The National Gallery in London is staging Beyond Caravaggio, an exhibition that looks at the many talented painters who followed the Italian baroque master (12 October-15 January 2017). The show includes 49 works, borrowed mostly from UK institutions, by artists like Orazio Gentileschi, Jusepe de Ribera and Valentin de Boulogne. In this excerpt from the exhibition's catalogue, the curator Letizia Treves discusses how British collectors developed a taste for Carvaggio's work, even as others dismissed him as a "vulgar" painter.
The National Gallery is very fortunate in having three paintings by Caravaggio in its collection, one from each of the distinct phases in the artist’s career, but the circumstances of their acquisition reveal that their arrival in Trafalgar Square was unplanned and fortuitous. The Supper at Emmaus (1601), unquestionably one of Caravaggio’s masterpieces, was given to the Gallery in 1839, just eight years after its owner failed to sell the painting at auction. The much debated purchase of Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist (probably 1609-1610) more than a century later, would not have gone ahead if it were not for the tenacity of Denis Mahon, a Trustee at the Gallery at the time, whose powers of persuasion convinced the Board to vote against the then Director and Keeper’s recommendations. And finally, the Boy bitten by a Lizard (around 1594-95), fully recognised as one of Caravaggio’s few recorded youthful works, was sold to an American private collector and only acquired by the Gallery after an export stop in 1986. Although not as dramatic as the chance discovery of Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ (1602) in Dublin in the early 1990s, the story of how the National Gallery came to house three magnificent examples of the artist’s work is no less revealing about past attitudes towards Caravaggio, particularly in Britain.
In spite of Caravaggio today being one of the most important and recognisable names in the history of art, his identity and the extent of his achievement were not fully understood until the 20th century. Caravaggio’s rehabilitation came about in the form of two seminal exhibitions: the first in Florence in 1922, dedicated to 17th- and 18th-century Italian painting, where Caravaggio played a prominent role, and culminating in Roberto Longhi’s ground-breaking exhibition in Milan in 1951. On the latter occasion Caravaggio’s paintings and those of his followers were brought sharply into focus for the first time, and similar landmark exhibitions were subsequently staged in America—in Cleveland (1971) and New York (1985)—though not in Britain. This was by no means due to a lack of eminent scholars in the field—quite the opposite. Ellis K. Waterhouse (1905–1985), who went on to become a university professor and museum director, wrote an influential—and very personal—account of Roman baroque painting. Roger Hinks (1903–1963), though better known as an authority on Greek and Roman antiquities, published the first monograph on Caravaggio in English. Denis Mahon (1910–2011), an enthusiastic advocate and collector of Italian baroque paintings, published extensively on Caravaggio throughout his long career as an art historian. But perhaps more than any other it was Benedict Nicolson (1914–1978) who made the most significant contribution to scholarship in the field. Long-time editor of the scholarly journal the Burlington Magazine (1947–78) and widely considered the pre-eminent expert on "Caravaggism", Nicolson published a comprehensive list of paintings by Caravaggio and his followers in the 1970s; the first serious attempt to classify artists belonging to the "Caravaggesque movement". Nicolson’s writings remain a vital resource for those studying the subject today, particularly since many of his perceptive attributions have stood the test of time.
