Closer Look: Photo-Op

By: John T. Spike

November 2007

"There is a young man named Caravaggio who is doing extraordinary things in Rome." This was the breathless report brought back to Holland in 1603 around the time that Caravaggio painted this St. John the Baptist. Caravaggio posed his models and painted them straight on. Ask any painter you know: This Baptist looks more like a studio portrait than a voice crying in the wilderness. His critics condemned him for eliminating the "artfulness" from art. We might say there is something photographic about his realism.

This tousled-hair young man was one of Caravaggio’s favorite models, and he cast him in at least five paintings: twice as John the Baptist and three times as the other Saint John, the apostle. (Maybe his name was Giovanni.) Caravaggio’s paintings are like repertory performances in which the same actors take turns in leading or supporting roles. Art holds the mirror up to Nature was Hamlet’s hip remark, but Shakespeare’s troupe, the King’s Men, made more of an attempt to disguise themselves.

It’s this theatrical quality that makes this Baptist so arresting. Supposedly he’s seated out of doors, which doesn’t explain why he’s flashed in the face by a spotlight in front of a curtain of leaves. Caravaggio’s picture mingles realism with manipulation, deleting undesired details like the shadow the reed should have slashed across one knee.

Not by chance, this Baptist is one of the key works in the debate currently raging over Caravaggio’s reputed use of projected images. The canvas displays many of the scratchy incisions the artist made on his paintings around 1600. He was living in the palace of Cardinal del Monte, an amateur student of optics, who also sponsored Galileo. The incisions are not like drawings. Typically, they mark critical points in the composition, usually the crown of a head. Two faint outlines can be seen, just barely, on the Baptist’s calf as it disappears into the shadows—quite a surprising distance, by the way, from his other knee. Caravaggio seems to revel in anatomical "mistakes" like this. Peter Robb, in his controversial book, M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio, theorized that Caravaggio made these incisions to position his models against an image projected on the surface of his canvas.

David Hockney arrived independently at the same hypothesis and developed it by exploring ways of projecting images with lenses and even concave mirrors. His book, Secret Knowledge, scandalized the art world in 2001. Hockney has been accused of trying to take the Old Masters down a peg (which makes no sense). His real point is that long before the invention of photography, some Old Masters were struck by the differences between our normal binocular way of focusing on one place at a time, and the single-point perspective, depth of field and fascinating overlappings of lens-projected images. Besides being a useful shortcut for studying foreshortening, these images, the theory goes, contribute to the crisp, "eyewitness" immediacy of Caravaggio’s canvases.

Testing these theories, and defending them, became a major commitment for David Hockney after his publication of Secret Knowledge. A year later, the Royal Academy organized a Caravaggio and Rome exhibition, which included this painting of John the Baptist. Going around the show together, Hockney and I stopped in front of this picture. I ventured how the young man’s abdomen had always bothered me. It seems to have ribs where no one has them. "That’s because it’s out of focus," Hockney replied. Painting this area out of focus would have struck his contemporaries as very odd, but Caravaggio was adroit at re-directing our gaze to where he wanted it. Marveling at this, we were suddenly interrupted by an elderly Frenchman, who came barreling into the room. Waving his cane at this very painting, he filled the air with curses, calling out, "C’est fou, c’est merde! C’est trop comme une photographie!" ("It’s crazy, it’s crap. It’s too much like a photograph!"). I stood there frozen, half-expecting a fracas to ensue. Instead Hockney said, congenially, "Hello Henri," and then introduced me to Henri Cartier-Bresson, the legendary photographer. After a little chat, in which Cartier-Bresson continued his complaints and went off, I said in conclusion, "I don’t know if you believe in epiphanies, but that was one."

John T. Spike’s catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Caravaggio (2001) is now in its third printing.