The
Catholic Weekly
Online
Sydney
23 November 2003
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Sydney welcomes its newest cardinal
Not to be missed
Help for Jenny, Luke
Take heart from teenagers
Caritas stays put
Irishtown revisited
The company they keep
Pregnant pause: Making room for the little person
Editorial: Young hopefuls
Letters: Quiet revolutionary
Conversation: Fr Michael Anghel, parish priest and grandfather of three - Priest
made rite choice
Chance or Hand of God?
Presto, adagio, it’s art Caravaggio
The last retreat
Virtual boost to learning
‘Big kids’ meet ‘littlies’
Teacher, student in De La Salle double history win
Prize for playground plan
Gospel values alive in L’Arche
Presto, adagio, it’s art Caravaggio
Orazio Gentileschi, David and Goliath, oil on canvas, 185.5x136cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
The Art Gallery of NSW and the National Gallery of Victoria have joined forces for the first major exhibition in Australia to showcase the art of the Italian master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
It features nine of Caravaggio’s paintings including Boy bitten by a lizard (from the National Gallery, London), St John the Baptist (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) and The Crowning with Thorns (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), plus more than 50 paintings by Caravaggio’s contemporaries and followers.
His well-known Italian followers, such as Manfredi, Saraceni and the father and daughter Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, are among the exhibition’s highlights.
French artists Valentin de Boulogne and Georges de la Tour, Spanish artist de Ribera, and Northern masters, including Ter Brugghen and van Honthorst, are also included.
Carravaggio (1571-1610) arrived in Rome around 1592 to seek his fortune as a painter. There he emerged as the leader of a new artistic era, helping shape the Baroque movement.
Between 1600 and 1606 he was successful in obtaining the most prestigious commissions from the Church, decorating churches with large-scale religious compositions.
He used ordinary people from the streets as models for his apostles, saints and other religious figures.
“Never before had an artist presented religious drama as contemporary life,” says Helen Langdon in her biography of Caravaggio. “Nor had any earlier painter dared to break so dramatically with long established studio traditions, painting his figures from nature, directly onto the canvas, with complex effects of studio lighting.
“It was the figures having been painted from life that most fascinated Caravaggio’s contemporaries.”
Caravaggio’s depictions of card sharps, fortune-tellers and musicians were widely imitated by artists from regional Italian schools, as well as from France, Spain and the Netherlands.
The works in the exhibition illustrate central themes of his work: victims of time and death or, on a lighter note, victims of gullibility and human folly. Above all, they portray the pleasures and pains of love, sacred and profane.
Edmund Capon, in Sydney, and Gerard Vaughan, in Melbourne, garnered an international team of experts to contribute scholarship and assistance in sourcing loans for the exhibition.
Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and his world is on show at the Art Gallery of NSW, from Saturday, November 29, until Sunday, February 22 (and at the National Gallery of Victoria from March 11-May 30). Gallery admission is $15 adults and $10 concessions, children and Art Gallery Society members, $40 family. The gallery is open each day 10am-5pm (9pm on Wednesdays except December 31). Closed Christmas Day and Good Friday.