Despite advancing scholarship in this area, the re-evaluation of Caravaggio in Britain took considerable time. This may have been partly owing to the pejorative views expressed so vehemently by John Ruskin (1819–1900) and Roger Fry (1866–1934), two of the country’s most influential critics, each of whom respectively had a profound effect on public taste throughout the second half of the 19th and early part of the 20th century. For Ruskin Caravaggio was synonymous with "vulgarity, dullness, or impiety" and in his "scale of painters"—a classification comprising four different groups—he lists Caravaggio alongside late Raphael, Guido Reni and the Carracci in a category entitled "School of Errors and Vices". The principal criticism Ruskin levelled at Caravaggio was that his art was vulgar and depraved: in his quest for truth Caravaggio had shown an inability to select beauty in nature, seeking instead the "horror and ugliness, and filthiness of sin". Fry, who in most other respects disagreed with Ruskin, took the same view. In his vigorous attack on 17th-century art, published in 1922, in which he accused Italian artists of having "invented vulgarity, and more particularly vulgar originality in art", Fry reproached Caravaggio for having loved all that is "brutal and excessive". These allegations call to mind the words of Giovan Pietro Bellori, whose largely negative but extremely compelling account of Caravaggio’s life was highly influential. Many of the opinions within it were shared by both Ruskin and Fry, some two hundred years later. Bellori had criticised Caravaggio for slavishly copying nature, without exercising any degree of selection, and it is no coincidence that the name he gave to Caravaggio’s imitators—"Naturalists"—was also adopted by nineteenth-century critics in Britain.
Ruskin also condemned Caravaggio for his use of chiaroscuro, accusing him of painting "for the sake of the shadows". And despite very little biographical information on Caravaggio being available at the time (other than Bellori’s account), the forceful lighting associated with this tenebrist style was equated with his murky character, Ruskin and Fry both branding him a "ruffian". Ruskin’s words in this connection—"the ruffian Caravaggio, distinguished only by his preference of candlelight and re-inforcement of villainy"—epitomise the way in which Caravaggio’s style was viewed in the mid-19th century. Caravaggio’s name was often associated with candlelit scenes, even though he never painted a single picture with a candle in it, favouring instead a strong directional light in his paintings. Candlelight is something more usually associated with Gerrit van Honthorst and the two artists became confused; one needs only to think of Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ lying unrecognised under an attribution to Honthorst from 1802 until the early 1990s. Likewise, any paintings with strong chiaroscuro, particularly those treating secular subjects, were called "Caravaggio" irrespective of their distinctive styles or individual merits. It might seem surprising that this view of Caravaggio was so mistaken, but by the mid-17th century the art of Caravaggio and his followers had fallen decisively out of favour and a full reappraisal of their work did not take place until almost 300 years later. Furthermore, Caravaggio had travelled throughout Italy, to Malta and Sicily, but he was not an "international" painter moving through the courts of Europe like, say, Peter Paul Rubens or, to a lesser extent, Orazio Gentileschi and Honthorst, both of whom came to work at the court of Charles I. To appreciate Caravaggio’s greatest works one had to travel abroad to see them.
Although the National Gallery today owns three paintings by Caravaggio, a number of opportunities to acquire paintings by him were missed during the Gallery’s almost 200-year history. Charles Eastlake, the Gallery’s first Director (1855–65), travelled regularly to Italy looking for potential acquisitions and carefully recording observations on pictures in his travel notebooks. On repeated visits to Genoa (in 1857, 1858, 1859 and 1862) he saw in Palazzo Balbi Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul, the first "rejected" version of the painting for the Cerasi chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. The picture made a favourable impression on Eastlake but his initial enthusiasm—"On the whole a good gallery picture’" (1857)—was tempered after each return visit, describing it as a good specimen" in 1858 and "very confused but fine in parts—on the whole eligible" (for acquisition) the following year. On his final visit in 1862 Eastlake’s reaction was positively lukewarm ("fine but too confused"), and the prospect of its acquisition was abandoned, perhaps compounded by the fact that the Gallery’s offer to purchase Giovanni Battista Moroni’s much-admired The Tailor (1565-70) had recently been accepted. A truly unique opportunity for the Gallery to acquire a large-scale religious work by Caravaggio was lost, and further offers of paintings attributed—whether correctly or not—to the master were turned down later in the century. Some other lamentable cases in which the Gallery missed out occurred in more recent memory, however. On account of the burden of post-war taxation, historic collections in Britain were broken up and important works sold through auction or reputable dealers, and Italian baroque paintings, in particular, were avidly pursued by American museums.
