John P. Walsh is an art historian, writer and photographer. He has an M.A. in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught Modern Art History at Northwestern University.
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FEATURE Image: Immanuel United Church of Christ, 1500 Old Church Road, Streamwood, Illinois. Built in 1868, it is the congregation’s second house of worship on the site and remains the congregation’s active sanctuary. March 2016. Author’s photograph. 7.49mb _0979
Immanuel United Church of Christ embodies the transformation of northern Illinois from frontier settlement to modern suburbia, serving as a living link to the German immigrant pioneers who established Hanover Township in 1852 and whose community identity endures amid the vast expansion of metropolitan Chicago.
IMMANUEL UCC in Streamwood, Illinois, has a unique history within the context of the similar histories of other early settlers in Northern Illinois beginning in the 1820’s. Though diverse settlement throughout this part of the state was feverish (Chicago incorporated as a city in 1837), the prairie landscape expanse remained sparsely populated into the 1830’s and 1840’s with its mixture of farms, industry, and trade. The Streamwood church and burial grounds were founded in 1852 when W.G. Hubbard donated its five acres of land for “the sole and exclusive use of erecting a house thereon for religious worship and a burying ground.”
It was a group of 13 farmers who organized the church and chose its name: Deutsche Vereingigte, Evangelische Lutherische Immanuael’s Germeinde. Apparently, as Illinois was the edge of the Western frontier, in those days there wasn’t anyone around, or very many, to enjoin them to state it in English. Of course, it translates as “United Evangelical Lutheran Immanuel Congregation.” Today, Streamwood is in Cook County and sits just on the other side of DuPage County to the south that broke off from Cook and was established in its own right in February 1839. The original relatively open site today is surrounded by tract housing and other modern development for as far as the eye can see or vehicle drives with Elgin about 9 miles to the west.
Old Church Road itself preserves the area’s historical geography and memory.
1851 map of Cook and Dupage Counties. Hanover is between Elgin and Schaumburg Townships. Public Domain.
Streamwood, incorporated in 1957, is one of three communities that comprise the so-called “Tri Village” area that includes Bartlett and Hanover Park. This part of Northern Illinois had served as a seasonal hunting and camping ground for the Cherokee, Miami, Potawatomi, and Ottawa Indians. In their turn, the land had been claimed by France, England, Spain, Virginia, and the Northwest Territory before it became part of the State of Illinois in 1818.
Founded in 1852 to serve German settlers in pioneer Hanover Township, the church reflects the important role immigrant congregations played in establishing stable communities in northern Illinois and its survival illustrates continuity between nineteenth century settlement history and twenty-first century suburban life.
The ImmanuelUCC church and burial ground were created in 1852 for German settlers in Hanover Township in today’s northwest DuPage/Cook Counties. Three U.S. Civil War veterans are buried here, including from the 127th Illinois Infantry; Volunteer 5th Calvary Illinois Regiment; and U.S. Calvary Co. H, 3rd Regiment. All three died and were buried in the cemetery decades after the war had ended. March 2016. Author’s photograph.
While the church started out as Evangelical Lutheran, over time the congregation moved towards becoming part of the United Church of Christ. In 1959 the members changed its name to reflect that reality. The first church building that was completed in 1853 was replaced in 1868 and is the present one. Among other buildings added to the church complex, the same historic sanctuary remains this Chicago suburban congregation’s house of worship today.
Landscape and grounds near ImmanuelUCC church in Streamwood. Hanover Township was an expansive area of farmland settled by mid-19th century German settlers to Illinois. March 2016. Author’s photograph.
Sources:
DuPage Roots, Richard A. Thompson, editor, DuPage County Historical Society, 1985.
Bessie Coleman, the first licensed Black female aviator, was born on January 26, 1892, in Texas. Her father, who was American Indian, left the family for Oklahoma when she was seven. Bessie stayed in Texas with her mother while her older siblings moved away. In the deeply segregated America of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, racism shaped nearly every aspect of life. Even so, Bessie’s mother encouraged her to excel in school, where Bessie became an avid reader.
Education and Early Work
At 18, Bessie attended what is now Langston University for one semester but lacked the funds to continue. She returned home to work alongside her mother, who labored as a maid and sharecropper.
At 23, ambitious and restless, Bessie moved to Chicago to live with her brothers. She worked menial jobs — manicurist, restaurant server — but found the city’s atmosphere freer than the Jim Crow South.
A New Possibility: France
During World War I, her brothers served in France and returned with stories of a society where women and Black people were treated with more dignity than in the United States. They told her that in France, women even flew airplanes — a revelation that electrified her.
In America, flying was largely a pastime for wealthy white men. Still, Bessie applied to U.S. flight schools and was rejected everywhere.
Support from Robert Abbott
Enter Robert Abbott, the influential Black Chicago newspaper owner of the Chicago Defender. Impressed by her determination, he urged her to go to France to earn her license. The French accepted her application, and Bessie crossed the Atlantic to begin training.
Training in a Dangerous Era
Flying in the 1910s was perilous. Open cockpits had no seat belts, aircraft were fragile, and accidents were common. Despite the risks, Bessie excelled. She became the first Black and American Indian woman to earn a pilot’s license.
She returned to the United States determined to build a career — but she lacked money and access.
Barnstorming Dreams and Barriers
To earn enough to buy her own plane and inspire other women and people of color, Bessie sought work as a stunt pilot. But once again, American flight schools refused to train a Black woman, even one already licensed.
Her dream would require the same persistence that had carried her from Texas to Chicago to France — and back again.
Bessie Coleman’s photo on her first pilot’s license, issued June 15, 1921. Public Domain.
Returning to France for Advanced Training
Bessie returned to France to get the specialized aviation training she still couldn’t access in the United States. Her determination — and the barriers she faced — had not gone unnoticed back home. By the time she returned to America for the second time, now a licensed pilot and trained stunt performer, the press greeted her with mostly positive attention.
1922: A Breakthrough Year
It was 1922, and Bessie was ready to take off. Her longtime supporter Robert Abbott arranged her first major air show in New York City, which immediately set reporters buzzing. Back in Chicago, her adopted home, Bessie began performing in more and more air shows, each one building her reputation.
A Rising Star of the Air Shows
To be a stunt pilot required absolute fearlessness, and Bessie’s daring routines — her figure eights, her loop‑the‑loops — made her a sensation across the country. She wanted to maintain and eventually own her own plane, but she didn’t yet have the money. So she borrowed whatever aircraft she could, determined to keep flying and to keep proving what a Black woman pilot could do.
“Queen Bess” Takes the Roaring Twenties by Storm
While some women performed wing‑walking stunts, none piloted the plane and performed aerial maneuvers the way Bessie did. Her skill, charisma, and courage made her a cultural phenomenon. Americans began calling her “Queen Bess” and “Brave Bess,” names that captured her place in the imagination of the roaring 1920s.
Bessie Coleman and airplane, 1922. Public Domain.
Aviation as Activism
As she was determined to do so, Bessie Coleman was making a difference in the nation. Of all these remarkable things in the air Bessie was known for, none was more significant than what she also achieved on the ground. Bessie Coleman told show promoters and managers that she would not perform at any show whose audience or performers were segregated by race or anything else. “Brave Bess” insisted that for all shows she performed in, there had to be just one gate for all people to walk through. At the time this was a profoundly radical request, particularly south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Speaking, Teaching, and Inspiring
Beyond stunt flying, Bessie lectured at schools and churches, urging young people — especially Black children — to pursue aviation. She saw flight not only as a career but as a path to dignity, opportunity, and pride.
Setbacks and Recovery
Still hoping to buy her own airplane, Bessie finally purchased one in 1923. But during a test flight, she crashed, breaking her leg and several ribs. She spent a year recovering in Chicago, grounded but not defeated.
A Return to the Skies
By 1926, Bessie was ready to fly again. She had no funds for a new aircraft, but a wealthy businessman donated a used plane. It was far from ideal — rickety, temperamental — and she hired a mechanic, William Wills, to get it into working shape.
Wills flew the plane from Texas to Florida for her next show, but along the way he had to make several emergency landings as the engine repeatedly failed. After repairs in Florida, he and Bessie took the plane up for a test flight on April 30, 1926, the day before the show.
The Fatal Flight
They tested the plane as Bessie hunted for locations for her stunts. During the practice run, Bessie leaned out of the open cockpit — without a seatbelt, standard for stunt pilots — to scout locations for her aerial maneuvers. Something went wrong mechanically. The plane lurched, and Bessie fell to her death. Moments later, the aircraft crashed, killing Wills as well. Bessie was 34. Wills was 24.
A Nation Mourns
By the time of her third memorial service in Chicago, more than 20,000 people had paid their respects. At the Chicago service alone, 15,000 mourners gathered as journalist Ida B. Wells read an essay honoring Bessie’s courage and legacy. Bessie Coleman was laid to rest at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, among many of Chicago’s Black notables.
A Legacy That Took Flight
In 1929, Black engineer and aviator William J. Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles, training Black men and women to fly. By the 1930s, groups of Black female stunt pilots — including the Blackbirds — carried her inspiration into the sky.
In 1940, Bessie’s early champion, millionaire newspaper publisher Robert Abbott, was also buried in Lincoln Cemetery, not far from the woman whose dreams he helped launch.
Bessie Coleman, first Black and American Indian licensed aviator, two days before her 31st birthday, January 24, 1923. Public Domain.
SOURCES:
Bessie Coleman Bold Pilot Who Gave Women Wings, Martha London, 2021, Capstone Press, North Mankato, MN.
FEATURE Image: 143 First Street, c. 1863. Since the 19th century Batavia, Illinois, 40 miles west of Chicago, was a railroad and manufacturing center in addition to its farmsteads. This mid-19th century limestone factory building is testament to Batavia’s industrial heritage. After the U.S. Civil War, Batavia was a major manufacturer of Conestoga wagons used in the country’s westward expansion. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 7.52 mb_6360.
Batavia, Illinois, reveals how a small Fox River community evolved from a frontier settlement and manufacturing center into a town rich with architectural diversity, where industrial buildings, churches, houses, and civic landmarks collectively preserve the story of nineteenth and early twentieth century Illinois.
Text & Photographs John P. Walsh.
143 First Street, c. 1863.
The limestone factory building’s square-shaped south façade’s stone cut is more grandiose than the longer west side indicating that it is the front face of the building. The tower at the north end likely held the building’s water tank and added more room and height for pulleys and other equipment. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 7.52 mb_6360.
Batavia’s architectural heritage reflects its origins as a Fox River settlement established in the 1830s and its later development as a railroad and manufacturing center.
Batavia is one of the towns along the Fox River settled in the 1830’s between Geneva and St. Charles to the north and larger Aurora to the south. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 95% 7.75 mb DSC_6350.
Batavia’s history intersects with larger national stories, including the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, westward expansion, and nearby Fermilab’s scientific legacy.
Fermilab is adjacent and to the east of Batavia. Since 1969 it has housed a herd of bison when Fermilab’s first director, Robert Wilson, established the herd as a symbol of the history of the Midwestern prairie and the laboratory’s pioneering research at the frontiers of particle physics. Each spring new calves are born signaling the herd’s rejuvenation. July 2016. Author’s photograph. 4.70mb _0577 see – https://www.fnal.gov/pub/about/bisoncam/ – retrieved 1.24.25.
Campana Sales Company Factory, Batavia, Illinois, East Elevation, 1936-1937.
The Campana Factory was built in the International Style to manufacture cosmetics for The Campana Company. At the time Campana’s “Italian Balm,” heavily promoted on the radio, was the nation’s best-selling hand lotion. The building was designed by Frank D. Chase & Company (founded in 1913) with Childs and Smith in Chicago. Frank David Chase (1877-1937) built newspaper plants in St. Louis, Milwaukee and Oklahoma City and a number of important buildings in Chicago including hospitals and office buildings. The central tower reflects the 19th-century heritage of Batavia’s limestone factories. The far one-story wings were added in the late 1940’s. The factory was purchased by the laundry detergent brand Purex who later closed Campana operations in 1982. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 77% 7.72mb _6437.
Limestone industrial buildings and former factories testify to the town’s important manufacturing history, including wagon production and later consumer industries such as Campana and Purex.
The main entrance is stainless steel set into black polished marble at the bottom of the tower. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 7.48mb _6446.
Religious institutions played a central role in Batavia’s civic development, with churches tied to abolitionist causes and community building.
The Congregational Church, 21 S. Batavia Avenue, 1856.
The locally quarried limestone central section dates to September 1856. The church displays the eclecticism of New England Colonial and Classical styles. Though the building’s classical detailing of capitals and pilasters is today mostly missing, the precisely cut and laid stone are original. These cut ashlar blocks include neatly finished arches, sills, and entablatures. The church’s design is attributed to architect Elijah Shumway Town (1804-1890) who built Batavia’s Bellevue Place Sanitarium in 1853 where Mary Todd Lincoln was committed for four months in 1875. When the original steeple was knocked down in a storm in 1877 it wasn’t replaced until 97 years later in 1974 and is the tallest steeple in Kane County. There have been additions to the church in the last 60 years. Established in Thompson Paxton’s cabin in 1835 as “Church of the Big and Little Woods” and affiliated with the Presbyterians, the church relocated to Batavia Avenue in 1841. Sharing a common belief in the anti-slavery doctrine, the church was supported by church members and the community-at-large so that the church changed its name to “Congregational Church and Society of Bavaria” in 1843. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 89% 7.73mb _6372.
Methodist church, 355 First Street, 1852.
Batavia’s first Methodist church was built in the Greek Revival. The pilasters are Doric order that meet the main beam resting across the tops of columns (architrave), blank frieze, cornice, and classical pediment. After 1886 the building was used as a schoolhouse in the Batavia school system. Today it is law offices. In 1836 a group meeting in William Van Nortwick’s home in Batavia organized the “First Methodist Class” which marked the establishment of the Methodist church in Batavia. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 96% 7.83mb DSC_6389.
West wall stonework and window of former Methodist Church built in 1852. July 2013. Author’s photograph. 7.02mb _0004
Born in Maine, Elijah Gammon (1819-1891) was a spiritual and business powerhouse in Batavia. After he moved to Illinois, he was the Methodist church’s first preacher in 1854. Having to give up preaching because of health in 1858, he changed careers to the manufacture of harvesting machinery. As he substantially contributed to the industry’s development and earned a fortune, his business responsibilities and success in no way limited his spiritual vision.https://aaregistry.org/story/elijah-gammon-supported-black-ministry/ – retrieved January 23, 2025.
United Methodist Church of Batavia, 8 N. Batavia, 1887.
United Methodist Church of Batavia was built in 1887. The rugged eclectic Richardsonian Romanesque-type building was designed by Solon Spencer Beman (1853 –1914) and inspired by a church in France that its donors had admired. The structure was almost entirely the gift of abolitionist Elijah J. Gammon (1819-1891), the church’s first preacher and local businessman, and Captain Don Carlos Newton (1832-1893), an active local businessman who had a house investment property right across the street.
Noted architect Beman designed the planned Pullman community and Pullman Company factory complex in Chicago as well as Chicago’s Fine Arts Building (1884) on Michigan Avenue. At the top of the church tower is a Palladian window under a pyramidal roof while in the back are hipped roofs. The building’s boulders were taken from the contractor’s farm about one mile south from the building site. The new church building replaced the first Methodist church in Batavia built in 1852 in Greek Revival and which still stands today. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 87%7.91mb _6498.
Chicago-based architect Solon Spencer Beman designed the United Methodist Church of Batavia in 1887. Several of his largest commissions, including the Pullman Office Building, Pabst Building in Milwaukee (1891), and the Romanesque Revival Grand Central Station (1890) in Chicago, have been demolished.A number of architects trained with Beman, including Prairie School architect William L. Steele (1875-1949), church architect Charles Draper Faulkner (1890-1979) and Spencer Solon Beman (1887-1952).
Born in New York, Captain Newton was a very active businessman and described as ”a persevering, self-made man.” He died unexpectedly at his home in Batavia after attending the Chicago World’s Fair for a week with his family in 1893. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/16849480/don-carlos-newton – retrieved January 23, 2025.
Batavia contains an unusually broad range of architectural styles, including Greek Revival, Italianate, Richardsonian Romanesque, Gothic Revival, Classical influences, and International Style design.
415 Main Street, 1860.
Eclectic Gothic Revival with Italianate features including scroll-cut square brackets tailored to the pitched roof line, segmental arches above the windows, and the heavy outlines of the door entrance. A polygonal bay and wings are informal features found in the Italianate that balances a formal façade. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 89% 7.87mb.
415 Main Street (1860). The door is larger than the windows and offset by the small ventilating window at the top in the gable. July 2011. Author’s photograph. 2.54mb100_3328 (1)
360 Main Street, 1855.
The house is an example of the evolving transition from Greek Revival to Gothic Revival to Italianate. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 74% 7.72mb DSC_6409.
33 S. Lincoln Street, 1850.
The lengthy 1850 Greek Revival is formal and simple. It has corner pilasters and there are four pairs of windows with an architrave, frieze and cornice characteristic of its type. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 73% 7.85mb DSC_6520.
505 Main Street, 1858.
The house is in the Swiss style and has a peacock feather spread motif above the second-floor balcony. There are also trifoils set in circles in the gable. The brick sunroom was added to the east around 1910. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 92% 7.81mb DSC_6426 (1)
505 Main Street. in-vogue late 1850’s peacock feather motif was made by scroll cut boards nailed to a backing and long tubes made by a lathe. To the left under the roof extension there is incised ornamentation with a tall thistle plant motif. July 2011. Author’s photograph. 1.54mb 100_3331 (1)
The Prairie style house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) in 1906. It is frame and stucco with massive chimneys. With its horizontals, low pitched roof, casement windows and thin eaves, it is the Prairie style fully developed. May 2024. Author’s photograph.
