It fell to the art historian Lionello Venturi to describe Venetian painting from its figurative roots, a curious task for a quiet disciple of Benedetto Croce. Professor in Turin in 1915, he published in 1926 a courageous book that we still admire today: The taste of the primitives (Alliance, 1991), a devastating plea against academicism and textbook classicism. Dissatisfied with the historical prejudice imposed by the imitation of nature as the essential reason for art, Venturi advances the concept of creation purged of its theological charge, to introduce the idea of taste in the artistic story, the set of preferences, options and opinions often contrasting that defines art in an era of secularization. The artist's culture now acquires a cardinal value in historiographical narrative. Thinking like this in 1926, faced with 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 at Caravaggio for what he has as an artist over time in boldness and plastic skill. An imaginative master of realism who discovered the strength of things, when painting already divined abstraction, constructive blurring, an art of representation or style. Caravaggio's painting was the protagonist of the harsh debate of the thirties of the 20th century, perhaps due to Venturi's ability to lower the saints from the base and take them to the urban quagmire, where men and gods coexist, elusive chimeras of a past symbolized in living forms.
The painter's madonnas were peasant women with bare feet, awake, on the path of mannerism and the demand for active gestures. In Counter-Reformation Rome, Caravaggio's art asserted itself against the arrogance of the triumphant church and the stubborn insistence, it is true, on a formal representational and realistic legacy that influenced contemporary tradition. The world of Caravaggio records the glimpses of truth that visualize the work of art open, the sense of beauty that betrays energy, a proposal that illuminates the dramatic space of his painting. The territory for adventure and risk that qualifies the static stillness of classicism but that mistrusts the canonical constructive plank. Caravaggio was always a rough, fighting and navvy painter, in a struggle between realism and action: in a Roman scuffle there were two dead and Caravaggio was badly wounded, the blue edge of the knife. Protected by the admiration of the cavaliere D'Arpino, Caravaggio's paintings in the church of San Luis de los Franceses make up an impressive corpus, today as in his time. However, Caravaggio's bellicosity led him, as was to be expected in dark times, to prison and a dangerous flight to the south: Naples and Malta and the favor of the Templars will be his provisional salvation. Always unstable, as soon as he could he escaped to Rome and died on July 18, 1610, desperate after the ship that was carrying his belongings.
Venturi is clear in his diagnosis: Caravaggio founded the Enlightenment tradition of the seventeenth century when historical painting deserved a unanimous critical response. Caravaggio's indomitable gaze entails a revolutionary thematic inquiry: an apple will be as valid and dignified a motif as a Madonna when facing its plastic translation.
Caravaggio's Apostles in Rome deserved everyone's admiration. He imagined Saint Matthew, the protagonist of the interpretation of the Gospel, a shrewd creator in the same measure as the powerful daily reality that ennobles his images. The angel as a model is a strong ideal figure, but the angel is also a complex nocturnal character, far more idealized than was fantasized in the Mannerist tradition.
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 the expressive concentration of the face of Christ absorb the plastic vivacity of the whole. Like the restless horse of Saint Paul. Perhaps the most reasonable proof of entering into the mature manner of Caravaggio points to accurate detail. A master in figurative individualization. In The Conversion of Saint Paul the darkness is lightened by the luminosity of men and beasts facing each other. Pablo's arms run along the horse's profile until closing a magical halo. Admirable.