It was in these regrettable circumstances that Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (around 1603-04) was sold in 1952—after 50 years in Britain—to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. In the same year The Musicians (around 1595) was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Caravaggio’s Martha and Mary was purchased by the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1973, just two years after the painting had failed to sell at auction in London. After Longhi’s landmark 1951 exhibition in Milan, American museums were increasingly eager to purchase works by Caravaggio. The owner of The Musicians, W.G. Thwaytes, had written to the director of the National Gallery in February 1952, informing him that he had been offered £25,000 by the Metropolitan Museum and that, before proceeding further, he wished to know whether the Gallery might be interested. Thwaytes’s proposal was declined and The Musicians was duly granted an export licence and shipped to New York. One would have thought that the painting’s recent discovery—and publication by Denis Mahon the previous month—might have encouraged the Director and Board to consider its purchase but, as confirmed by correspondence preserved in the Metropolitan’s archives, it seems there was little or no interest in Caravaggio at the National Gallery at that time. In December 1951 Mahon had written a letter to Theodore Rousseau, then curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, in which he recommended that if the museum was interested in the painting he should ask for an "unofficial option or first refusal". Mahon also warned that an export licence would need to be applied for and, though the outcome was unpredictable, he had been reliably informed that "the present Director of the National Gallery [Sir Philip Hendy] knows nothing at all about Caravaggio, and his staff are, with one partial exception, hardly aware of the existence of the Seicento". Mahon would only became a Trustee at the National Gallery in 1957, five years after the Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness and The Musicians were sold, otherwise he would undoubtedly have made a robust case for the acquisition of one or other painting. Indeed, in a memorandum to the National Gallery’s Board of Trustees in 1969, Mahon drew the Trustees’ attention to paintings by Caravaggio that had previously left British soil, using such arguments in favour of the Gallery’s purchase of Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist (probably 1609-1610).
Opportunities to acquire important paintings by Caravaggio’s followers—Valentin de Boulogne, Georges de La Tour and Orazio Gentileschi, for example—were not pursued by the National Gallery, and many works left Britain altogether. One such example is Valentin’s Fortune Teller (around 1620), which had been in the collection of the Dukes of Rutland at Belvoir Castle since before 1788. Ambitious in scale and appealing in its subject matter, the Valentin was sold by the 9th Duke in 1926 (as by Caravaggio). It was purchased shortly afterwards by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where the painting remained until 1953, whereupon it was—rather unusually for a museum in the UK—de-accessioned. The painting finally left Britain in 1981, having been sold to the Toledo Museum of Art, and the National Gallery made no attempt to purchase the painting. As for La Tour, whose pictorial output is very small (approximately 40 works), three significant paintings by the artist left England in the last century. Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop was declined by the National Gallery in 1938 and subsequently sold to the Louvre; the signed and dated Penitent Saint Peter, in England since the mid-19th century, was bought by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1951; and, perhaps most sensationally, The Musicians’ Brawl (around 1625-30), a masterpiece by La Tour once attributed to Caravaggio, which was sold by the Trevor family in 1972 after having hung at Brynkinalt Hall in Denbighshire (Wales) for almost 150 years, was purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Despite this exodus, both public and private collections in the British Isles remain surprisingly rich in paintings by Caravaggio and his followers. Although Caravaggio’s fortunes declined internationally from the mid-17th century onwards, the reappraisal of his work in the last century reaffirmed his true originality as a painter. Roger Fry—not an ardent admirer of his work—shrewdly observed more than a century ago that Caravaggio was in many ways ‘the first modern artist; the first artist to proceed not by evolution but by revolution’. His inventiveness and unforgettable imagery continue to inspire even today.
• From Beyond Caravaggio by Letizia Treves, published by the National Gallery Company and distributed by Yale University Press in October 2016. Reproduced by permission.Letizia Treves is Curator of Later Italian, Spanish, and French Seventeenth-Century Paintings at the National Gallery, London
• Beyond Caravaggio, National Gallery, London, 12 October-15 January 2017