Frank Lloyd Wright in 1903, likely a self-portrait. Public Domain.
Fabyan Villa was the home of George and Nelle Fabyan from 1908 to 1939. A mid-19th century farmhouse was acquired by the Fabyans in 1905 and extensively remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1907. The house, on a hilltop looking east to the Fox River was the centerpiece of the Fabyans country estate called “Riverbank.” In 1914, the Fabyans purchased a windmill (photo below) that was located on a farm near Oakbrook, Illinois, and had it relocated opposite Riverbank on acreage that they acquired that same year. July 2013. Author’s phtograph.
The Fabyan Windmill, 1850s.
Between Batavia and Geneva, Illinois, The Fabyan Windmill is an authentic, working Dutch windmill dating from the 1850s. It was built by a German craftsman, Louis Blackhaus, and moved to this location in July 1915 next to the Fox River from its original site near Oakbrook, Illinois. July 2011. 2 mb 100_3357
111 S. Lincoln Street, c. 1850.
Though obscured by modern adaptations, the severe cube of the structure indicates its Greek Revival roots. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 92% 7.84mb DSC_6396.
125 S. Lincoln, 1852.
The Greek Revival design centers on a temple-like main block, where paired pilasters ascend to a pediment. The composition is subtly unconventional, however, as the entablature is only partially realized, one side implied by modest returns above the pilasters. Extending from the central section are a one-story entrance wing and a two-story addition featuring a pronounced cornice, dormers, arched windows, and tiny pitched roofs. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 88% 7.78 mb DSC_6400
432 Main Street, c. 1850.
The front porch may or may not be original but befits the broad formal mid-19th century Greek Revival structure. May 2024. Author’s photograph. 93% 7.82mb DSC_6431 (1)
Batavia’s historic buildings remain visible markers of changing economic, cultural, and social priorities across nearly two centuries.
333 S. Jefferson Street, Batavia Institute, Bellevue Mental Hospital, 1853.
Following the assassination of her husband, President Abraham Lincoln, Bellevue became the residence of Mary Todd Lincoln briefly in 1875. July 2011. Author’s photograph. 2.87mb 100_3332
Mary Todd Lincoln in 1846. Mary Todd was 23 years old when she married 33-year-old Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois on November 4, 1842. Their four sons were all born in Springfield. In 1875 Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926), her eldest son, had her institutionalized following a jury trial. She was committed to this private asylum in Batavia on May 20, 1875. Estranged from her finances and her son, she fell into a deep depression in the mental institution. Making contact with her lawyer and the press, the former First Lady got the wheels of justice and public opinion on her side. The resulting bad publicity for Robert Lincoln prompted the asylum director to pre-emptively change his opinion of Mary’s mental fitness so that in September 1875 she was released into the care of her sister Elizabeth Todd Edwards (1813-1888) with whom she was close and moved to Springfield. Following a second jury trial on June 19, 1876 that declared Mary “restored to reason,” Mary Todd Lincoln was back in charge of her money and freedom and promptly fled the country. She lived in France for the next four years. When she returned to Springfield in poor health in 1880, she lived again with her sister in Springfield. On July 16, 1882. Mary Todd Lincoln died of a stroke in Elizabeth’s home. Mary was 63 years old. Before her burial in Oak Ridge Cemetery next to her slain husband, her funeral was held at First Presbyterian Church in Springfield. Just steps from the Lincoln home, this was the church Abraham Lincoln started attending in 1850 after the death of their second son, four-year-old Eddie. The present church building was dedicated in 1868 and remains standing at 7th Street and Capitol Avenue today. see – https://www.nps.gov/features/liho/25/25.htm – retrieved January 23, 2025.
333 S. Jefferson Street, Batavia Institute, Bellevue Mental Hospital, 1853.
The monumental Italianate structure was designed by Elijah Shumway Town (1804-1890), who also built Batavia’s Congregational Church. The projecting two-story wings, capped by a Mansard roof containing a third story of dormers, were constructed of slightly cruder stone and added before 1870. July 2013.
419 Union Street, 1863.
The exuberance of the Italianate style is evident in the soaring polygonal bay anchoring one side of the façade and the cupola rising from the other. Large windows and multiple curved brackets are characteristic features of the style. Contrasting textures of stucco and heavy stone add visual interest while creating the impression of more costly materials and construction than were actually employed. The house served as the residence of one of the physicians associated with the Batavia Institute across the street. July 2013. Author’s photograph. 4.77mb _0092 (1)
Calvary Episcopal Church (222 Main Street), 1880.
Designed in the American Gothic style, the church reflects the mid-to-late nineteenth-century revival of medieval Gothic forms that arose in English Protestant architecture as a reaction against the prevailing Neoclassicism of the previous two centuries. American influences are evident in the building’s overall massiveness, particularly in its square tower, which is crowned by a double-pitched roof. Between the tower’s stages is an unusual sheet-metal band ornamented with bosses and discs and encircling the dormers of the steeple. April 2016. Author’s photograph. 2.82 mb DSC_0476 (1)
Through its factories, churches, houses, and landmarks, Batavia offers a remarkably intact architectural record of how industry, religion, transportation, and community shaped a growing Midwestern town from the nineteenth century into the modern era.
Details:
July 2013.
July 2013. 5.11mb 0479
Sources:
A Guide to Chicago’s Historic Suburbs on Wheels and on Foot, Ira J. Bach, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1981, pp. 304-319.
FEATURE Image: Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571), Fisherman Presenting a Ring to the Doge Gradenigo, 1534, oil on canvas, 370 x 301 cm (145.7 in × 118.5 in), Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
The Venetian Renaissance was shaped by the wealth, global reach, and humanist culture of the Republic of Venice, whose artists transformed European painting through their mastery of color, light, atmosphere, and poetic invention. From Bellini to Giorgione, Lotto, and Bordone, Venetian painters created a distinctive artistic tradition that reflected both the intellectual ideals and imperial ambitions of one of Renaissance Europe’s most powerful states.
INTRODUCTION TO PART 1.
Venice is one of the great Italian cities for Renaissance art and its wide-ranging influences. Reflecting a city in the sea, its art is characterized by light and color. Its most remarkable artistic production was between 1470 and 1590 – the rise, height, and decline of the Italian Renaissance. Developed into a powerful maritime empire between the 9th and 11th centuries, Venice was an independent city state that rivaled all other Italian maritime empires such as Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi; and lesser-known Ragusa, Ancona, Gaeta and Noli, and until the fall of the Republic in 1797. From its trade routes Venice inherited and fortified the coloristic tradition of Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean, Islamic countries and the Far East, Ravenna along the Italian coast to the south, and Aquileia near Trieste. Trade routes also included to the Free Cities of the North and its medieval Gothic culture. These activities led to a cosmopolitan culture manifested in Venice’s art and architecture. Around 1500 the Republic also had expanded its territorial holdings to a great extent across Italy, Dalmatia, the Alps, and the Aegean Sea.
The Tuscan Renaissance came to Venice starting around 1430 via Padua, a prestigious university town known for its science and philosophy departments, and part of the Venetian state. Artists such as Giotto (c.1267-1337), Filippo Lippi (c. 1406-1469), Donatello (c. 1386– 1466), Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) brought essential elements of the Early Florentine Renaissance to Venice. Since 1469 Venice was a publishing center and had been a stop since late medieval times for humanist authors such as Petrarch (1304-1374). As the Mediterranean’s dominant naval force, Venice’s cosmopolitan mercantile culture brought financial and human capital to the lagoon city whose concentration spawned technological innovation. Politically, since Venice was a Republic and not a duchy or bishopric, publications and ideas were unencumbered by censorship present elsewhere. For example, Aldine Press established in 1495 began by printing Greek and Roman classics and later worked with leading humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536), Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) and Giovanni Pico (1463-1494). The Aldine Press also produced the first proto-type of today’s lightweight and portable paperbacks. By the 16th century over 250 publishing houses operated in Venice making the city a beacon for humanist writers and artists. (see – https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190708-the-city-that-launched-the-publishing-industry – retrieved December 15, 2024).
The legacy of Giovanni Bellini provided the foundation for the Venetian Renaissance.
These propitious contacts and developments led to the establishment of Venetian Renaissance art by GIOVANNI BELLINI (c. 1430-1516). From an old family of painters, Bellini established a dialogue between Florentine artistic principles of space and form and its philosophy of the natural world with man at the center with Venetian painterly practice. His major discovery was, beginning in his artwork of the 1490s, the situating of naturalistic color to replace the urbane decorative palette used in medieval painting. He also moved past the older mythological subject matter to a naturalistic presentation of religious themes.
Bellini was joined by Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina (1430-1479) who studied with Piero della Francesca (c. 1416-1492) and introduced the influential geometric design to his compositions that influenced CIMA DA CONEGLIANO (c. 1459 – c. 1517). More isolated in his work – and thereby more important for art practice – was the work of VITTORE CARPACCIO (1465-1526) who introduced his synthesis of strict realism, including a sense of space and proportion. Carpaccio captured not only Venice’s contemporary architecture in the work of classicist Mauro Codussi (1440-1504) and sculptor Pietro Lombardo (1435-1515) but its social activity as well. Following Antonello da Messina and Piero della Francesca, Carpaccio used original and expressive colors. Though Carpaccio’s output faded before 1510, Bellini’s work continued until 1516 and through him formed a continuity of style between the late 1400’s and early 1500’s in Venice.
Giorgione revolutionized painting through poetic landscapes, atmospheric effects, and ambiguous narrative subjects.
In this first period, GIORGIONE (1478–1510), a student of Bellini, was another important figure in exploring color in Venetian art. Though influenced by Bellini, Giorgione was original in his transformation of his teacher’s stoic elite classicism to a grounding in intimacy and humanity. Many of his religious subjects are based on individualized portraits. In his unidealized landscape painting based on the realism of German Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Giorgione replicates feelings produced in nature rather than rigid archeological reconstructions that Bellini, Mantegna and Donatello produced. Giorgione was also imbued in Flemish painting including Gerard David (c.1460-1523) and Hans Memling (c. 1433-1494). When Giorgione died at 32 years old in a pandemic in 1510, he left to others his melancholic contemplation of the natural world as a direction for Venetian painting, particularly TITIAN (1488-1576) who is to be featured in another post.
Titian was part of a family of artists who, in 13th-century and 14th century in Italy, had been civic leaders such as mayors, magistrates, and notaries. In Italian his name is Tiziano Vecellio, but in English the artist is famously known as Titian. Titian became the leading painter in Venice and an influential artist throughout sixteenth-century Italy. In the 15th century, two Vecellio brothers had children who became artists. Titian was the grandson of one of those brothers who was ambassador to Venice where the family had a timber trade. A follower of Giorgione, Titian was more intense and dominating in vision and style than the earlier master including his rich dark hues without drawing. Titian also took advantage of Germanic engraving and painting sources for his art, particularly its compositional realism, dynamism and classical references as manifest in Dürer. Though a perfunctory colorist, PARIS BORDON/E (1500-1571) was another artist who came under the influence of Titian’s imperially theatrical style and made a success of it.
Sebastiano del Piombo carried Venetian colorism to Rome, where he engaged with the artistic world of Michelangelo.
There were other artists who followed Giorgione by way of his subject matter rather than, as Titian had, his color. This included artwork of SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO (1485-1547), particularly his early Venetian work before he departed for Rome in 1511, and JACOPO NEGRETTI, CALLED PALMA IL VECCHIO (c.1480–1528) who eventually fell into Titian’s orbit but painted arcadian subject matter inspired by Giorgione.
Lorenzo Lotto developed some of the most psychologically penetrating portraits of the Renaissance.
Prolific Venetian artist LORENZO LOTTO (c. 1480 – 1556) retained his independence and highly individual style in a prolific career influenced by Bellini’s composition, Antonello da Messina’s color, and Dürer’s realism. Lotto started in Treviso in 1503 and returned to Venice in 1525 via Recanati, Rome (where he worked with Raphael in the Vatican apartments making his drawing pliant and coloring mellow) and Bergamo. Lotto’s output was primarily deeply spiritual religious paintings and portraits which plumbed psychological depth, and were very popular. In Venice Lotto became one of the leading artists with Titian and Il Pordenone (1484-1539), painting altarpieces, devotional scenes, and portraits for wealthy patrons in the city. Lotto left Venice in 1533 to return to the papal states of the Marches where he intermittently returned to Venice. In 1554 Lotto became a lay brother at the Santa Casa in Loreto and died there in 1556.
Giovanni Bellini
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516)Madonna with the Child, 1470-1476, oil on canvas transferred from wood, 20.4 in. x 16.9 in (52 x 43 cm), Museo Correr, Venice.
Giovanni Bellini came from a family of artists and began work in his father, Jacopo’s workshop. The Bellini brothers Giovanni and Gentile (d. 1507) were greatly influenced by their contemporary Andrea Mantegna who married their sister Nicolosia in 1454. The chronology of Bellini’s paintings is challenging to definitively settle upon since he ran a large workshop of pupils and assistants whose production output was signed with his name. Bellini’s pupils and influences extended to great names of Renaissance Venetian painting: Giorgione, Titian, Palma Vecchio, Sebastiano del Piombo and had influence beyond his direct contacts and into the future. Bellini also studied Donatello so to develop his personal style in the 1450’s and 1460’s. This is manifested in this Madonna and child of which there are several which expresses in light and color harmonious formal three-dimensional beauty and human feeling.
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516), Portrait of Joerg Fugger, 1474, oil on panel, 10.2 in. x 7.8 in., 26 cm x20 cm, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California. https://www.nortonsimon.org/art/detail/M.1969.13.P – retrieved December 17, 2024.
In the mid 1470’s, following a practice popularized by Sicilian Antonello da Messina, Bellini moved from tempura painting to oil. Bellini began to use more rounded figures, also taken from Antonello. He also adapted Piero della Francesca’s perspective system. These artistic elements were evident in Northern European artwork commissioned by Italian families from Rogier Van der Weyden (1399-1464), Hugo Van Der Goes (c.1440-1482), Jan Van Eyck (c. 1385-1441), Petrus Christus (c. 1395-1472), Dieric Bouts (c. 1415-1475) and Hans Memling (c. 1433-1494). Bellini’s oil on panel portrait is the artist’s first. The sitter is of Joerg Fugger, the 21-year-old heir to a wealthy banking family in Germany. Bellini depicts his subject with small blue blossoms in his hair, the sign of a scholar. The portrait is three-quarter length instead of profile and set against a neutral background or, later, with landscape and sky. The portrait informed a coming generation of portraiture and religious images in Italy including Raphael (1483 – 1520), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and Fra Bartolomeo (1472-1517).
The 1470’s saw Bellini produce his most glorious landscapes including the warm and glowing St. Francis at the Frick. Specific details about this painting’s provenance are speculative. It is presumed to have been painted in the late 1470’s for Venetian patrician Zuan Michiel, and was destined for the monastery of San Francesco del Deserto on a remote Venetian island. By 1525, the painting hung in the palace of Taddeo Contarini in Venice. (further reading- https://www.frick.org/exhibitions/bellini_giorgione – retrieved December 17, 2024.). Francis is shown receiving the stigmata in a natural mystical light surrounded by a variety of animals. Bellini’s setting for this religious event that took place in September 1224 is a valley in the Venetian countryside (it took place in Umbria), with a small hilltop town in the background and Francis standing outside his hermit’s dwelling. Saint Francis is said to have composed his Canticle of Creatures also in late 1224, considered one of the first masterpieces of Italian verse.
“Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” on view until February 4, 2024, reunited for the first time in about four hundred years the Frick’s “St. Francis in Ecstasy” by Giovanni Bellini with Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers,” on rare loan from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum which hung in the palace of Venetian art collector Taddeo Contarini.Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516), Christ Blessing c. 1500, Tempera, oil, and gold on panel, 23 1/4 x 18 1/2 in. (59 x 47 cm), Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. https://kimbellart.org/collection/ap-196707 – retrieved December 17, 2024.
In Bellini’s long career he depicted Jesus Christ differently over time. In his early years he often depicted the dead Christ in a lonely solitude. Later he added angels, and grief-stricken figures of his mother Mary and the apostle John. Bellini developed to depict Christ as triumphant or beatified in his miraculous apparitions of the Transfiguration, Resurrection and Ascension. In Christ Blessing Bellini animatedly portrays the God-Man sent to bless the world on one hand and holding the shepherd’s rod to guide his flock in the other (it may also be logically seen, though not completely in view, as his staff with the traditional red cross on a white flag atop symbolizing his triumph over death). A devotional image presenting the Resurrected Savior, its vibrant figure is brought close to the picture plane where his level gaze and shadowed arm of blessing informs the viewer of the matter-of-fact reality of the scene in quiet harmonious colors. Yet, at the same time, golden rays of light emanate from the top and sides of his head, making thoroughly evident His Divinity. In the background Bellini depicts prolific rabbits, shepherds tending their flock and three shrouded figures who likely are the three Marys at the tomb on Easter morning. There is also a lighted church bell tower to convey the presence of Christ in his Church.
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516), Drunkenness of Noah, oil on canvas, c. 1515, 40.5 in. x 61.8 in (103 cm x 157 cm), Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon.
