenses or mirrors can be used to correct orientations.
Hockney, and now Lapucci, are claiming that Caravaggio used these techniques, and I’m going to point out a few reasons why it was not likely he did and why their claim seems flawed.
Part of what is at issue here is the purpose for utilizing such devices. Tracing a projected image will allow for a much quicker rendering of proportion and relationships between, say, facial features, so for anyone who has difficulty “getting a likeness,” it will come in handy. It will not increase the ability to compose or depict such things as the dirt on the soles of a figure’s feet.
Caravaggio used friends and acquaintances as models throughout his career. For example, a rather brusque, tough looking fellow with a short, stubby nose appears in paintings he made in Rome and then in Naples, Sicily and Malta. But Caravaggio traveled alone to these places, in an incessant trek, fleeing police, thugs and the knights of Malta. (It’s a ripping tale.)
If Caravaggio was able to summon the likenesses of friends — if he could paint them from memory — it seems odd that he would resort to cumbersome contrivances with lenses and pinholes. Why? To what advantage?
If the camera obscura can give assistance to the artist who requires aid in the depiction of reality, just how does it assist those who can paint the probing of a finger into the wounds of Christ, as in Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas or the decapitation of John the Baptist or Holofernes? Take a look at the robes of the angel assisting Matthew in his work. Let’s imagine how Caravaggio set up this flowing drapery and froze it, along with the winged boy and unbalanced old man long enough to trace the whole bloody affair onto a canvas.
In point of fact, the draperies in many of his works are in movement and seem to have sprung ideally into perfect shapes that harmonize with the interstices of other objects in motion. How can these fortunate breezes have been captured by pinhole technology and traced? Lapucci claims that the absence of drawings and preliminary sketches is “proof” that Caravaggio used the technology. This is a silly claim. I know many artists who paint directly on the canvas, composing as they work, without thumbnails. I work this way myself. The notion that a fugitive might take the time to do drawings — and preserve them — while making paintings for churches to finance his flight is comic.
I find myself wondering if those who make these claims have actually looked at Caravaggio’s work. Some of these compositions, such as “The Seven Acts of Mercy,” are so complex that it seems it would have been much harder to trace it than to just invent it, which is what the skilled master most likely did: invent it — all of it.
Most entertaining of all is a claim both Hockney and Lapucci make to bolster their thesis: that evidence of Caravaggio’s reliance on lenses can be found in the majority of left-handed figures throughout his oeuvre. If Hockney and Lapucci had just taken the time to glance at a book of Caravaggios, they’d see that the opposite is true.
I can’t account for a single left-handed action taking place in all of Caravaggio’s work. Not one. Every beheading, lute-strumming, gospel-writing figure performs his or her chores with the right hand, not the left. The one image touted as a lefthander is the much-loved Bacchus, from around 1595, in which we see a beautiful boy holding a glass of wine. But he isn’t drinking with his left hand. He has just poured the wine with his right hand — the bottle sits to his right — and is offering the wine to us — he is Dionysus after all — with his left.
Well, this rant has run over-long. When I ask myself why someone would hypothesize so erroneously, the only answer that comes to mind is tenure and the requirement to publish at all costs. I hope I’ve made my case plainly enough. Better to go see some of his work for yourself.
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