Photography's debt to Caravaggio | Jonathan Jones | Art and design | guardian.co.uk
Photography's debt to Caravaggio | Jonathan Jones | Art and design | guardian.co.uk:
Caravaggio is one of my favourite artists. But, strangely enough, I've never given much thought to his relationship with photography – until now. Writing captions for the Guardian's series of supplements about 100 years of great photojournalism, I've been amazed by how closely some of these photographs resemble paintings by the baroque master Michelangelo Merisi, more commonly called Caravaggio, whose life straddles the late 16th century and the start of the 17th. Again and again, whether it's in Cartier-Bresson's immediacy or Bill Brandt's sepulchral shadows, you catch hints of Caravaggio's intensely lit and passionately sensual world in the work of the most brilliant photographers.Of course this is no coincidence. Caravaggio was rediscovered because of the camera. It was the spontaneity and directness of the photographed image, both in still prints and movies, that made people recognise the greatness of his art again. From the 18th to the early 20th centuries, Caravaggio had been neglected and forgotten. He simply was not on the radar. But in the 1930s, 40s and 50s - the decades when photography came into its own - he was championed by critics such as Roberto Longhi as a true great of European art.Did Caravaggio, perhaps, use some kind of camera obscura to find and map his images? David Hockney thinks so. But perhaps how he fixed his images is less important than how he lit them. Surely we can agree the lighting in a painting such as The Calling of Saint Matthew by Caravaggio is "real" - that he actually did create these lighting conditions in his work room. He experimented, in other words, with lighting effects.The other reason he is so immediate is that he used humble models who look like what they are – faces from the streets. I haven't got the answer as to exactly how it was that Caravaggio so strangely anticipated the great photographers, or how much he influenced them. But the parallels are there in front of our eyes, in light and shadow.
Caravaggio is one of my favourite artists. But, strangely enough, I've never given much thought to his relationship with photography – until now. Writing captions for the Guardian's series of supplements about 100 years of great photojournalism, I've been amazed by how closely some of these photographs resemble paintings by the baroque master Michelangelo Merisi, more commonly called Caravaggio, whose life straddles the late 16th century and the start of the 17th. Again and again, whether it's in Cartier-Bresson's immediacy or Bill Brandt's sepulchral shadows, you catch hints of Caravaggio's intensely lit and passionately sensual world in the work of the most brilliant photographers.Of course this is no coincidence. Caravaggio was rediscovered because of the camera. It was the spontaneity and directness of the photographed image, both in still prints and movies, that made people recognise the greatness of his art again. From the 18th to the early 20th centuries, Caravaggio had been neglected and forgotten. He simply was not on the radar. But in the 1930s, 40s and 50s - the decades when photography came into its own - he was championed by critics such as Roberto Longhi as a true great of European art.Did Caravaggio, perhaps, use some kind of camera obscura to find and map his images? David Hockney thinks so. But perhaps how he fixed his images is less important than how he lit them. Surely we can agree the lighting in a painting such as The Calling of Saint Matthew by Caravaggio is "real" - that he actually did create these lighting conditions in his work room. He experimented, in other words, with lighting effects.The other reason he is so immediate is that he used humble models who look like what they are – faces from the streets. I haven't got the answer as to exactly how it was that Caravaggio so strangely anticipated the great photographers, or how much he influenced them. But the parallels are there in front of our eyes, in light and shadow.