In one of Bellini’s last works the master shows how he adapts his work to the developing artistic style after 1510 led by Giorgione and Titian: the composition is fluid and dynamically conceived, with dramatic realism, aqueous colors and excited brushstrokes. Its attribution to Bellini has been accepted by scholars since 1927 though it remains open to debate.
Cima da Conegliano
Cima da Conegliano (c. 1459-c.1518), Virgin and Child in a Landscape, 1496-99, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, oil on panel, 28 x 24 3/4 in. (71.1 x 62.9 cm). https://ncartmuseum.org/object/virgin-and-child-in-a-landscape/ – retrieved December 12, 2024.
Cima was a Venetian artist who admired Bellini’s use of color and Antonello’s style of the Netherlandish masters. In contrast to renewed classicism which appeared in Venice in its art and architecture, Cima attempted a sophisticated art reliant on the study of nature that was prevalent in the provinces. Born in Treviso in about 1459, Cima worked in Vicenza in Mantegna’s circle and then moved to Venice in 1492. He was associated with the school of Alvise Vivarini (1442/1453–1503/1505), though Cima remained linked to the gentle and rustic naturalism of the provinces. His models included Madonnas and religious figures in peaceful landscapes such as this painting of a peasant mother and her child in a landscape that includes behind them a monastery and hilltop fortification. The crystalline colors and fluid drawing indicate Antonello’s influence while its overall placidness is characteristic of Cimi’s artwork.
Vittore Carpaccio
Vittore Carpaccio (1465-1526), Apparition of the Martyrs of the Mount Ararat in the Church of Sant’ Antonio di Castello, c.1513-14, oil on canvas, 47 5/8 x 68 ½ in. (121x 174 cm), Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice.
A pupil of Gentile Bellini (Giovanni’s brother), and a follower of Giovanni and Giorgione, his finest work began in 1490. The Legend of Saint Ursula and other pageant-type pictures was early and masterful Italian genre painting. Carpaccio depicted detailed episodes of sacred history and legend using the settings and minutiae of contemporary everyday Venetian society within a formal pictorial schema. This Apparition of the Martyrs of the Mount Ararat in the Church of Sant’ Antonio di Castello is a small canvas that captures the compelling simplicity and authentic emotion of a religious scene that was present in his earlier larger format cycles and series. The painting is of a vision of the prior of St. Anthony monastery kneeling at the altar on the far left. He turns to see the 10,000 martyrs of Mount Ararat he called upon in prayer during a plague that had broken out among the friars. As the martyrs process into the church, they are blessed by St. Peter, the first pope. Carpaccio depicts the interior of a Gothic Church – including an elaborate wooden screen at left and cargo ships suspended from the ceiling – that was demolished in 1807.
Vittore Carpaccio (1465-1526), Preaching of St. Stephen, 1500-1525, oil on canvas, 1.48 x 1.94m, Louvre. In place until the abolition of the brotherhood in 1806; P. Edwards, 1807; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, 1808; entered the Louvre by way of exchange, 1812. https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010062650 – retrieved December 19, 2024. detail. detail. detail.
Preaching of Saint Stephen by Vittore Carpaccio was done on the first quarter of the 16th century. It depicts the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, giving a sermon whose actions and words involve its audience as active witnesses. Set within a spacious landscape it reflects an ideal city view, reminiscent to Jerusalem. It is suggested that Carpaccio may have been in Jerusalem as this scene is reminiscent of life in that city and of the Haram-ash-Sharif with the Mosque of Omar.
Carpaccio’s realism in numerous portraits in his ceremonial pictures was influenced by the Flemish masters already popular in Italy in the 1490’s. This bust-length independent portrait of a woman set against a plain dark background is almost an abstract construct of eyes, mouth and hairstyle. Her large head is turned slightly in one direction while her limpid eyes look in the other direction. Her reddish hair is pulled loosely back from her face and, at the crown of her head she wears a yellow net to hold some of it. Her square-neck dress is slate blue edged in black, with a white and gold embroidered front panel. Around her neck she wears a choker of white and black beads.
Giorgione who moved to Venice around 1500 is the transitional figure between Bellini and Titian. Instead of a prevailing late 15th century practice of precise brushstrokes and sculptural composition in his art, Giorgio expressed his subject matter in studied tonal gradations of color and precise analysis of human emotional expression described in gentle brushstrokes. Vasari saw Giorgione’s painting as if having no intermediary between art and life. Painted in the same period as Old Woman (Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice), this Portrait of a Man epitomizes what Vasari called the “modern manner” where Giorgione sought to paint “living and natural things.” With its plain dark background and close head crop the man’s carefully observed turning gaze and ambiguous expression is wholly engaging and alive.
Giorgione (1478–1510), The Tempest, c. 1508, oil on canvas, 83 cm × 73 cm (33” × 29”), Gallerie dell’Accademia.
With Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione is ranked as one of the founders of modern art. He was the first artist in Venice who often painted small artworks in oil of mysterious and evocative subjects for private commissions instead of public church works. The Tempest, originally commissioned by a Venetian noble of the House of Vendramin, is one of those artworks. Known as “a landscape of mood,” it has no discernable subject matter outside of expressing the tension and heat of an approaching storm. Its meaning remains elusive today. Giorgione’s career and personal life are equally mysterious. The artist is known to have shared a studio with Venetian painter Vincenzo Catena (c. 1480-1531) in Venice, worked on the Doges’ palace (though these works are lost) and on frescoes on the exterior of the German Merchants headquarters in Venice where Titian was working as well in a lesser role. Giorgione was an innovator but his known output is small, questionable, and, dying in the plague in 1510 at 32 years old, sometimes completed by others including his pupils, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo, who were profoundly influenced by him.
Because of Giorgione’s early death in 1510 and other circumstances he did not complete many of his later paintings, making their ultimate identification difficult. That Titian completed many of these works is documented. Once in the collection of the House of Vendramin, this painting is such of jumble of painterly hands it is today attributed to the Circle of Titian though when earlier it was attributed to Giorgione the hand of Titian was apparent particularly in the figure of Christ. Titian was more aggressive in his use of colors –such as browns and grays- than Giorgione’s refined yellows and blues. X-rays reveal another composition – believed to be Giorgione-like- over the ponderous right hand of the angel painted over it.
Sebastiano del Piombo
Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), Organ Shutters, Four Saints, c. 1507-09, 115.3 in. x 53.9 in., 293 cm x 137 cm Gallerie delle’ Accademia, Venice (formerly in the Church of San Bartolomeo al Rialto).
When the organ shutter doors closed they formed a single image of two martyrs: Saint Batholomeo and Saint Sebastian. These organ shutters for San Bartolomeo al Rialto are the earliest documented works of Sebastiano. Commissioned by the church’s vicar in late 1507, it was completed in 1509.
Detail of above. St. Louis of Toulouse.
St. Louis of Toulouse was a bishop of Toulouse in France consecrated by Boniface VIII in 1297. Because of his princely standing Louis won the episcopal appointment, but as bishop he turned his office and efforts to meeting the material and spiritual needs of the poor in his diocese, feeding the hungry, and ignoring his own material interests. After six months, exhausted by his labors, he abandoned the position of bishop and died at Brignoles of fever, possibly typhoid, at 23 years old. St. Louis of Toulouse is one of the inside panels inside a niche of gray stone and gold mosaic (the other is St. Sebald of Nürnberg) by Sebastiano in his first documented commission.
Venice emerged as a rival to Florence and Rome, developing a distinctly Venetian style rooted in light, sensuality, and the visual splendor of the maritime republic.
Sebastiano Luciani, a pupil of Giorgione who deeply influenced him, was born in Venice in 1485. He didn’t become “del Piombo” until after 1531 when he became Keeper of the Papal Seal (“Il Piombo”). After Giorgione’s death in 1510 del Piombo may have completed some of Giorgione’s work and, in 1511, moved to Rome. Working at Villa Farnesina in Raphael’s circle that included Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536), del Piombo fell out with Raphael and became a devoted follower of Michaelangelo (1475-1564). Both eagerly worked to outperform Raphael, an artistic rival, and Michelangelo lent del Piombo some of his drawings to work from for some of the main figures in the complex composition of The Raising of Lazarus. The gigantic painting was commissioned for Narbonne Cathedral in southern France by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1478-1534), later pope Clement VII, who had also commissioned Raphael’s last painting Transfiguration for the same cathedral.
“The Raising of Lazarus” by Sebastiano del Piombo is introduced by curator Matthias Wivel in this talk as part of the series ‘The History of the National Gallery in Six Paintings.’Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), Portrait of Clement VII, c. 1531, oil on slate, 105.4 × 87.6 cm (41 1/2 × 34 1/2 in.), J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RJN – retrieved December 18, 2024.
The pope visited the artist’s studio and was pleased with his original three-quarter length portrait seated in a chair positioned diagonally, and ordered this oil copy on slate. The practice originated in Rome around 1500 in an attempt towards immortality in art. However, the material was heavy and would shatter if not handled with care. After 1531 del Piombo painted rather less and turned to making admirable portraits which combined his Venetian training in color and Roman discipline in form.
Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), Portrait of a Man in Armor, c. 1511-15, oil on canvas, 34 ½ x 26 ¼ in (87.6 x 66.7 cm) Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.
Sebastiano made this portrait under the influence of Giorgione in terms of its gentle, engaging expression and subtly dramatic “over the shoulder” pose. Until more recently, this painting was attributed to Giorgione and, as it is Sebastiano, it recalls the deep influence Giorgione had on his pupils who imitated him profoundly. It has been postulated that the sitter is the Florentine general Francesco Ferrucci (1489-1530) who fought in the Italian Wars.
Palma Il Vecchio
Jacopo Negretti called Palma il Vecchio (c. 1480-1528), Diana and Callisto, c. 1525/28, oil on canvas, 30 ½ x 48 ¾ in. (77.5 x 124 cm), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie) https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/detail/1291/?offset=34&lv=list – retrieved December 12, 2024.
Palma Il Vecchio was a Venetian painter who was a pupil of Bellini and influenced by Titian, Giorgione and Lotto. He is chiefly remembered for his paintings of female figures, particularly a blonde Venetian type of ample charm which extended even to paintings of several female saints. The subject of the naked woman located in a natural setting was pioneered by Giorgione and Titian but Palma Il Vecchio progressed the subject to work out the figure in three-dimensions and reliant on the linear curves in and of a complex assembly and interplay of naked female figures. In this painting, Palma il Vecchio adapted the poses of the sculptors of antiquity and drew on Mannerist contemporaries such as Giulio Romano (1499-1546) and Marc Antonio Raimondi (c. 1470/82–c. 1534). The sensuous surface texture typically found in Venetian art has given way to porcelain-like coolness.
Giovanni Cariani
Giovanni Cariani (a. 1490-1547), Portrait of a Man, 1525-30, oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 36 1/2 in. (92.7 x 92.7 cm), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Little is known about Cariani’s biography though it is speculated he was born in Bergamo in or before 1490. In his gentle, soft shaded subjects and arcadian elements Cariani’s early work is Venetian influenced by Giorgione. The artist was also inspired by Bellini and close to Palma Il Vecchio. He moved to Bergamo before 1520 and mastered portraiture under the influence of Lorenzo Lotto which are the highlight of his career. One of Cariani’s masterpieces is this portrait of a man of letters holding a seal that is possibly imperial or papal. The luminous colors are influenced by Palma Il Vecchio while the psychological insight of the sitter is learned from Lorenzo Lotto. The sitter is believed to possibly be Giovanni Benedetto da Caravaggio, a professor and administrator at the University of Padua.
Lorenzo Lotto
Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480 – 1556), Fra Gregorio Belo of Vincenza, 1547, oil on canvas, 34 3/8 x 28 in (87.3 x 71.1 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436917 – December 18, 2024.
The sitter beats his fist into his chest in penance, lifts an open book of Passion meditations, and is surrounded by a brooding sky and background living scene of Calvary, all of which works for the artist to scrutinize the mental state or inner thoughts of his sitter, here a religious brother in an order of poor hermits. Lotto had studied portraits of Albrecht Dürer, who made two trips to Venice, to learn to convey these deeper psychological states. Lotto’s assertively confessional portraits under his intense handling of light and dourly earthy colors, were astutely new and sometimes rejected by clients.
Lotto, a deeply religious man and one of the most independent of the 16th century Venetian artists, had a highly singular artistic vision with penetrating insight into the human personality. This painting is a mixture of the artist’s realism and idealism. The setting is natural as are the donors who Lotto draws with a Northern European Art sensibility. The Madonna and child are not derived from models, but expressed from an artistic conception of spiritual superiority. Kneeling donors in profile with the Virgin and Child was a motif developed in Venice in the 1490’s by Bellini. From the medieval period forward, donors were frequently portrayed in artworks they commissioned and such was more popular than ever in the early 1500’s.
Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480 – 1556), Madonna and Child with Sts. Jerome and Anthony of Padua, 1521, oil on canvas, 37 1/8 x 30 5/8/ in. (94.3 x 77.8 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
While strongly influenced by Bellini at the start Lotto developed an independent chameleon-like style influenced by a range of contemporary Renaissance artists such as Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Fra Bartolomeo, Raphael, Corregio (1489-1534), Giorgione, Titian, as well as Germans, Dürer and Hans Holbein the Elder (1460-1524). But Lotto’s well-known character of independence had as much an historical context as a personal one. About Lotto, Bernard Berenson observed that the Venetian painter was “a psychological painter in an age which ended by esteeming little but force and display, a personal painter at a time when personality was getting to be of less account than conformity, evangelical at heart in a country upon which a rigid and soulless Vaticanism was daily strengthening its hold” (quoted in Pignatti, page 66). This painting from the 1520’s is remarkable for its renewed vision of the picture plane, here with an interlocking group of figures filling a shallow foreground like a frieze and a delimited background.
Paris Bordon, or Bordone
Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571), Fisherman Presenting a Ring to the Doge Gradenigo, 1534, oil on canvas, 370 x 301 cm (145.7 in × 118.5 in), Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
It was painted in Venice for the confraternity of San Marco in 1540. Bartolomeo Gradenigo (1263-1342) was the 53rd Doge of Venice for three years, from 1339 to 1342. He was born in Venice to an ancient noble family and was a rich trader who practiced politics from an early age and lived a life of luxury. The painting depicts a famous legend that occurred in Gradenigo’s reign when a storm was pushed back by the intercession of Venice’s saints. Afterwards the saints gave a humble fisherman the “Ring of the Fisherman” to present to the doge.
Accademia – Doge Bartolomeo Gradenigo by Paris Bordon/e.Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571), Portrait of a Knight in Armor, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in. (91.4 x 76.2 cm) Frame: 44 3/4 x 38 x 3 1/2 in. (113.7 x 96.5 x 8.9 cm), North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. https://ncartmuseum.org/object/portrait-of-a-man-in-armor/ – retrieved December 13, 2024.
Paris Bordon/e was born in Treviso in 1500 and moved to Venice in 1508. where he was based his entire life until his death in 1571. His training is unknown though apparently in Venice where he listed as an independent painter in 1518. As a young professional he reflected the influence of Giorgione in his sentimental portraits and Titian in his use of bold and fluid colors. In the mid 1520s he took on a figural monumentality reminiscent of Pordenone. In the late 1530s Bordon/e was in France at the court of Francis I making realistic portraits and, in 1540, in Augsburg, where he painted for the wealthy Fuggers. Bordon/e was well known for his subjects’ delineated costumes and detailed intellectual landscapes.
Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571). Gladiator fight, c. 1560, oil on canvas, 218 × 329 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie. https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/detail/292/?offset=0&lv=list – retrieved December 13, 2024.Paris Bordon/e.Paris Bordon/e.Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571), Portrait of a Young Woman in a Green Coat, c. 1550, oil on canvas, 40 1/8 x 30 ½ in. (102 cm × 77.5 cm), Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie.https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/detail/288/?offset=11&lv=list – retrieved December 13, 2024.
Bordon/e’s painting is closely related to Titian’s style yet in this female figure expresses with elegance and refinement Bordon/e’s own sophisticated stylistic vision. This may be a portrait of Veronica Franco, a Venetian courtesan who played an outsized role in the social and cultural life of the city in the mid16th century.
Feature image: Three reindeer, one mission: stack the holiday cheer sky‑high. Bringing some serious retro California sunshine to the winter chill, this stacked reindeer yard display perfectly channels the festive, energetic groove of The Beach Boys’ 1963 classic “Little Saint Nick.” Just like Santa’s legendary bobsled, these three are hauling holiday spirit through the neighborhood at a frightening speed. December 2024. Author’s photograph. All rights reserved.
At Christmas 1963, “Little Saint Nick” was more than a successful Beach Boys Christmas novelty record. Its B-side, “The Lord’s Prayer,” revealed Brian Wilson’s emerging artistic ambition, sophisticated vocal arranging, and willingness to push beyond the group’s surf-pop image, making the single an important milestone just before the Beatles and the British Invasion transformed popular music.
The Road to the Top
The Beach Boys finally reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1964 with “I Get Around.” The breakthrough felt overdue. Throughout 1963, the California surf pop group had dominated American radio: five Top 10 singles, including three that cracked the Top 5, and three Top 10 albums. They completed their first national tour that April, and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” finished the year as Billboard’s No. 1 song. By December, with their first holiday single “Little Saint Nick” climbing the charts, the Beach Boys looked like America’s most celebrated pop band. Only Newark’s The Four Seasons rivaled their chart power.
Shifting Tides
Then, just two months later, everything changed. The British Invasion hit. The Beatles arrived in early 1964 and turned the rock ’n’ roll world upside down. Overnight, the Beach Boys found themselves challenged—creatively and commercially—by the Fab Four, who were suddenly setting the pace the rest of the pop world had to match.
