I find it extremely foolish to renounce an artist's work because of the life that artist has led, and miss out on it, or, in the worst case, encourage others to miss out. Knowing the artist helps us understand the work, but, at the moment of creation, the artist—just like us when we consume his work—is situated in another realm. The world of creation is, by the way, a place of stricter moral rigor than life itself. Vargas Llosa, for example, so painfully anti-Catalan, wrote some of the best essays you will find on the subject.Strap.
Logically, these days, the exhibitionCaravaggio 2025at the Palau Barberini is sold out. Caravaggio's life is full of police reports for his scandalous and marginal behavior, even being sentenced to death for the murder of a man. Who knows whether the chicken or the egg came first, but one must have a very radical character—although not necessarily explicit—to provoke an artistic earthquake like the one that involved Caravaggio. Having known the margins of convention explains the disillusioned vision of his paintings, a disillusionment that borders on the avid desire for beauty that he conveys. Beauty is always on the brink of destruction, as are hisFruit basketor hisSick Bacchus.
One of the most striking impressions of the exhibition is being able to see, right around the corner, three paintings with the same model playing Mary Magdalene, Saint Catherine, and Judith. She approaches the torture wheel as a girl would approach her lover. The beauty of this model, with all the vital complexity of her character, reflected in the characters she interprets through the painter's imagination, is a very rare spiritual experience, a priceless pleasure, never better said.
Caravaggio's obsession with feet has to do with having your feet on the ground, dirty realism or arte povera. He had to repaint aSaint MatthewBecause the patron felt the saint's bare feet were too prominent, and the new painting was nowhere near as brilliant. The dirty feet of saints and pilgrims are a sign of a life lived, of the liquidation of Platonic idealism and the eradication of the naive or hypocritical goodness of cancellation, which has done so much harm and affects human intelligence, which is to say, freedom.
