Chiaroscuro

Write a story that begins in the light and ends in darkness, or the other way around.

Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro is the ‘disposition of light and dark in a picture’. It literally means ‘bright-dark’ and it comes from the Italian ‘chiaro’ which means ‘clear and bright’ and ‘oscuro’ from the Latin ‘obscurus’ meaning ‘obscure’. 

In art, chiaroscuro means the contrast between light and and dark and the technique was developed by famous artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio and Rembrandt.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was an important and notorious Italian painter and he made extensive use of chiaroscuro in his paintings. Basically he would black out the background of the painting and then illuminate his foreground figures. The ‘Calling of St. Matthew’ was commissioned for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome around 1599 and it is said by the art critics that it epitomised his mastery of chiaroscuro where the application of light and shade was taken to a new level. In this famous painting, Jesus appears to be pointing at the red-headed bearded man who is pointing towards himself as if to say, ‘do you mean me?’ However, he could be pointing to another younger man who is hunched at the corner of the table.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the calling of Matthew is described as follows: 

Matthew 9:9 

9. As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. 

Tax collectors were hated in the time of Jesus because they collected taxes on behalf of the Romans. So Jesus is criticised for socialising with tax collectors but he declared that ‘he did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance’. So in a way the painting shows how Matthew had joined the dark forces, but when Jesus called him he made the decision to walk into the light. 

By using chiaroscuro in this painting Caravaggio was showing that anyone can have a change of heart and there is always an opportunity to embrace the light. It must have taken a lot of courage to just quit your occupation and obey a calling. In his own personal life Caravaggio was no stranger to deeds of darkness including verbal and physical assaults and duels. His patrons were usually able to protect him as they wished him to continue painting but in 1606, Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tommasoni who came from a wealthy family. Caravaggio was sentenced to beheading and and as a result he had to flee from Rome and he moved to Naples, then Malta and finally Sicily. 

So what made a gifted painter who produced some of the greatest masterpieces in the world behave in a violent way to the point where he murdered someone?  What made him get involved in brawls in the back streets of Rome? Why were his masterpieces adorning the churches of Rome and at the same time his name was appearing in criminal records? 

It is interesting that Caravaggio used chiaroscuro, a technique that uses light and darkness to depict the characters in his paintings. He was able to show the character’s dilemma in making the decision to leave one life and follow another as in the The Calling of St. Matthew. 

Some art critics speculate that the more depraved Caravaggio became, the better his art was. 

The opposite happens in Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the artist Basil Hallward paints Dorian Gray’s portrait. Dorian Gray admires his portrait so much that he makes a wish that he will always stay young and handsome and that he would give his soul to have his wish granted. His wish is granted and he stays young and beautiful but after each cruel and despicable deed, his painting becomes ugly and distorted. 

He came from a town in Lombardy called Caravaggio and at the age of thirteen, he studied under Simone Peterzano, a Milanese painter and not only did he learn from the master, but he also carried out menial tasks. So he was prepared to do the groundwork and learn the skills he required to become a great master. When he arrived in Rome, he struggled to survive and he must have experienced great hardship. However, he was eventually head-hunted by Cardinal Del Monte and from then it was a rag-to-riches, darkness into light story. Church commissions were an important source of income for up and coming artists.  Caravaggio even moved into the Cardinal’s palace and this meant he became part of an elite society. 

Critics have speculated on his fall from grace, his skirmishes with the law, his brawling and so forth and a few theories have been put forward. One critic said it was because of the plague that swept through Milan in his childhood and claimed the life of his father. It was said that because of the horrors that he witnessed he was able to produce works where the characters oscillate between darkness and light. His subjects are shown to be experiencing moments of agony and even though they are bathed in light, the darkness threatens to envelop them. Also Milan was embroiled in the conflict between the Protestant reformers and the Catholic Reformers. The Catholic archbishop, Charles Borromeo saw the potential in religious art to encourage virtue. He believed that humans were inherently sinful and needed to be encouraged to become more pious. Caravaggio was able to deliver what the Cardinal was looking for. 

His erratic and turbulent character will always remain an enigma. One critic praised his ability to create electrifying and captivating images. His faces depict characters undergoing gruesome suffering. For example, in his 1661 painting, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, Peter looks at horror at the nail that is about to be driven into his hand.   

Caravaggio will continue to intrigue us forever because his life was a dance between the dark and the light and as his artistic powers were forever reaching new heights, his violent and unpredictable behaviour brought him low depths to the point where he had to flee from the ‘Eternal City’ because there was a price on his head.