The 1963 single “Little Saint Nick” endures because it transformed the band’s surf‑and‑speed aesthetic into holiday magic and was an early step toward the ambitious studio craft of The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album the following year.
Little Saint Nick LYRICS:
(Ooooooooh, merry Christmas Saint Nick) (Christmas comes this time each year) (Oooooooo-ooooooooh)
Well, way up north where the air gets cold There’s a tale about Christmas that you’ve all been told And a real famous cat all dressed up in red And he spends the whole year workin’ out on his sled
It’s the little Saint Nick (Oooooh, little Saint Nick) It’s the little Saint Nick (Oooooh, little Saint Nick)
Just a little bobsled, we call it old Saint Nick But she’ll walk a toboggan with a four speed stick She’s candy-apple red with a ski for a wheel And when Santa hits the gas, man, just watch her peel
It’s the little Saint Nick (Oooooh, little Saint Nick) It’s the little Saint Nick (Oooooh, little Saint Nick)
Run, run, reindeer Run, run, reindeer (Oh-oh-oh-oh) Run, run, reindeer Run, run, reindeer He don’t miss no one
And haulin’ through the snow at a frightenin’ speed With a half a dozen deer with Rudy to lead He’s gotta wear his goggles ’cause the snow really flies And he’s cruisin’ every pad with a little surprise
It’s the little Saint Nick (Oooooh, little Saint Nick) It’s the little Saint Nick (Oooooh, little Saint Nick)
(Aaa-aaa-aaah) (Ooooooooh, merry Christmas Saint Nick) (Christmas comes this time each year) (Aaa-aaa-aaah) (Ooooooooh, merry Christmas Saint Nick) (Christmas comes this time each year) (Aaa-aaa-aaah) (Ooooooooh, merry Christmas Saint Nick) (Christmas comes this time each year) (Aaa-aaa-aaah) (Ooooooooh, merry Christmas Saint Nick) (Christmas comes this time each year)
A Holiday Blueprint and Spiritual Depth
“Little Saint Nick” was released on December 9, 1963, climbing to No. 3 on Billboard’s Christmas Singles chart. Brian Wilson had composed the music that August, building it on the same brisk, compact structure he used for “Little Deuce Coupe.” Mike Love supplied most of the lyrics, shifting his focus from hot rods to a holiday bobsled.
The single’s B side carried a more reflective but remarkable achievement: “The Lord’s Prayer,” Albert Hay Malotte’s 1935 setting, adapted and arranged by Brian Wilson. Sung a cappella in four interlocking harmonies, it revealed a creative and spiritual depth unusual for a band of early twenty somethings. By Christmas 1963, the Beach Boys were firmly established as America’s No. 1 pop group.
“Little Saint Nick” successfully adapted the Beach Boys’ hot-rod and surf formula into a Christmas song, helping cement their status as America’s leading pop group in late 1963.
Brian Wilson dreamed up “The Lord’s Prayer” as a bold holiday B‑side—an intricate, five‑part a cappella arrangement blending barbershop, jazz‑pop, and church hymnals. Released December 9, 1963, it showcased his rising studio ambition long before fans were ready for it.The Beach Boys poured long hours into reshaping their signature harmonies for Christianity’s most venerated prayer. In doing so, they hoped to elevate the sacred text while proving that their so‑called surfer sound carried far more depth than lightweight pop. Their intricate vocal blend became both a devotional experiment and an early declaration of artistic ambition.
“The Lord’s Prayer” was an unusually ambitious B-side, featuring intricate a cappella harmonies and spiritual subject matter that demonstrated Brian Wilson’s growing sophistication as an arranger and producer.
Another clear indicator of the band’s rapid evolution can be found in Shut Down Volume 2, released in March 1964 at the absolute peak of the initial Beatlemania hurricane, where it climbed to No. 13 on the Billboard 200. Written and recorded just before the British Invasion transformed the American airwaves, the album’s opening track and lead single, “Fun, Fun, Fun,” was released a mere six days before the Beatles’ historic debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. Written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, the track was recorded on New Year’s Day 1964 as a sunny California anthem wrapped around a story of teenage rebellion. The lyrics follow a girl who deceives her father, taking his Ford Thunderbird under the guise of going to the library, only to cruise the town to enjoy the thrill of speed and peer admiration that comes with driving a cool car. Rather than offering a rigid moral lesson, the song unapologetically celebrates the carefree, defiant spirit of youth. The driving hook—”she’ll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-bird away”—promises that her freedom will last right up until she is caught, though the narrative ends with the narrator rescuing her from being grounded so the joyride can continue. While the Beatles already held the top slots on the charts in early 1964, the Beach Boys were still chasing their first chart-topper; “Fun, Fun, Fun” peaked at No. 5 that March, paving the way for their first No. 1 hit with “I Get Around” later that July.
The Ed Sullivan Shockwave
In mid January 1964, they left for their first international tour, performing in Australia and New Zealand. When they returned on February 2, their next single—“Fun, Fun, Fun”—was released the following day. It reached No. 5 on March 21.
But in the brief window between its release and its chart peak, the rock ’n’ roll landscape shifted beneath their feet. On February 9, 1964, the British Invasion began in earnest. The Beatles—John, Paul, George, and Ringo—made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing before an audience of roughly 74 million Americans, nearly half the country. The Beach Boys, still the top U.S. pop band, had not yet been invited onto that stage. The Beatles’ explosive debut instantly reshaped the pop hierarchy, and the Beach Boys suddenly found themselves facing a new and formidable rival.
The single stands at a historical crossroads, representing the Beach Boys at the peak of their pre-Beatles success just before the British Invasion challenged them and inspired the artistic competition that would lead to their greatest innovations.
The Packaging Gap
Overnight, the Beach Boys suddenly looked almost bush league next to the British newcomers—not musically, since both groups drew from the same exuberant teenage world, but in publicity, packaging, and sheer media savvy. It was a preview of what would happen again in the 1980s, when British acts outpaced Americans in the emerging music video era.
A Five-Year Revolution
In the long wake of that shock, as the Beatles returned to The Ed Sullivan Show twice more in February 1964 and again that May, Brian Wilson’s quiet but fierce competition with them began. Rock ’n’ roll would never be the same. Over the next five years, the music exploded into something more original, experimental, and sonically adventurous—a transformation that fueled breakthroughs for the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and countless others.
And sitting right on the cusp of that revolution was “Little Saint Nick.” With its hook and beat, the 1963 single endures today as a bright artifact from the moment just before rock ’n’ roll reinvented itself.
SOURCES:
Badman, Keith. The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America’s Greatest Band on Stage and in the Studio. 1st ed. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2004, pp. 45-54. Love, Mike. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2016, pp. 84-88. Morgan, Johnny. The Beach Boys: America’s Band. Illustrated ed. New York: Union Square & Co., 2015, pp. 61-65. Whitburn, Joel. Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles, 1955-1999. Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 2000, pp.38-39.
FEATURE Image:El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Laocoön, oil on canvas, 1604-1614, 55 7/8 x 76″, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.In Greek and Roman mythology, Laocoön is a Trojan priest who warned the Trojans to destroy the Trojan Horse sent by the Athenians and is punished with death by the gods for it. More details on the artwork in the post.
El Greco (Doménikos Theotókopoulos) was one of the most original artistic visionaries in history, utilizing a deeply personal, expressive style of Mannerism—characterized by elongated figures, deliberate scale manipulation, and jarring colors—to transform dramatic biblical and mythological narratives into profound mystical events. His artwork beautifully synthesizes his formal Greek icon training, the vibrant oil techniques of the Venetian school, and Roman monumentality to reflect complex theological themes and deep spiritual struggles.
c. 1590 The Agony in the Garden, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, called El Greco, oil on canvas, 40 1/4 x 44 3/4 in. (102.2 x 113.7 cm) Toledo Museum of Art, Gallery 15. November 2012. Author’s photograph.1.32mb 101_0977.
From the Toledo, OH, museum label: With his intensely personal style, El Greco (“the Greek”) is one of the most original artistic visionaries of any era. Born Doménikos Theotókopoulos on the Greek island of Crete, he trained in Venice and Rome before settling in Toledo, Spain, where he painted this picture. Jesus is shown praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, outside Jerusalem, just before his arrest for his teachings (Judas and the Roman soldiers are approaching at the right). His disciples Peter, James, and John sleep at left. The consciously manipulated scale of the elongated figures, the intentionally jarring colors, and the deliberately confusing space (where exactly is the angel in relationship to the sleeping apostles?) add to the drama and emotion of the scene and capture Christ’s spiritual struggle as he agonizes over his coming crucifixion. Combining aspects from all four biblical accounts of the narrative for his own interpretation of the story, El Greco gives visual form to Christ’s metaphor in Matthew 26:42—”Oh my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”see – The Agony in the Garden – Search el greco (Objects) – Search – eMuseum – retrieved December 10, 2025.
1590-1595 Agony in the Garden oil on canvas 103 × 131 National Gallery, London
While the two versions of Agony in the Garden by El Greco share an almost identical horizontal composition, the differences between the example in the Toledo Museum of Art and the one in London’s National Gallery are striking. The Toledo painting is fully autograph, executed by El Greco’s own hand, and serves as the prime original prototype for this particular composition. It displays tighter control, greater expressive intensity, and the fluid, energetic drapery that characterizes the master’s finest work. The London version, by contrast, is a later workshop replica produced to satisfy strong demand for the image and executed largely by assistants under El Greco’s supervision. Its forms are somewhat simplified, and its fabric folds appear more rigid and mechanical, reflecting the touch of a copyist rather than the master himself. El Greco’s authentic hand in the Toledo, OH, painting is especially evident in the highly complex, faceted, gemstone-like treatment of Christ’s brilliant crimson robe, where sharp white highlights transition dramatically into saturated reds. Equally characteristic is the deep, cavernous shadow that envelops the sleeping apostles, heightening the painting’s spiritual tension and emotional power.
El Greco’s surviving oeuvre is estimated to be around 500 paintings.
1595–1600 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Self-Portrait or Portrait of an Old Man, oil on canvas, 52.7 cm × 46.7 cm (20.7 in × 18.4 in), The Metropolitian Museum of Art, New York.
Usually identified as a self-portrait, it is supported by the fact that the same figure appears several times in El Greco’s oeuvre and ages alongside the artist. The portrait shows the influence of Titian (1489-1576) and Tintoretto (c.1518-1594) whose artwork El Greco saw in Venice.
Enduring Architectural Inspiration:
The grand backdrops of his paintings often echoed the columned architecture and arcades he witnessed during his foundational time in Venice.
El Greco painted this episode of the Purification of the Temple many times, a story that appears in all four Gospels. The artist used intense colors and exaggerated gestures to express the chaos and disruption of the moment when Jesus Christ, angry that the temple was being used for sinful commerce and not prayer, makes a whip and uses it to drive out the traders selling animals for sacrifice. In the upper left corner is a painted sculpture of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden by the Angel of God reinforcing the message of sinfulness in the trader’s actions in the scene. At right in contrast, Christ’s apostles stand beneath a painted relief sculpture of faithful Abraham. The story of the Purification of the Temple told in Chapter 2 of John’s Gospel relates: “…Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money-changers seated there. He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, ‘Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.'” El Greco painted Christ’s body energetically twisted with his right arm raised and ready to strike the man draped in yellow cloth he is gazing at. The man in yellow mirrors Christ’s pose as he recoils, arching his back and raising his hand to protect himself. The figures behind him lean in the same direction backwards to avoid being struck in the melée. The painting shows El Greco’s debt to Renaissance art such as Titian and Michelangelo (1475-1564) whose artwork El Greco studied during his travels to Venice and Rome. The figures behind Christ are much calmer. The gray-bearded man with his hand on his knee looking up in a yellow and blue costume is identified as Simon Peter. While the foreground setting suggests a grand columned one that is only partially seen, the buildings in the background with their arched arcades were likely inspired by architecture El Greco saw in Venice in 1568.
El Greco arrived in Toledo, Spain, by July 1577 and remained in the city for the rest of his life until his death on April 7, 1614.
1596–1600 View of Toledo oil on canvas 121.3 × 108.6 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Painting around 20 years after El Greco’s arrival to Toledo, it stands as one of the most enigmatic masterpieces in Western art because pure, independent landscape painting essentially did not exist in late 16th-century Spain. When El Greco first arrived in Toledo in 1577, he was still painting with a heavily Italian Renaissance-influenced style focused on monumental human figures and clean perspective. By the late 1590s, he had fully embraced extreme Mannerism—using rhythmic distortion, elongated lines, and supernatural light. Art historians theorize that View of Toledo is an artwork where the artist applied this highly developed, intensely psychological style to a physical place rather than the human figure in a religious or mythological setting.
In 1561, King Philip II had permanently moved the royal court from Toledo to Madrid, stripping Toledo of its status as the political capital. By the late 1590s, the city’s elite intellectual circles—many of whom were El Greco’s closest patrons—were deeply invested in preserving Toledo’s prestige as the spiritual and historical heart of Spain. Scholars believe this painting was commissioned as a form of cultural propaganda where El Greco painted it as a living, breathing testament to the divine forces that his patron circle believed guarded the ancient city and whose swirling, dark, lightning-charged sky marked it with the numinous presence of God.
c. 1608 View and Plan of Toledo, El Greco Museum (Museo del Greco) in Toledo, Spain.
Tavera Hospital rests on the large white cloud in the foreground so that it did not block the view of the city’s grand Bisagra Gate behind it.The artist explains this artistic choice on the large scroll/map held by the young man on the right (often identified as El Greco’s son, Jorge Manuel). At left the golden muscular figure pouring water represents an allegory of the Tagus River, symbolizing the lifeblood and natural wealth of Toledo, while the Virgin Mary and angels float in the heavens directly above the city.
Theological Integration:
His artwork served as a powerful tool of the Counter-Reformation in Toledo, Spain, visually giving form to high Catholic theology, scripture, and mystical stories to combat contemporary heresies.
1577-79 El Greco, The Assumption of the Virgin (Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo, Spain), The Art Institute of Chicago.
Part of an altar ensemble, Assumption of the Virgin is 13 feet high and 7 feet 6 inches wide. In the painting there are two principal groups – the Virgin and angels above and, below, the 12 apostles and an empty sarcophagus. It was the first major commission for El Greco for the Bernadine Convent Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, Spain. It was in the funerary chapel of Doña María de Silva. El Greco in Spain is first recorded on July 2, 1577 (Toledo Museum of Art, El Greco of Toledo, (exhibition catalog), Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982, p.16). On August 8, 1577 a contract was made for the main altar series which included The Assumption of the Virgin. El Greco agreed to complete the project in twenty months for a payment of 1500 ducats. The artist signed and dated The Assumption in 1577 and was paid in full in 1578. The painting was installed in September 1579 and remained in the church for the next almost 250 years. (Ibid., p 152; Wood, James, AIC – Essential Guide, Chicago, 2003, p.131). In 1827 The Assumption of the Virgin was purchased by Infante Don Sebastián Gabriel de Borbón (“S.G.”). An inventory of S.G.’s estate lists The Assumption as #26, one of only two sixteenth century Spanish paintings in his collection of more than 200 works. The listing reads: “Otro en id de 14 pies y 5 pulgadas de alto por 8 pies y 3 pulgadas de cnaho. Su asunto, la Ascension de la Virgen, y los Apóstoles, alrededor de Sepulcro. Esta restaurado por Bueno. Tiene marco tallado y dorado…Dominico Greco.” [“Another in dimension (ideación) of 14 feet and 5 inches high by 8 feet and 3 inches wide. Its subject, the Assumption of the Virgin, and the Apostles, around the sepulcher. It was restored on the up and up. It has carved and gilt markings.” – my translation.] (Agueda, Mercedes, “La colección de pinturas del infante Don Sebastián Gabriel,” Boletín del Museo de Prado, iii/8 (1982), pp.103 and 106; 102-17; American Art News, Jan. 7, 1905, Vol. III, p.1.; Toledo Museum of Art, El Greco of Toledo, p.153). In 1837 S.G.’s collection of paintings was confiscated because of his political (pro-Carlist) activities.Along with pictures acquired from the suppression of the religious orders during the Napoleonic occupation (1800-12) his collection of paintings (including presumably #26 in his 1835 inventory) was exhibited at the Museo de la Trinidad. (Boletín, p. 103; Groveart.com, “Borbón y Braganza, Don Infante Sebastián Gabriel.”) S.G.’s property was returned to him shortly before his death in 1875. The Prado describes events until 1902 like this: “La colección…a la muerte del Infante…fue nuevamente exhibida en publico por sus herederos con motivo de una venta realizada en Pau en 1876, añadiéndose al núcleo primitivo de la colección la parte correspondiente llevada al matrimonio por su segunda esposa, Ma Cristina de Borbón. En 1890, su hijo Pedro pone en venta en el Hotel Druot de Paris parte de la colección y unos años más tarde se hace lo mismo en Madrid, bajo el nombre de la Infanta Maria Cristina. De las tres ventas sucesivas 1876, 1890 y 1902 se desprende como los colecciónistas fueron despojando del conjunto todo lo que podriamos llamar grandes piezas…”[… the collection at the death of the Infante was exhibited anew in public in a sale held in Pau in 1876 for the benefit of his heirs. Adding itself to the primitive nucleus of the collection was that respective part brought to the marriage by his second wife, Mrs. Cristina de Borbón. In 1890, her son Pedro put up for sale at the Hotel Druot in Paris another part of the collection and some years later did the same thing in Madrid under the name of the Infanta Maria Cristina. From these three successive sales of 1876, 1890 and 1902 the collectors were divesting themselves of whatever would be called the great pieces…” – my translation]. It is not yet clear at which of these three sales if any The Assumption of the Virgin found itself. What remained after the final sale in 1902 stayed in the possession of Borbón heirs. (Boletín, p. 104). In January 1905 The Assumption of the Virgin was purchased by Durand-Ruel and exhibited in his Paris gallery. (American Art News, Jan. 7, 1905, vol. III, p.1). Durand-Ruel had purchased it from the Spanish Bourbon family into whose possession it came in 1811. The painting was being exhibited at the Prado when Durand-Ruel purchased it in January 1905. Durand-Ruel was dealing in other El Grecos around that time such as acquiring his Laocoön in 1910 and selling it to Paul Cassirer in Berlin by October 1915 (today it is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.). On July 17, 1906, The Assumption of the Virgin was purchased by The Art Institute of Chicago for 200,000ff from Durand-Ruel in Paris. This purchase for an American museum reflected the daring and independent judgment of its purchasers. The painting had always been praised as the artist’s most beautiful and was considered a homage to Titian’s composition in the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice while also expressing Roman monumentality. (Horowitz, Helen L., Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1976, p. 101; The Art Institute Chicago 28th Annual Report, June 1, 1906-June 1, 1907, pp.20 and 59; Toledo Museum of Art, El Greco of Toledo, p.153). In February 1915 Mrs. Nancy Atwood Sprague, widow of Art Institute of Chicago Trustee Arnold Sprague, gave $50,000 to defray the artwork’s purchase expenses. From the very beginning this El Greco painting was considered the Museum’s most important acquisition of the year and called the greatest work of El Greco outside Spain. (Chicago Art Institute Bulletin, Mar. 1, 1915, p. 34).
