It was up to the art historian Lionello Venturi to describe Venetian painting from its figurative roots, a curious task for a silent disciple of Benedetto Croce. A professor in Turin in 1915, he published in 1926 a brave book that we still admire today: El gusto de los primitivos (Alianza, 1991), alleged destroyer against academicism and textbook classicism. Dissatisfied with the historical prejudice that imposes the imitation of nature as the essential reason for art, Venturi advances the concept of creation stripped of its theological burden, to introduce the idea of ??taste in the artistic account, the set of preferences, options and often opposing views that define art in an age of secularization. The culture of the artist acquires a cardinal value in the historiographical narrative. To think in this way in 1926, before a universe of exploding forms, was the early feat of an extraordinary historian, who together with Longhi in Florence, formed an impregnable front of rigor and sensitivity that stimulated modern Italian intellectual life .
I stop with Caravaggio for what he has as an artist over time in audacity and artistic skill. An imaginative master of realism who discovered the strength of things, when painting already guessed abstraction, constructive blurring, an art of representation or style. Caravaggio’s painting starred in the harsh debate of the thirties of the 20th century, perhaps given Venturi’s ability to take the saints down from the pedestal and take them to the urban mire, where men and gods coexist, elusive chimeras of a symbolized past in living forms.
The painter’s madonnas were peasant women with bare feet, awake, on the route of mannerism and the requirement of an active gesture. In the Rome of the Counter-Reformation, Caravaggio’s art asserted itself against the arrogance of the triumphant church and the stubborn insistence, indeed, on a formal representational and realistic legacy that influenced the contemporary tradition. The world of Caravaggio registers the bursts of truth that visualize the open work of art, the sense of beauty that betrays energy, a proposal that illuminates the dramatic space of his painting. The territory for adventure and the risk that nuances the static stillness of classicism, but which is wary of the canonical constructive veneer. Caravaggio was always a rough, messy and quintessential painter, in a struggle between realism and action: in a Roman clash there were two deaths and Caravaggio was badly wounded, the blue edge of the knife. Protected by the admiration of the knight, Caravaggio’s paintings in the church of Sant Lluís dels Francesos form an impressive corpus, today as in his time. However, Caravaggio’s bellicosity led him, as expected in troubled times, to prison and a dangerous escape to the south: Naples and Malta and the favor of the Templars will be his temporary salvation. Always unstable, so he was able to escape to Rome and died on July 18, 1610, desperate after the ship that transferred his belongings.
The selection of pictorial examples that Venturi adds in his essays is careful and maintains the legend of the rendered admirer of the Apostles. Caravaggio’s apostolate already enjoyed great tribute in his lifetime. The criticism confirms the painter’s habit of avoiding previous drawings and traces, and working directly with the brush on the canvas, which gives his painting a unique vivacity. It is a perfect example, we would say, of the imagination on guard. For Caravaggio painting involves beauty and action, in short, a choice that illustrates the dramatic aspect of his beliefs of a figurative elaboration that goes beyond mannerism, but also of the baroque and oblique mannerism to come . The fierce violence of the misunderstood.
Venturi is transparent in his diagnosis: Caravaggio founded the Illuminist tradition of the 17th century when historical painting deserved a unanimous critical response. Caravaggio’s untamed gaze leads to a revolutionary thematic inquiry: an apple will be a motif as valid and dignified as a Madonna when faced with its plastic translation.
Caravaggio’s Apostles in Rome deserved everyone’s admiration. He imagined San Mateo, protagonist of the interpretation of the Gospel, a shrewd creator in equal measure with the powerful everyday reality that ennobles his images. The angel as a model is a robust ideal figure, but the angel is also a nocturnal and complex character, much more idealized than was imagined in the Mannerist tradition.
The Supper at Emmaus, The Card Players or The Conversion of Saint Paul pay their temporary mortgage as genre paintings, of course, but without a doubt the light and expressive concentration of Christ’s face absorbs the plastic vivacity of the whole . Just like St. Paul’s restless horse. Perhaps the most reasonable proof of entering the mature manner of Caravaggio lies in the precise detail. A master of figurative individualization. In The Conversion of Saint Paul the darkness is lightened with the brightness of men and beasts facing each other. Pau’s arms trace the horse’s profile until they close a magical halo. admirable