1577-79 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), The Holy Trinity, 300 x 178 cm, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
The painting of the Holy Trinity was part of the altar ensemble for El Greco’s first major commission. It was above The Assumptionof the Virgin with God the Father holding the dead Christ surrounded by angels and a white dove hovering above signifying the Holy Spirit.
1586 The Burial of the Count of Orgaz oil on canvas 480 × 360 Church of San Tomé, Toledo1577-1579 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), The Disrobing of Christ (“El Espolio”), oil on canvas, 285 x 173 cm, Sacristy, Cathedral, Toledo.
One of the finest and most important paintings of El Greco’s career, El Espolio was commissioned on July 2, 1577, by Diego de Castilla, the dean of the cathedral in Toledo, Spain, and hung in the vestry (where clergy dress in their vestments). In 1612 it was moved into a re-modelled sacristy (where the sacred vessels are held) and placed in a new post and lintel frame in the 1790’s. El Greco shows Christ looking serenely skyward, a pathway of clouds signaling upwards to his Father in Heaven. In the center of the painting, Christ is dressed in a bright red robe as he is being tormented by his captors. A figure behind his left shoulder points at Christ accusingly while a man in green holds a rope tied around Christ with one hand as the other is ready to disrobe his garment. Two others behind Christ argue over who will get his garments. Christ’s imminent crucifixion is signaled by the man in yellow at the lower right bending over a cross and drilling holes into the wood preparing it for the nails to be driven through Christ’s feet. At the lower left are the three Mary’s who contemplate the crucifixion scene with distress. The man dressed in typical 16th century armor was likely a contemporary portrait and may be intended to represent the Roman centurion. The disrobing incident may be inferred by the mention in all four gospels of the Roman soldiers playing dice for his robe. Apocryphal sources describe this moment of disrobing that include the figural and narrative elements depicted in El Greco’s painting. The artwork was intended for the vestry where a priest dresses for the Mass, a ritual action that mystically re-presents under the sacramental signs of bread and wine the same sacrifice of Christ on Calvary’s cross. This significance becomes El Greco’s main focus in the picture as Christ’s blood red robe is executed with a dynamic and energetic technique. see – El Greco, David Davies, National Gallery Company, London, 2003, p.122.
1597–1599 Saint Joseph and the Christ Child oil on canvas 289 × 147, Capilla de San José (Chapel of Saint Joseph) in Toledo, Spain
El Greco painted this massive piece (289 × 147 cm) specifically for the high altar of the standalone Chapel of Saint Joseph (Capilla de San José) in Toledo, where the original masterpiece remains on display today
1597-1599 El Greco, Saint Martin of Tours and the Beggar, oil on canvas, 193.5 × 103 cm (76 3/16 × 40 9/16 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.1164.html – retrieved November 11, 2024.
The painting was commissioned by Martín Ramírez for the Chapel of San José in Toledo, Spain. El Greco painted miracles as matter of fact. St. Martin and The Beggar depicts a scene from a low vantage point looking up to a monumental knight sharing his cloak with an attenuated, nearly otherworldly figure of a naked beggar. St. Martin of Tours (d.397), part of the Imperial Calvary stationed near Amiens during the times of Roman Emperor Constantine, sits mounted on a magnificent white Arabian steed and is dressed in stylishly practical soldier regalia from head to foot signifying his noble role and power to survey this emerald green landscape that is Toledo and the Tagus river. Martin’s green cloak is one part of his regalia but, on a cold autumn or winter day, his heart burns to divide it with his sword so to share it with this naked bandaged stranger he meets on the road. The encounter and action are modest and profound simultaneously– a typical social setting yet not merely transactional within a rigidly conceived social order but a tender act of charity. Martin rode off with his half cloak and thought of his soldierly duties. Yet it afforded a miracle. That night, tradition relates, Christ appeared to Martin in a dream revealing that the beggar the knoght shared his cloak with was Him.
1597-1599 Madonna and Child with Saint Martina and Saint Agnes National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
The painting was originally commissioned alongside Saint Martin and the Beggar to decorate the side altars of the Capilla de San José (Chapel of Saint Joseph) in Toledo, Spain. It depicts the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus floating upon celestial clouds, flanked by angels, while looking down upon two early Christian virgin martyrs below: Saint Martina (kneeling next to a lion) and Saint Agnes (holding a lamb).
1595 The Holy Family with Saint Anne (also frequently referred to as Our Lady of Good Milk), Hospital de Tavera (managed by the Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli) in Toledo, Spain.
This particular composition is highly distinct from El Greco’s other versions of the Holy Family. Here, he focuses on an intimate, tender moment by portraying the Virgin Mary as a nursing Madonna (Virgen de la Leche). She is joined by her mother Saint Anne caressing the infant Jesus’s head, while Saint Joseph stands watch protectively on the right. Scientific analysis using X-radiographs has shown that El Greco initially sketched a highly naturalistic portrait of Mary’s face before stylized and elongating it into his iconic, otherworldly Mannerist aesthetic
c.1580 Christ Carrying the Cross oil on canvas 105 × 79 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York1597–1600 Christ Carrying the Cross oil on canvas 108 × 78 Prado, Madrid.c.1590 Christ on the Cross with two Donors oil on canvas 260 × 171 Louvre Museum, Paris
Next 3 images, detail of above:
1597 -1600 The Resurrection Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain.
This magnificent canvas was originally commissioned in 1596 as part of a grand multi-painting altarpiece ensemble for the church of the Colegio de Doña María de Aragón in Madrid. The painting displays the absolute height of El Greco’s late Mannerist style. Christ is depicted completely weightless, holding a white banner that symbolizes his triumph over death, while soaring gracefully above a mass of wildly contorted, startled Roman soldiers below. El Greco uses extreme vertical elongation (scorcio) and an ethereal, ghostly light to elevate the physical event into a supernatural, deeply mystical plane.
This painting shows St. John the Evangelist in a half-figure which has a clear precedent in the Venetian school where El Greco completed his training. Crete, where El Greco was born, was a Venetian possession. El Greco arrived to Venice as a teenager in the late 1550s or early 1560s where he worked with Titian (c. 1490-1576) but became the admirer and heir of Tintoretto (c. 1518-1594). El Greco, who studied icon painting in Crete, learned the medium of oil from its virtuoso Titian, but once in Venice, El Greco quite normally was attracted to Tintoretto, the city’s then-modern master. “The Greek” did not simply imitate Tintoretto’s exterior forms but very personally emulated his deeply spiritual and expressive Mannerism. In this later painting, El Greco depicts the tradition that John the Evangelist was in Rome when the Emperor Domitian (51-96) tried to assassinate Jesus of Nazareth’s young apostle by poisoning the wine in his Mass chalice. But the legend relates that the poison turned into a fabulous serpent tipping off John and his holy companions and doing them no harm. Like Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480-1556), El Greco depicts this story’s externals surrounding John – be it the heavy chalice, poisonous serpent exorcised from it, or the expressive hands of the apostle holding the cup of sacrifice and motioning towards it – to scrutinize the inner conviction or character of the sitter, the young author of the Johannine corpus of a gospel, three letters, and the book of Revelation. On John’s Gospel Cornelius à Lapide (1567-1637) wrote that the Evangelist was indeed the eagle (inspired by a description in Ezekiel) who soars skyward and swoops down to earth for his prey. John wrote the last canonical gospel in 99 with combatting that day’s Christian heresies in mind, specifically those that denied Christ’s divinity – whom in his epistles he called “anti-Christs.” John conveys sacred ideas with a rusticity of style. The 17th century theologian and biblical scholar Cornelius à Lapide affirmed that “John was most like Christ” and that the disciple loved the master supremely and the master held the disciple most dear. Because of the relationship of Jesus and John, the biblical scholar claimed, “when you read and hear John [in his gospel, letters, and book of Revelation] think that you read and hear Christ.” He quotes St. Jerome who claimed that Christ transfused his own spirit and his own love including “the purest streams of Jesus Christ’s Doctrines” into Saint John. This relationship is signaled by John’s reclining on the breast of Christ at the Last Supper. John, now in old age, was pressed by all the bishops in Asia and many others to write a “breakthrough” account claiming of the deepest things of the Divinity of the savior. John agreed with the condition that the whole church fast before he embarked on the project and when the fast ended John began: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.” Nothing is stronger to attest to the origin, eternity, and generation of the divinity of the Christ. John wrote in the Greek language because he was addressing Greeks but, again according to Cornelius à Lapide, the gospel is filled with Hebrew phrases and idioms because St. John was a Hebrew who loved his native language. Though John relates Jesus’s miracles as proof that Christ was the Messiah, God as well as man – including the singular accounts of the changing water to wine at the wedding feast of Cana (chapter 2) and the raising of Lazarus from the dead (chapter 11) – John less relates actions of Christ as found in the synoptics Matthew, Mark, and L uke who focused on his humanity and much more of the discourses and disputations that Christ had with the Jews (mostly its rulers), again with none other than the same purpose to prove his theology meant for the whole world that Christ was “God as well as man.” In John’s gospel a careful examination of contexts needs to occur because Christ speaks sometimes as man and sometimes as God. Its high theology which dealt with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, unity of the Godhead, and divine relations and attributes became that gospel in the next centuries that the bishops referenced to combat their day’s heresies such as Arianism (which denied Christ’s Divinity), the Docetists (who denied Christ’s humanity), and Nestorians (who denied Christ’s dual natures). John had favorite terms and ideas he repeated in his gospel – calling Christ “the Life” and “the Light.” Calling saints “the children of light.” Calling sin “darkness.”
1602–1607 Saint James the Less (Toledo series) oil on canvas 98 × 78 Toledo Cathedral, Toledo, Spain
Mastery of Expressionist Mannerism:
Rather than merely copying Italian masters, he evolved a highly individualistic Mannerist style, bending rules of perspective and physical anatomy to elevate human emotion to a spiritual, otherworldly plane.
c.1600 Portrait of a Cardinal (possibly Fernando Niño de Guevara) oil on canvas 67.2 × 42.5 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York1609 Portrait of Cardinal Tavera oil on canvas 103 × 82 Tavera Hospital, Toledo, Spain.1587–1600 Portrait of an Elderly Man (also known as An Elderly Gentleman or Portrait of an Old Nobleman), Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain.
This piece is widely considered one of El Greco’s finest and most psychologically profound portraits. Rather than focusing on grand status symbols, El Greco isolates the subject against a dark, minimalist background to highlight the gentleman’s somber expression and weary eyes.
The signature on the right is written in Greek script as “Doménikos Theotokópoulos epoíei” (Doménikos Theotokópoulos made this), which was the artist’s traditional way of proudly reclaiming his Cretan heritage while operating in Spain.
1592–1595 Saint Louis IX with a Page, oil on canvas, 120 × 96, Louvre Museum, Paris1595 Female Portrait (also known as Portrait of a Lady), Philadelphia Museum of Art.1580 The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest oil on canvas 81.8 × 65.8 Prado, Madrid.
The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest is the definitive visual symbol of the Spanish Golden Age aristocrat and stands as one of the most famous portraits in Western art history. After a 1996 restoration, modern art historians now widely agree that the man is Juan de Silva y de Ribera, the Marquis of Montemayor and the military commander of the Alcázar of Toledo. The elongated hand pressed flat against the chest is a solemn declaration of chivalric honor, or an expression of deep Christian piety. He holds a beautifully detailed, gold-gilt sword hilt, a direct symbol of his knightly status and military authority. A gold medallion or pendant hangs from his neck, partially tucked into his doublet, suggesting office in a religious or military order.
Stylistic Evolution & Influence:
Born in Crete and trained in Byzantine icon painting, El Greco moved to Venice and Rome where he absorbed the structural monumentality of Michelangelo and the rich colorito and fluid brushwork of Titian and Tintoretto.
1608–1614 The Saviour The primary version featuring this distinct neutral background and composition is housed in the El Greco Museum (Museo del Greco) in Toledo, Spain. El Greco and his workshop produced a few variations of this subject as the centerpiece for larger Apostle series (Apostolados), meaning very similar authenticated versions can also be found in the Prado Museum in Madrid and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh.
This composition draws heavily on traditional Byzantine Christian iconography—specifically the Pantocrator (Christ as Ruler of All), reflecting the formal religious icon training El Greco received during his youth in Crete before moving to Italy and Spain. He depicts Christ half-length against a dark, minimalist background, with his right hand raised in a traditional gesture of blessing while his left hand rests atop a crystal-like globe representing the world. The sharp, diamond-shaped (rhombus) halo behind his head and heavily elongated facial features are hallmarks of El Greco’s late, intensely spiritual Mannerist style.
1603 Saint Bernardino of Siena oil on canvas 269 × 144 El Greco Museum, Toledo, (Toledo, Spain) (Property of Prado, Madrid)1609 Saint Jerome oil on canvas 108 × 87 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.1609 Portrait of Fray Hortensio Félix Paravacino oil on canvas 112.1 × 86.1 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
A Matter-of-Fact Approach to Miracles:
He painted divine interventions and mythological events not as distant, impossible magic, but with a stark, contemporary reality, placing ancient tales like Laocoön directly into 16th-century Spanish landscapes.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
As mentioned in the feature image caption, Laocoön is a Trojan priest in Greek and Roman mythology who warned the Trojans to destroy the Trojan Horse sent by the Athenians by which they won the war. “I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts,” he told them (see Edith Hamilton, Mythology, p. 285). Laocoön and his two sons are punished for revealing this truth by the gods. They are attacked by giant serpents sent out of the sea by Apollo and Artemis that bit and crushed them to death and then slithered away into Athena’s Temple in the city. The Trojans, instead of heeding their priest’s warning and seeing his death for what it was — the punishment for telling them the truth of the danger of the Trojan Horse — viewed it as warning not to question the entry of the monumental wooden horse into the city. They pulled it in, set it in front of Athena’s Temple, and went to their homes believing they had won a peace that had not happened in ten years. El Greco set the artwork outside Toledo giving the ancient tale a contemporary context and unique interpretation. Though Laocoön and his two sons’ fates are sealed, the artist captures a unified centrifugal movement with individualized figures in bare-faced struggle after exercising their prudential judgment that is witnessed by dispassionate onlookers as if in a dream.
Laocoön and His Sons, 1st CE?, marble, 242 cm high, Vatican Museums, Vatican City. The classical marble sculpture was unearthed in 1506 and housed in the Belvedere in the Vatican. Its discovery aroused great excitement in the Renaissance art world and numerous copies were made. El Greco’s painted extrapolation was taking this passion of classical suffering to the level of one’s own modern synthetic invention where the colorful sensation of upheaval is dynamic. PHOTO: “Laocoön and His Sons” by JuanMa is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1614. Opening of the Fifth Seal Metropolitan Museum of Art
This painting depicts a dramatic passage from the Bible’s Book of Revelation (6:9–11), where the souls of martyred saints cry out to God for justice while receiving white robes. The ecstatic figure on the left is Saint John the Evangelist, gesturing toward the heavens.
This piece represents the absolute peak of El Greco’s late, highly abstract Mannerism. Its radical distortion of human anatomy, chaotic drapery, and emotional intensity had a profound, direct influence on 20th-century modern art. In fact, Pablo Picasso spent months studying this exact canvas in Paris before painting his groundbreaking Cubist masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
SOURCES:
El Greco, Leo Bronstein, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New York, 1990. El Greco of Toledo, Jonathan Brown, William B. Jordan, Richard L. Kagan, Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, Little, Brown, Boston. 1982. El Greco, David Davies, National Gallery Company, London, 2003. Mythology Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, Edith Hamilton, Grand Central Publishing, New York and Boston (originally published in 1942).
On November 5, 1963, President John F. Kennedy reminded his fellow Americans of the detailed guarantees of individual liberty found in the Bill of Rights that “perhaps we take for granted but which we are guaranteed in the United States Constitution…” “President John F. Kennedy” by U.S. Embassy New Delhi is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.
In a letter dated September 24, 1963, Lawrence Speiser (1923-1991), Director of the Washington D.C. Office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) expressed his encouragement and support to the idea of the President of The United States addressing the nation in that auspicious time and place to commemorate that year’s U.S. Bill of Rights week. The Bill of Rights are the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution that were created on September 25, 1789 and ratified by the states on December 15, 1791. As the president listed in his remarks, they guarantee individual rights and liberties to every citizen including “freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right of assembly and petition, the right of trial by jury, the right to be secure in one’s own home, the protection of due process of law and private property and public trials, and many other things…” President Kennedy agreed to make a two-minute movie trailer for national showing on television and in theaters during “Bill of Rights Week” to be held that year from December 15 to 21.
In his letter, the ACLU Director in Washington, D.C. acknowledged the important relevance of the Bill of Rights in his day as it was when originally written and adopted. Just months since President Kennedy’s June 11, 1963 Civil Rights speech to the nation (https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/televised-address-to-the-nation-on-civil-rights – retrieved October 26, 2024) which advocated a fundamental support of the civil rights movement for Black Americans, and less than one month since the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the National Mall, ACLU Director Speiser pointed out to Kennedy’s Press Secretary in his letter the significance of the Bill of Rights to these actions: “Certainly the entire civil rights movement today for fair and equal treatment for Negroes has demonstrated the importance of basic freedoms of speech, press, religion and assembly as well as due process of law in attaining that ideal. The August 28th “March on Washington” was a massive demonstration in the time-honored tradition of a peaceable assembly to petition the government for a redress of grievance.”
On November 5, 1963, President John F. Kennedy recorded a short speech for Bill of Rights Day, which is celebrated on December 15. The speech was filmed at the request of the Council of Motion Picture Organizations and was distributed to theaters across the country.
President Kennedy’s remarks from the Oval Office were filmed on November 5, 1963. They were to be broadcast nationwide in December 1963. A little over two weeks after Kennedy made these remarks, the 46-year-old president was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. In President Kennedy’s remarks on Bill of Rights Day he related the history of how the document came to be created and formed: “After the Constitution was written it was felt that while this was an extraordinary document it did not provide the kind of guarantees for our individual liberties that a free country required. Therefore, under the leadership of James Madison, the first 10 amendments were adopted to the Constitution. We call them the Bill of Rights.“
James Madison (1751-1836), who became the 4th president of the U.S. for two terms starting in 1808, introduced the Bill of Rights on June 8, 1789. His amendments contained numerous restrictions on the federal government and would protect, among other things, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the right to peaceful assembly. While most of his proposed amendments were drawn from the ratifying conventions, Madison was largely responsible for proposals to guarantee freedom of the press, protect property from government seizure, and ensure jury trials. President John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, cited Madison in his remarks to the nation on November 5, 1963. “4 James Madison” by US Department of State is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.
The U.S. Bill of Rights comprises the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution adopted in 1791. The Bill of Rights specifically adds to the Constitution specific and detailed guarantees of personal freedoms and rights, clear limitations on the government’s power in judicial and other proceedings, and explicit declarations that all powers not specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states or the people. “The Bill of Rights” by eugevon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
President Kennedy pointed to the document’s profound meaning and relevance in the life of the nation – “We, The People.” Despite, or because of, the many struggles in the nation’s history, the Bill of Rights had proved vital and inseparable to the people in America – and mankind – in their guarantee of the sort of life its citizens seek to live and lead. “My fellow American citizens,” Kennedy said, “…They are the most extraordinary and detailed guarantees of individual liberty that any people on earth now possess. Because of the Bill of Rights, we are guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right of assembly and petition, the right of trial by jury, the right to be secure in one’s own home, the protection of due process of law and private property and public trials, and many other things that perhaps we take for granted but which we are guaranteed in the United States Constitution…”
FEATURE Image: Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598, oil on canvas, 56 ¾ x 76 ¾” 145 x 195cm Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. https://barberinicorsini.org/opera/giuditta-e-oloferne/ – retrieved October 12, 2024.
Viewed chronologically, Caravaggio’s career reveals the emergence of a radically new artistic vision in which light, shadow, emotion, and everyday reality transformed both religious and secular painting, altering the course of European art around 1600.
Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630), Portrait of Caravaggio, c. 1621/25, red and white chalk on blue paper, 23.4 x 16.3 cm, Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence.
INTRODUCTION.
The chalk portrait above is probably the most faithful likeness of Caravaggio. Born Michelangelo Merisi in 1571, Caravaggio became an influential figure in Italian and European art in and well after his lifetime. He revolutionized painting by his theatrical use of light, dramatic narrative, and the naturalistic physical depiction of everyday people. His depiction of figures in historical narrative using dramatic interplay of light and shadow called chiaroscuro along with its naturalistic composition was further modernized in its scenes’ inclusion of the emotional and psychological human state. These artistic qualities were admired and emulated by many young European artists going forward into the balance of the seventeenth century.
Caravaggio came to Rome around 1592 from Lombardy, where he was influenced by the works of Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (c.1480-1548), Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480-1557), Romanino (c.1484-1566) and Moretto (c. 1498-1554?). For a while he worked in the workshop of the leading late mannerist Giuseppe Cesari (1568-1640), but soon broke away from the established course in Roman-Florentine artistic mannerism. His completely new approach of intense realism and chiaroscuro — that is, dramatic use of light and darkness to situate a scene – made him the “master of darkness” and completely revolutionized art in Rome around 1600. Along with Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio, was one of the progenitors of 17th century painting.
Caravaggio’s Il Fruttaiuolo (“Boy with a Basket of Fruit”) presents a remarkable contrast of the detailed, colorful, and sensuous depiction of fruits of the season and the refined and delicate innocence of an adolescent boy holding its basket. The placid scene of typical everyday life is enhanced by an expressive and careful execution. The model was Caravaggio’s friend, Sicilian painter Mario Minniti, at about 16 years old. According to Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613-1696) who included Caravaggio in his Lives of the Artists, the artist learned “to paint flowers and fruit so well imitated that everybody came to learn from him how to create the beauty that is so popular today.”
Carlo Maratta (1625-1713), Portrait of Gian Pietro Bellori who was Caravaggio’s most important biographer. Other early biographies of Caravaggio’s life were written by his doctor, Giulio Mancini (1559-1630) and by Giovanni Baglione (1566-1643), a rival artist.
Caravaggio’s Il Bacchino Malato (“The Young Sick Bacchus”), also known as Bacchino malato (“The Sick Bacchus”) or Autoritratto in veste di Bacco (“The Self-Portrait as Bacchus”), is an early self-portrait by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, dated between 1593 and 1594. The artwork dates from Caravaggio’s first years in Rome when he moved to the Eternal City from his native Milan in 1592. The painting was in the collection of Giuseppe Cesari (1568-1640), Caravaggio’s early employer. In 1607 it was confiscated from Cesari by the Pope in exchange for the Italian mannerist’s freedom following an illegal firearms charge. The pope gifted it to his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577-1633), together with the Boy Peeling Fruit and Boy with a Basket of Fruit (“Il Fruttaiuolo“).
The painting is a realist portrait of a young man displaying the typical attributes of Bacchus, the god of drunkenness. The sitter is turned to the viewer in a three-quarter pose, holding in his hands a bunch green grapes held next to his ailing greenish complexion. The sitter has been identified as the artist since it is documented that he was in the Ospedale della Consolazione in Rome around this time for undefined reasons. This interpretation provides the origin for the artwork’s title.
Giuseppe Cesari, Self-portrait, 1640, Accademia di San Luca. Cesari was Caravaggio’s first employer and in possession of The Young Sick Bacchus that was confiscated by the pope.
Ottavio Leoni, Portrait of Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The sitter was not only the pope’s nephew and a Cardinal in the Catholic Church but the recipient of early Caravaggio paintings by gift. Such a gift was not at random: the cardinal’s growing art collection, including Caravaggio and Bernini, formed the basis of the Villa Borghese in Rome.
According to Giulio Mancini, Caravaggio painted The Fortune-Teller for a proverbial song while staying with Archbishop Fantino Petrignani (1577-1601). By 1620 when Mancini was writing, the painting was owned by Roman art collector and Catholic prelate Alessandro Vittrici (d. 1650). Later (1657) it was in the collection of Catholic Cardinal Camillo Francesco Maria Pamphili (1622-1666) who sent it with Bernini (1598-1680) to Paris as a gift to Louis XIV.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), cardsharps,1594/95, oil on canvas, 37 1/16 x 51 9/16 in. (94.2 x 130.9 cm), Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. https://kimbellart.org/collection/ap-198706 – retrieved October 18, 2024.
Playing the game of primero the player at left is oblivious to a bearded cardsharp who uses his gloved fingers to signal to the other player the content of the cards. The other cheater is reaching for a hidden card from his pants behind his back. Caravaggio’s composition is novel with a naturalistic treatment of the figures whose distinct expressions and gestures convey a realistic and hard drama of being cheated and cheating. This painting was owned and stamped by Cardinal del Monte and in his inventory of 1627 following his death. It had been lost for almost a century when it was discovered in a European private collection and purchased by the Kimbell in 1987.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Martha and Mary Magdalene, c. 1598 Detroit Institute of Arts.
“Caravaggio helped to popularize half-length religious paintings like this, made for private collectors rather than for public church settings. His greatest innovation was in depicting biblical characters as if they belonged to contemporary Roman society, basing them on studio models and dressing them in 17th-century attire, as he does here.” https://www.artic.edu/articles/1071/caravaggio-s-dramatic-life-and-paintings – retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Musicians, 1595/96, oil on canvas, 36 ¼ x 46 5/8” (92.1 x 118.4 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435844 – retrieved October 10, 2024.
The Musicians, painted by Caravaggio and now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte (1549–1627), one of Rome’s most influential patrons of the arts. Conceived as an allegory of music—signaled by the presence of Cupid in the background—it is equally a portrait of contemporary musical practice, featuring individualized sitters. Among them is Caravaggio himself, second from the right, offering one of his rare youthful self-portraits.
During the Counter‑Reformation, the Catholic Church actively promoted a revival of music, and Cardinal del Monte was at the center of this cultural movement. At his residence, the Palazzo Madama, he hosted composers, rehearsals, and experiments in progressive musical forms, especially the emerging solo vocal style that departed from older polyphonic traditions. The Musicians was designed specifically for the Cardinal’s music room, its subject and atmosphere echoing the live performances that took place there.
In keeping with Caravaggio’s modernizing approach, the figures are not idealized classical types but real young men posed in quasi‑antique white robes. The self‑portrait—directly engaging the viewer—shows the artist holding a cornetto, a popular wind instrument of the period. Caravaggio also employs a spatial device familiar in later eighteenth‑century art: the prominently placed violin and open music manuscript in the immediate foreground. These objects project into the viewer’s space, drawing the spectator into the scene as an implied participant.
Ottavio Leoni, Francesco Maria del Monte, 1616.
Born in Venice of a Tuscan aristocratic family, Cardinal del Monte was an important connoisseur of the arts. Four centuries later his fame rests on his early patronage of Caravaggio and an art collection which provides detailed provenance for many important works of the period. Del Monte was the single most influential force in Caravaggio’s life. Between 1595 and 1601, the Catholic cardinal became not only the painter’s primary patron but his intellectual mentor, legal shield, and diplomatic strategist—an alliance that lifted the volatile outsider into the ranks of Rome’s most sought‑after, and most controversial, artistic prodigies. Their bond was complicated by each’s share of eccentricities, intense legal vulnerabilities, and the uneasy overlap between church politics and the city’s street‑level underworld.
As mentioned, the relationship began when Del Monte purchased The Cardsharps from a local dealer and immediately recognized the raw, disruptive talent behind it. He brought Caravaggio into his official residence, the Palazzo Madama, granting him a stipend, room and board, and a dedicated studio. Within those walls, Caravaggio entered a rarefied world. Del Monte—an intimate friend and protector of Galileo —surrounded himself with mathematicians, natural philosophers, and experimenters in optics. Immersed in this court of scientific inquiry, Caravaggio refined the radical, directional lighting that would become his signature, transforming observation into revelation.
Del Monte also understood that private cabinet pictures could only carry an artist so far. Leveraging his position as a Vatican insider, he secured Caravaggio’s first major public commission: the Contarelli Chapel cycle in San Luigi dei Francesi. It was a turning point—Caravaggio’s explosive debut on the public stage and the moment his reputation as a revolutionary painter crystallized.
But the Cardinal’s protection had limits. Caravaggio’s temperament grew increasingly erratic, his nights spent among gamblers, swordsmen, and fugitives. By 1606, after the fatal brawl with Ranuccio Tomassoni, even Del Monte could no longer shield him. Caravaggio fled Rome under threat of execution, bringing to an abrupt end one of the most fertile and consequential artistic partnerships of the Baroque age.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Lute Player, 1595/96, oil on canvas, 37 x 46 7/8” The Hermitage Leningrad.
The Lute Player was owned by Cardinal del Monte. It was sold to Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-1637), an aristocrat Italian banker, art collector and intellectual, and appeared in his inventory in 1638. Caravaggio’s model for the painting is the same as for The Musicians.
Nicolas Régnier/Niccolò Renieri (1591-1667), Portrait of Vincenzo Giustiniani, c. 1630.
Commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Caravaggio’s St. Catherine of Alexandria presents the saint in the unmistakable likeness of Fillide Melandroni, a well‑known Roman courtesan who played a decisive role in the painter’s artistic and personal life. Young artists routinely turned to women like Fillide for models—respectable women were simply unavailable for such work—and Caravaggio, more than most, transformed these marginalized figures into icons of startling dignity and psychological depth.
Richly robed and kneeling on a cushion, Catherine occupies the canvas with commanding stillness. She rests one hand on the spiked breaking wheel and gently cradles the sword—emblems of her martyrdom—while the dramatic fall of light isolates her against the darkness in Caravaggio’s signature chiaroscuro. The effect is intimate yet monumental: a saint rendered not as an ethereal ideal but as a living woman whose presence feels immediate, almost breathing qualities which would have an immense impact on European art in the 17th century.
Caravaggio heightens this immediacy with a device that would also echo through seventeenth‑century European painting: the saint’s body and attributes press toward the viewer’s space, collapsing the distance between sacred history and the spectator. It is precisely this fusion of realism, theatrical light, and emotional proximity that made works like St. Catherine so influential across the Baroque world.
Detail of above: the face of St. Catherine of Alexandria (Fillide Melandroni).
Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy stands as his earliest known religious composition, and already the hallmarks of his mature style—intimacy, theatrical light, and emotional immediacy—are unmistakable. The subject, Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), the Umbrian mystic famed for his radical poverty and fierce asceticism, often withdrew into solitude for forty‑day fasts, seeking to imitate Christ as literally as Scripture allowed. Medieval tradition holds that, like Christ in the wilderness, Francis was ministered by angels during these periods of spiritual extremity.
Caravaggio seizes on one such moment. In September 1224, on Mount La Verna in central Italy, Francis received the stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ—an experience granted to only a handful of saints. Caravaggio renders the episode with striking restraint: the saint collapses into the arms of an angel, his body slack with awe, while shepherds linger in the obscured background, half‑witnesses to a mystery they cannot fully comprehend. A faint trace of the wound appears beneath the rough folds of Francis’s tunic, a subtle but potent sign of the miracle.
The entire scene is carved out of darkness by Caravaggio’s directional light, a technique shaped by the scientific culture surrounding his patrons. Here, the light does not merely illuminate; it consecrates. It isolates Francis and the angel in a suspended moment of revelation, while the world around them recedes into shadow.
Caravaggio painted the work in Rome for Ottavio Costa (1554–1639), a Genoese banker and discerning collector who became one of his most loyal supporters. Centuries later, in 1943, Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy became the first Caravaggio to enter a public collection in the United States, marking a milestone in the American reception of the Baroque master.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Rest on the Flight to Egypt, c, 1595/98, oil on canvas, 51 ¼ x 63” Galleria Doria- Pamphili, Rome.
La fête champêtre is a musical picnic whose tradition originated in Italy. Caravaggio’s composition is lyrical and complicated. As it is in the setting of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt in Matthew’s Gospel, the characters are dressed humbly accompanied by the presence of an angel.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Boy Bitten By A Lizard, 1596/97, oil on cavas, 27 ½ 2 22 3/8”, The National Gallery, London.
Detail of above.
Mancini relates that Caravaggio painted the subject when staying with an old Catholic prelate named Pandolfo Pucci. By the end of his residence Caravaggio nicknamed his temporary benefactor Monsignor Insalata, or “Mister Salad,” for the pittance of solid food he served his artist boarder. The mock heroic painting may be allegorical with the lizard conveying its traditional meaning of lust or death joined to cherries symbolic of love and roses that of sexually transmitted disease — and warning of all three. see – https://www.britannica.com/biography/Caravaggio/First-apprenticeships-in-Rome-Pucci-Cesari-and-Petrigiani – retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Bacchus, c. 1597, oil on canvas, 37 3/8 x 33 ½”, Uffizi, Florence.
Detail of above.
Cardinal del Monte commissioned it from Caravaggio for a Medici. Detail of above.
Commissioned by his principal patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Caravaggio’s Bacchus was presented as a diplomatic gift to Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici to mark his son’s wedding—a gesture that secured the painting’s place in the Medici collections for centuries. Today it stands as a cornerstone of early Baroque art, celebrated for its audacious rejection of idealized Renaissance classicism in favor of a startlingly earthbound realism.
Instead of a radiant, godlike deity, Caravaggio gives us a working‑class Roman youth—almost certainly his friend and frequent model Mario Minniti—costumed as the god of wine. Any pretense of antiquity is deliberately dismantled. Bacchus reclines not on a marble couch but on a striped mattress folded to imitate a Roman triclinium. His white “toga” is nothing more than a contemporary bedsheet, loosely draped over his body. The effect is both intimate and unsettling: a classical god rendered as a boy you might meet in the streets of Rome, invited into myth by costume alone.
The lower half of the canvas deepens the painting’s moral tension. Caravaggio arranges a sumptuous still life—apples, grapes, figs, a carafe of wine—but it is also a vanitas. The apples are bruised and worm‑eaten, the grapes overripe, the leaves already curling toward decay. This quiet rot serves as a memento mori, a reminder that youth, beauty, and sensual pleasure are as fleeting as the fruit that embodies them. Caravaggio’s realism becomes a form of philosophy.
Despite its current fame, Bacchus nearly vanished from history. After the fall of the Medici dynasty, the painting was relegated to a dark storage room in the Uffizi reserves—unframed, uncatalogued, and obscured beneath yellowed varnish. It remained forgotten until 1913, when art historians rediscovered and authenticated it as an irreplaceable treasure of the Baroque.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, 1597, oil on stucco, about 9/9”” x 5’11” Villa Ludovisi, Rome. https://villaludovisi.org/ – retrieved October 12, 2024.
The building and grounds of Villa Ludovisi in Rome, and their rich artwork, includes masterpiece frescoes by Guercino (1591-1666) and other leading lights of the 17th century Bolognese school. Caravaggio’s Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto is his only known oil painting on plaster. Cardinal de Monte purchased the villa and took up residence there in 1596. The cardinal sold it to the Ludovisi in 1621. Bellori relates that the subject matter for the fresco of these gods was to express the cardinal’s interest in medicinal chemistry (today’s pharmaceuticals).
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598, oil on canvas, 56 ¾ x 76 ¾” 145 x 195cm Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. https://barberinicorsini.org/opera/giuditta-e-oloferne/ – retrieved October 12, 2024.
Commissioned by Ottavio Costa, one of Caravaggio’s most loyal Roman patrons, the painting passed through several prominent Roman families before entering the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in 1970. Its subject is the famous episode from the Book of Judith, a Biblical tale of courage, seduction, and divine deliverance that had long captured the Christian imagination.
Judith—beautiful, eloquent, and revered in her community—is a widow living in the besieged city of Bethulia, threatened with destruction by the Assyrian general Holofernes. Because he is captivated by her beauty, Judith is granted unusual freedom within the enemy camp. She joins Holofernes at a banquet in his tent, where he drinks himself into oblivion. As the text puts it, “Holofernes, charmed by her, drank a great quantity of wine, more than he had ever drunk on any day since he was born” (Judith 12:20).
Once the attendants withdraw, Judith seizes her moment. The biblical account describes the scene with stark intensity: she stands beside the general’s bed and prays silently for strength, saying: “O Lord, God of all might, in this hour look graciously on the work of my hands for the exaltation of Jerusalem. Now is the time for aiding your heritage and for carrying out my design to shatter the enemies who have risen against us” (Judith 13:4–5). Taking Holofernes’ own sword from the bedpost, she grasps his hair, invokes the God of Israel, and strikes twice, severing his head. She then rolls his body aside and hands the severed head to her maid, who conceals it in a food bag before the two women slip back into the night (Judith 13:4–10).
Caravaggio chooses the exact instant when violence erupts—his first painting to depict action with such visceral, kinetic force. The scene unfolds like a frieze suspended in time: Judith leaning forward with grim resolve, her maid assisting with practiced efficiency, and Holofernes recoiling in shock as the blade bites into his neck. The theatrical light isolates the figures against darkness, heightening the sense of immediacy and moral gravity.
This painting marks a turning point in Caravaggio’s career. With Judith Beheading Holofernes, he demonstrates not only his mastery of chiaroscuro but also his ability to transform a biblical narrative into a moment of raw human drama—one that reverberated across the Baroque world.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini, c. 1603, Private Collection, Firenze. Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini (1568-1644) became the future Pope Urban VIII whose reign began in 1623.
The words of Christ, who is there, have been spoken. But now time is suspended. How will Matthew reply? Christ is calling him. Do I go or not? Do I follow him or not? These paintings are completely dramatic. Caravaggio uses natural light but turns it into an astonishing symbol of divine illumination.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, 10’7 1/2 “ x 11’ 2” Contarelli Chapel, Church of Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.
Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600), a monumental oil on canvas measuring 10’7½” × 11’2” (322 × 340 cm), occupies the left wall of the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Commissioned as his first major public work when the artist was 28 years old, it quickly became a defining masterpiece of the Baroque—an image that rewired the expectations of religious art for an entire generation.
Caravaggio stages the biblical moment described in Matthew 9:9—Christ summoning the tax collector Levi (Matthew) to discipleship—not in a distant, idealized past but in a dark, contemporary Roman tavern, thick with shadow. The sacred enters the profane unexpectedly.
The composition unfolds in two distinct worlds. Around the counting table sit Matthew and his companions, absorbed in their unseemly gains, dressed in sumptuous late‑16th‑century velvet doublets, feathered hats, and sidearms—figures of worldly wealth and casual corruption. Into this scene step Christ and Saint Peter, barefoot and clothed in rough robes. Their presence feels out of sorts, yet the room shifts around them.
A single, razor‑sharp beam of light—Caravaggio’s signature tenebrism —enters from the upper right, cutting diagonally across the darkness. It travels in parallel to Christ’s extended hand, making the light itself a metaphor for divine grace and spiritual awakening penetrating a den of exploitation and greed. As the light strikes the faces at the table—some oblivious, others looking up startled— it settles fully on Matthew, who points to himself in shock.
In Counter‑Reformation Rome, the message was unmistakable. Caravaggio’s painting declared that the divine could break into the most ordinary, compromised corners of daily life—that salvation could arrive unannounced, even in a backroom thick with schemes of greed. It was a psychological jolt to the city’s viewers, a reminder that grace was not confined to altars or idealized visions but could happen anywhere to anyone, at any moment.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, 1602, oil on canvas, 9’8 1/2 “ x 6’ 2 ½” Contarelli Chapel, Church of Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.
This first version of The Inspiration of St. Matthew by Caravaggio was rejected because the evangelist was considered too crude and the angel too familiar. The painting was destroyed during the Fall of Berlin in 1945 and known by photographs.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, 10’7 1/2 “ x 11’ 3” Contarelli Chapel, Church of Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.
Permanently installed on the right wall of the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew erupts across the canvas in a chaotic, centrifugal burst of bodies and motion. The composition radiates outward from a single, horrifying fulcrum—the moment of the apostle’s death—captured with explosive, almost cinematic intensity. With this work, Caravaggio established himself as the unrivaled master of psychological violence in early Baroque art.
The narrative follows the traditional account in the Golden Legend. Saint Matthew, having publicly condemned King Hirticus of Ethiopia for lusting after his own niece, the consecrated virgin Iphigenia, is murdered in retaliation. Caravaggio distills the entire hagiography into one blinding instant: the assassin, a half‑nude royal soldier, lunges forward to strike the fatal blow as Matthew collapses, bleeding, onto the altar steps.
Caravaggio pushes tenebrism to its outer limit. The saint lies sprawled on the ground, his arms flung open in a gesture that hovers between defense and surrender. The executioner grips Matthew’s wrist, towering above him with a drawn sword, his face twisted in a scream of fury. Around them, witnesses recoil in terror, their bodies spiraling outward as if blasted by the force of the violence.
Yet amid the earthly chaos, the supernatural breaks through. A cloud gathers above the altar, and an angel descends—not to rescue Matthew, but to complete the drama of martyrdom. Leaning down from heaven, the angel extends the palm of victory, placing it into the saint’s wounded hand at the very moment the assassin’s sword arcs downward.
The intersection of these three elements—the angel’s arm, the soldier’s blade, and Matthew’s reaching hand—forms a powerful diagonal axis, a visual declaration that divine salvation overrides mortal execution. In this collision of heaven and earth, Caravaggio transforms a brutal killing into a moment of transcendent destiny.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Medusa (detail), 1600/01, oil on canvas mounted on a convex poplar-wood shield, Uffizi, Florence.
Caravaggio’s Medusa is painted on an actual parade shield.
Caravaggio’s Medusa (1600/01), now in the Uffizi Gallery, is one of the most astonishing feats of early Baroque engineering and psychological terror. Painted in oil on canvas and mounted onto a convex poplar shield, the work fuses myth, optics, and raw anatomy into a single, unnervingly lifelike apparition. Commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte and presented as a diplomatic gift to Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici, it was proudly displayed in the Medici Armory as both a marvel of craftsmanship and a symbol of dynastic power.
Because the surface curves outward, Caravaggio had to deploy advanced foreshortening and perspectival distortion to counteract the shield’s bulge. He subtly elongates Medusa’s cheeks and distorts her jawline so that, when viewed head‑on, the surface appears flat—or even concave—a technical sleight of hand that would have impressed both artists and scientists in Del Monte’s Roman circle.
Caravaggio captures the exact, electric instant between life and death. Perseus has already struck, yet Medusa’s nervous system still fires. Her face becomes a study in catastrophic realization: eyes bulging with shock and fury, brow knotted in disbelief, mouth wrenched open in a silent, blood‑freezing scream. True to his radical naturalism, Caravaggio did not invent stylized serpents; he studied real vipers, painting them mid‑coil, mid‑strike, writhing in panic as their host dies beneath them. From the severed neck, bright arterial blood spurts outward in jagged, hyper‑realistic streams.
To deepen the mythic resonance, Caravaggio anchors the work in the classical story as told by Ovid. According to the Metamorphoses, Perseus could only approach Medusa safely by looking at her reflection in the polished bronze shield given to him by Athena. By painting Medusa’s head directly onto a shield, Caravaggio transforms the viewer into Perseus himself—the one who sees the monster only through a mediated surface. The painting becomes a weapon, a mirror, and a mythic reenactment all at once.
For modern viewers, the shield reads as pure horror: a severed head frozen in the moment of its final scream. But for the Medici, it carried a very different charge. Medusa—whose gaze could immobilize armies—became a potent emblem of political dominion, a symbol of a ruler whose power could paralyze enemies before they even approached.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Basket of fruit (canestra di frutta), c. 1600/01, oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 25 3/8, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. https://www.ambrosiana.it/opere/canestra-di-frutta/ – retrieved October 13, 2024.
Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit is the only autonomous still life by the artist known to survive, though his figure paintings are filled with exquisitely rendered fruit that function as symbolic subtexts. Across his oeuvre, these arrangements vary widely in species, ripeness, and composition, yet they share a distinctive naturalism—blemishes, curling leaves, and the quiet drama of decay rendered with almost scientific precision.
The painting belonged to Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), cousin of Saint Charles Borromeo and, like him, Archbishop of Milan. A towering figure of the Counter‑Reformation, Federico championed religious art as a tool of pastoral instruction, yet he was also an unusually passionate collector of still life, a genre often dismissed as minor. Whether he commissioned Caravaggio’s painting or received it as a gift remains uncertain, but he valued it enough to bequeath it in his will to the Ambrosiana in Milan, the scholarly gallery and library he co‑founded in 1618.
The basket itself is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with Caravaggio’s work. A nearly identical arrangement appears in the Supper at Emmaus in London’s National Gallery, painted around the same time. In both works, the fruit leans precariously over the edge, as if about to tumble into the viewer’s space—a hallmark of Caravaggio’s desire to collapse the boundary between the painting and the viewer.
Cardinal Borromeo lived in Rome from 1586 to 1601, precisely the years when Caravaggio’s reputation was rising with meteoric speed. During this period, he became deeply familiar with the painter’s radical naturalism. For a prelate devoted to both doctrinal clarity and the beauty of the created world, Caravaggio’s still life—so attentive to the fragile, transient nature of living things—would have held profound appeal.
Giulio Cesare Procaccini ((1574–1625), Cardinal-Archbishop Federico Borromeo, 1610, Museo diocesano di Milano.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Supper at Emmaus, c. 1600/01, oil on canvas, 54 ¾ x 76 ¾” The National Gallery, London.
Caravaggio’s Roman career accelerated rapidly after the triumph of the Contarelli Chapel commissions. Almost immediately he was engaged for another prestigious project in Santa Maria del Popolo, decorating the Cerasi Chapel. Although these were technically private commissions, their placement in major Roman churches ensured that Caravaggio’s work circulated before a broad public. By 1600 he had become one of the most sought‑after painters in the city, attracting both established patrons and ambitious newcomers such as the wealthy Mattei brothers, prominent Roman bankers. For one of them, in the family palazzo, Caravaggio produced The Supper at Emmaus (1601), a work executed at the apex of his early fame and artistic maturity.
What distinguishes this painting is not only Caravaggio’s reliance on live models and his anatomically precise naturalism, but his increasingly sophisticated deployment of light as a bearer of meaning rather than mere aesthetic embellishment. Instead of depicting the journey to Emmaus, Caravaggio selects the climactic instant at the supper table when the risen Christ blesses and breaks the bread and the disciples suddenly recognize him—just before he vanishes from their sight. Light becomes the visual analogue of recognition itself: a revelatory force that cuts through the scene with theological and psychological clarity.
Caravaggio dramatizes this moment with unprecedented immediacy. One disciple thrusts himself forward, his elbow projecting into the viewer’s space; the other flings his arms wide in astonished realization. Meanwhile the innkeeper, who has not grasped the miracle unfolding before him, remains enveloped in the darker register of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, his face still in shadow. The contrast is not incidental: it marks the divide between those who have entered the “light” of recognition and those who remain outside it.
The composition’s theatricality intensifies this effect. Caravaggio’s half‑length, tightly cropped figures press against the picture plane, collapsing the distance between sacred narrative and beholder. Everyday objects—fruit basket, tablecloth, the disciples’ garments—jut outward with near sculptural immediacy, creating a sensuous, almost tactile realism that anchors the miracle in the viewer’s own world. The result is a painting that is simultaneously grounded in contemporary Roman life and elevated by a supratemporal luminosity that signals divine presence.
Yet the work was not universally admired. Critics objected that Caravaggio’s Christ looked too youthful and unbearded—“a man posing as Christ who certainly was not Christ,” as Bellori complained in 1672. Caravaggio got the criticism though Michaelangelo Buonarroti did the same thing in the pope’s Sistine Chapel. Others scoffed that the fruit on the table could not have been in season during the post‑Easter episode. Such criticisms, however, reveal the very innovation of Caravaggio’s method: his commitment to inventing a world that is believable precisely because it is rooted in the observable, even when that realism unsettles traditional expectations. Unlike earlier artists who idealized sacred history, Caravaggio insisted on painting from life, even in a religious history painting intended for private devotion.
The Supper at Emmaus thus exemplifies Caravaggio’s distinctive achievement: a fusion of radical naturalism and spiritual intensity that collapses historical distance, bringing the sacred into the viewer’s present while simultaneously lifting the everyday into a realm of revelation.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Conversion of Saint Paul, 100/01, oil on canvas, 90 ½ x 70” Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria de Popolo, Rome.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Crucifixion of St. Peter, 1600/01, oil on canvas, 90 ½ x70” Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria de Popolo, Rome.
The chapel was purchased by Tiberio Cerasi (1544-1601) in 1600 who worked as Treasurer-General for Pope Clement VIII. Cerasi had the chapel redone by Carlo Maderno (1556-1629). In 1601 Cerasi hired Caravaggio to paint The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion of St. Paul. Notably, his paintings’ first versions were rejected. The final paintings were installed in 1605 and the chapel consecrated in 1506. The Assumption of Mary over the altar was painted at the same time by Annibale Caracci. See – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerasi_Chapel– retrieved October 14, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601/02, oil on canvas, 42 1/8 x 57 ½” 118 × 156.5 cm Neues Palais, Potsdam.
Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas presents the New Testament encounter (John 20:27–31) with uncompromising naturalism and the stark drama of chiaroscuro. The painting’s later history is as turbulent as its subject. Originally owned by the powerful Giustiniani family, it was sold under financial duress and purchased in 1815 from a Paris dealer by King Frederick William III of Prussia (1770–1840). The king intended to assemble a public art museum for Berlin, yet this work—astonishingly—was initially judged “lower quality,” perhaps because Caravaggio offers no visible markers of Christ’s divinity. Instead, he renders the risen Christ with the same corporeal immediacy as the apostles, a choice that unsettled early nineteenth‑century connoisseurs.
Of the five Caravaggios acquired by the Prussian monarch, only three ultimately entered the museum collection, including Cupid as Victorious at the Gemäldegalerie. The Incredulity of Saint Thomas was instead hung in the Berlin Palace, and later, in 1856, installed in the picture gallery at Sanssouci, where its psychological intensity found a more appreciative audience.
Caravaggio’s interpretation of the biblical scene is uncompromisingly direct. Christ guides Thomas’s hand into the wound in his side, the gesture rendered with surgical clarity. The apostles crowd around, their faces lit by a single, directional beam that isolates the moment of recognition. There is no halo, no ethereal glow—only flesh, shadow, and the shock of belief forced into being. Caravaggio transforms a theological lesson into a moment of tactile revelation, collapsing the distance between viewer and miracle. https://brandenburg.museum-digital.de/object/11898 – retrieved October 11, 2024.
Frederick William III ruled Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars and, while shy and quiet by nature, reluctantly participated in the coalition against Napoleon in the German campaign of 1813. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, he took part in the Congress of Vienna and helped established the new postwar order in Europe. For the remainder of his reign, Frederick William III set about reforming Prussian institutions and centralizing royal control.
Youth With A Ram was painted for Ciriaco Mattei (d.1614), one of the foremost art collectors of his time, and given to Cardinal del Monte by his son before his death. Mattei also commissioned Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus and The Taking of Christ.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Taking of Christ, 1602, oil on canvas, 133.5 cm × 169.5 cm (52.6 in × 66.7 in) National Gallery of Ireland. On loan from the Society of Jesus, Leeson Street., Dublin.
The painting includes a self portrait of Caravaggio. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1603, oil on canvas, 41 x 53 1/8” Uffizi, Florence.https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/sacrifice-of-isaac – retrieved October 12, 2024.
The painting illustrates the Old Testament story in which God subjected Abraham to an extraordinary test of obedience by ordering him to sacrifice his only son Isaac (Genesis 22: 1-19). Caravaggio faithfully depicts the crucial moment of this dramatic story, when old Abraham, at the very moment he is about to immolate a screaming Isaac, is blocked by an angel sent by the Lord.
The Deposition, considered one of Caravaggio’s greatest masterpieces, was commissioned by Girolamo Vittrice for his family chapel in Santa Maria in Vallicella (Chiesa Nuova) in Rome. In 1797 it was included in the group of works transferred to Paris in execution of the Treaty of Tolentino. After its return in 1817 it became part of Pius VII’s Pinacoteca.
Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, DETAIL The Madonna of Loreto (The Madonna of the Pilgrims), circa1603-1604, Oil on canvas, 8’ 8 ½ x 4’ 11”, Cavalletti Chapel, Church of Sant’ Agostino, Rome.Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, The Madonna of Loreto (The Madonna of the Pilgrims), circa1603-1604, Oil on canvas, 8’ 8 ½ x 4’ 11”, Cavalletti Chapel, Church of Sant’ Agostino, Rome.
The painting has been in the Cavalletti chapel in Rome since it was installed at the end of 1604.
Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, Ecce Homo, c. 1604-05, oil on canvas, 50 ½ x 40 ½” Civic Collection, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa.
The painting was made for a competition with Domenico Passignano (1559-1638) and Lodovico Cardi (“Il Cigoli”) (1559-1613) soon after Il Cigoli first arrived in Rome. Il Cigoli won the compettion and the whereabouts of Caravaggio’s painting until it arrived to Genoa is uncertain. It may be that Caravaggio himself took it to Genoa when he visited there in 1605.
Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, Saint John the Baptist, c. 1605, oil on canvas, 68 1/4 x 52” Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
The painting was made for Ottavio Costa who then had a copy made for his chapel in Liguria while the original was lost. It resurfaced in the mid 19th century in England and was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in the 1950s. Caravaggio reveals the qualities of the saint by his expression and pose. He is sober and downcast with a tense energy as his pose manifests the monumentality of the prophets on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. With his staff he quietly and contemplatively conveys zeal, passion and vitality. There is a sense of his singleness of purpose, joined even to a little madness, as a man driven by making straight the paths of the Lord.
The painting was bought by King Charles I of England (1600-1649) in 1637. After the monarch’s defeat in the English Civil War (1642-1645), he was imprisoned and executed for high treason in 1649. During the Commonwealth (1649-1660), the painting was sold in 1651 and recovered at the Restoration. Caravaggio’s painting depicts the call of the very first disciples in the very first New Testament Gospel by Mark: “As he passed by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea; they were fishermen. Jesus said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Then they abandoned their nets and followed him” (Mk 1:16-18). Caravaggio depicts Jesus without a beard as he turns back to invite them to follow him as he moves ahead. Fishermen, Simon Peter holds skewered fish on a stick while Andrew points to himself identifying the object of Jesus’s invitation.
As recently as 1987 this painting came to be attributed to Caravaggio and as the original of this painting’s subject matter. In varying copies of the work the furrow in Christ’s brow is painted faithfully though in this original it is not a painted feature but a canvas fold. There are other design features that, after recent cleaning and conservation, point to a later work of Caravaggio. Many small incisions are present in the artwork’s lower layers of paint that is an uncanny method used by the artist to lay out important points on the canvas for his design. Although the attribution can be argued to the contrary – such as the unusual use of the color blue which Caravaggio saw, according to Bellori, as the “poison of colors” – he did use the color and mostly softened as it is here. Blue, for instance, occurs in the Baptism of Christ (National Gallery of Ireland, c. 1603) and the Annunciation (Nancy, c. 1604). At the Supper at Emmaus (Brera, 1605-6) Christ also wears a robe of softened blue. In its telling broad brushwork, restrained colors, and minimal detail the painting was understood to be a Road to Emmaus painting as discussed by Giulio Mancini and Giovanni Baglione. But these early biographers’ references are likely to the Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery London, 1601). Dated stylistically by its economical, shadowed, and expressive manner, The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew appears to be from the period of 1603-1606. This would be before Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni (c. 1580-1606) in a brawl and fled Rome in May 1606. During the first years of the 17th century, the sensuous surface detail of Caravaggio’s art had become spare, dark and expressive. Further, The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew places half-length figures interacting against a stark background, similar to such paintings as Doubting Thomas (Sanssouci, Potsdam) and the Betrayal of Christ (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), both of 1603. Before this painting reached England, there was a broadly interpreted copy of it that is today in a private collection by Bernardo Strozzi (1582-1644). Strozzi lived and worked in Rome, Genoa and Venice where he may have seen this painting by Caravaggio. When Charles I’s buying agent was later in Italy, he visited the same places as Strozzi had been, except Genoa.
The painting was commissioned in 1605 by members of the powerful archconfraternity of the Palafrenieri who, following the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica, asked the painter for a new work intended to replace an old painting that decorated the altar of their chapel dedicated to St. Anne. Painted within a few months, in April 1606 the work was exhibited and shortly afterwards moved to the nearby church of Sant’Anna dei Palafrenieri where, seen by Scipione Borghese, it was bought by him. For whatever reason the painting was controversial – perhaps the cleavage of the Madonna or the rendering of the nudity of the child – but Scipione Borghese proudly hung it in his own picture gallery. The painting depicts Mary as she crushes a snake – a symbol of sin – at her feet with the help of Jesus and witnessed by Anna, mother of the Virgin.
Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, Saint Jerome writing, 1605/06, oil on canvas, 116 cm x 153 cm, Borghese Gallery, Rome.
According to Bellori, the painting was made by Caravaggio for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The cardinal was not only an avid and refined art collector but one of young Caravaggio’s earliest and greatest admirers recognizing the Lombard’s talent despite personality flaws or lack of connections in Rome. The painting depicts Saint Jerome (c. 340s-420), Doctor of the Church, best known for his translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin as well as his commentaries on the Bible. Caravaggio depicts the priest and confessor writing and studying the Holy Scriptures as a scholar, now in old age, who has dedicated his life as a humanist engaged in the complex translation and exegesis of the Church’s sacred text. The composition is divided into large fields of color in warm tones (the saint’s complexion and reddish mantle) and cold tones (the skull and shroud-like white cloth) with Jerome’s arm outstretched with writing instrument in hand across the picture to symbolically portray the unity of the scholar-saint’s dialogue with these opposites of nature including life and death, past and present. As there are many unfinished details in the painting, the artist’s style points to his rapid execution of the work. https://www.collezionegalleriaborghese.it/opere/san-girolamo – retrieved October 13, 2024.
DETAIL Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Death of The Virgin, c. 1605-1606, oil on canvas, 12’1 ½” x8’, Louvre, Paris.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Death of The Virgin, c. 1605-1606, oil on canvas, 12’1 ½” x8’, Louvre, Paris.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Madonna of the Rosary, c. 1605-1607, oil on canvas, 11’11 ½” x8’ 4”, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
The Madonna of the Rosary (1605-1607) is a monumental work of the Italian Baroque and one of the few large-scale, traditional altarpieces Caravaggio ever completed. Although its original patron remains unknown, the commission may have come from the powerful Colonna family, who sheltered the artist after he fled to Naples in 1606. Whoever commissioned it ultimately rejected the painting. It was taken to Naples and sold to Flemish art dealers, who transported it to Antwerp. There, a committee of artists, including Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, purchased it for St. Paul’s Dominican Church.
The painting unfolds as both visual drama and Catholic Counter-Reformation theology, collapsing heaven and earth into a single charged moment. High above, the Madonna sits enthroned with the Christ Child as she presents the rosary to Saint Dominic, clad in the black-and-white habit of his order. The rosary serves as heaven’s answer to Dominic’s prayers in the struggle against the thirteenth-century Albigensian heresy. At right stands Saint Peter Martyr, the first canonized martyr of the Dominican Order, elevated to sainthood by Pope Innocent IV only eleven months after his death and even before the canonization of the order’s founder, Saint Dominic. To this day, Peter Martyr, the fiery preacher who fought heresy throughout Northern Italy and was murdered by an axe blow to the head in 1252, remains the fastest canonization in Catholic Church history. Gazing directly at the viewer, he points toward the Christ Child, identifying Jesus as the ultimate source of divine grace.
Below, Caravaggio brings sacred history to the world’s barefoot and struggling poor. Kneeling in the dirt, their grimy feet and outstretched hands reach for the rosaries being distributed through Saint Dominic. In the left foreground, a wealthy donor in a black coat and crisp white ruff kneels while looking directly outward, drawing viewers into the drama.
In 1781, the painting was confiscated from St. Paul’s Dominican Church when Emperor Joseph II pressured the Dominicans to surrender, or “donate,” the masterpiece to his imperial collection. Today, it remains one of Caravaggio’s essential late works and a centerpiece of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where its powerful blend of realism, devotion, and theatrical display continues to command attention.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Seven Acts of Mercy, 1606, Oil in canvas, 12’ 9 ½” x 8’ 6 ½” Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples.
The Seven Acts of Mercy altarpiece was painted between September 23, 1606 and January 9, 1607 for which Caravaggio was paid 400 ducats. The commission required that the artist include the figure of the Madonna of the Misericordia and all the acts of mercy in one vertical canvas and whose overall achievement was a first in Italian art.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Salome, 1609/10, oil on canvas, 35 5/8 x 65 ¾” The National Gallery London.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Flagellation, 1607, oil on canvas, 9’ 4 ½” x 6’2” Capodimonte Museum, Naples.
The dramatic play of light and shadow throws into relief the melancholic expression on David’s face and the hauntingly lifelike head of Goliath, creating a palpable sense of guilt and redemption that resonates deeply with the viewer.
The head of Goliath is Caravaggio’s self portrait.
In addition to developing a considerable name as an artist, Caravaggio was a reputably volatile, bad-tempered and violent man. On May 29, 1606 Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight, the cause of which is disputed, though it may have been over a Roman prostitute, Fillide Melandroni who had posed for Caravaggio several times. The capital crime forced Caravaggio to flee to Naples. A report written by the local coroner declared that the male victim died by Caravaggio’s attempt to castrate him, the code on the Roman street meriting it for a man who insulting another man’s woman. Caravaggio became a fugitive from the law though he continued to paint (Supper at Emmaus) and fled to Naples by the end of 1606. In Naples he painted Flagellation and Seven Works of Mercy, among others. He fled further to Malta and then to Sicily where Caravaggio moved from town to town across the island fearing some unnamed retribution. It was presumed that 38-year-old Caravaggio died from syphilis or perhaps malaria or the Malta Fever though there is current speculation the artist may have been murdered in revenge for his crimes by perhaps members of the Tomassoni family or the Royal Knights. see – https://www.italianartsociety.org/2018/05/on-29-may-1606-the-great-italian-baroque-painter-caravaggio-killed-ranuccio-tommasoni-in-rome/ ; https://thecinemaholic.com/ranuccio-tomassoni-caravaggio/– retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Portrait of a Courtesan (Fillide Melandroni), c, 1599. Destroyed Berlin 1945. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Supper at Emmaus,1606, oil on canvas, 141 x 175 cm, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.
Caravaggio’s later Supper at Emmaus in Milan’s Brera Gallery intensifies the drama and imposes greater stylistic discipline compared to the earlier London version painted five years prior. The gestures are more restrained and the palette more muted, allowing the dramatic accents to emerge with heightened clarity despite the overall reduction of detail. Objects are rendered with deliberate precision—the urn angled toward the viewer, the plates catching narrow rims of reflected light—each contributing to the painting’s controlled visual rhetoric.
The composition organizes itself in a semicircular sweep of gestures around the table, rising diagonally from Christ’s head to the sharply profiled disciple and then to the standing figures beyond. The entire scene is suffused with a concentrated, directional illumination that culminates on the face of the risen Christ, reinforcing the painting’s theological and dramatic center.
SOURCE: Brera Milan: Great Museums of the World (Great Museums of the World, volume 14), Newsweek, Inc. & Arnoldo Monadori Editore, 1970, pp. 68-69.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Beheading of St John, 1608, St John’s Co-Cathedral, Valetta, Malta.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), St. Francis of Assisi in Meditation, 1606/07, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Civica Museo ala Ponzone Cremona.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt with his Page, 1606/07, oil on canvas, 195 x 134 cm, Louvre.
The subject was the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta. In exchange for this grand portrait, according to Bellori and Baglione, Caravaggio became a Knight of Malta on an accelerated timetable though soon after the artist fled the island in disgrace.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Burial of Saint Lucy, 1608/9, oil on canvas, 13′ 4 1/2″ x 9′ 10″ 408 x 300 cm, Church of Santa Lucia,Syracuse in deposit at the Galleria Regionale, Palazzo Bellomo, Syracuse, Sicily.
The famous Caravaggio painting depicting the burial of Santa Lucia once hung in the Church of Santa Lucia al Sepolcro, but today is in Siracusa’s Palazzo Bellomo museum. The original church, built as early as the 6th century, was on the site of Saint Lucy’s martyrdom in the early 4th century. Beneath the sanctuary is a vast labyrinth of dark catacombs dating from the 3rd century which have never been completely explored and are closed to the public. Once containing the tomb of the decapitated saint, her remains were relocated to Venice during the Crusades and where they can be found today. This painting was made by Caravaggio between October 1608 in Malta and early 1609 in Sicily in a commission arranged by his old friend painter Mario Minniti. Caravaggio was on the run in Sicily starting in late 1608 when he arrived into Siracusa, and then onto Messina followed by Palermo. In Sicily, the exile Caravaggio painted Resurrection of Lazarus, The Adoration of the Shepherds (Adorazione dei pastori) and Ecce Homo. In late 1609 he returned to Naples and continued painting, including another St. John the Baptist and, his final artwork, The Martyrdom of St. Ursula. In Naples the artist was attacked in the street by four armed men shortly after his arrival where Caravaggio was seriously injured. see – https://www.frommers.com/destinations/syracuse-and-ortygia-island/attractions/santa-lucia-al-sepolcro; https://www.great-sicily.com/post/the-byzantine-era-in-sicily – retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Adorazione dei pastori (The Adoration of the The Shepherds), 1609, oil on canvas, 10′ 3 1/2 ” x 6′ 11″, Messina, Sicily, Museo regionale interdisciplinare.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), La Resurrezione di Lazzaro (The Resurrection of Lazarus), 1609, oil on canvas, 10′ 3 1/2 ” x 6′ 11″, Messina, Sicily, Museo regionale interdisciplinare.
In Malta Caravaggio became a Knight of Malta but got into another violent group brawl where a knight was badly injured. With a warrant put out for his arrest Caravaggio managed to flee to Sicily in October 1608. By December 1608 Caravaggio was found guilty in abstentia and removed from the Maltese order. The commission for this painting came from Giovanni Battista de’ Lazzari, a merchant of Genoese origin who had obtained permission to be buried in the choir chapel of the church of Saints Peter and Paul de’ Pisani (demolished in 1880) in Messina where Camillo de’ Lellis’ religious order, founded in 1591 and dedicated to the care of the sick, had a house. De’Lazzari’s signed contract on December 6, 1608, declared that his new altarpiece would have the Madonna and St. John with saints as its subject. But that was changed to the resurrection of Lazarus (Gospel of John, chapter 11). It is very likely the change was made by De’Lazzari in agreement with the Camillians. According to Susinno, the artwork’s 13 figures were staff members of the hospital where Caravaggio did the painting. see – https://federica90.wixsite.com/emozionearte/post/caravaggio-in-sicilia-la-resurrezione-di-lazzaro – retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Denial of St. Peter,1609/10, oil on canvas, 94 x 125.4 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The Denial of Saint Peter is generally thought to be one of the last pair of artworks by Caravaggio, the other being The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. It was probably finished at Naples in the summer of 1610.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), St. John the Baptist, 1610, oil on canvas, 159 x 124.5 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Caravaggio carried this painting and others sailing from Naples to Rome hoping for a pardon from the pope. Instead, when the desperate artist landed he was arrested and the boat was sent back to Naples with the paintings. Caravaggio died on July 18, 1610 in Porto Ercole. The papal nuncio secured this painting for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. see – https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/caravaggios-martyrdom-of-saintt-ursula/ – retrieved October 15, 2024.
LAST PAINTING.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, oil on canvas, 142 x180 cm, Naples, Galleria di Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano.
Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was painted in the last month of his life. It contains his characteristic and revolutionary chiaroscuro, naturalism, and depiction of psychological and physical emotion. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was commissioned by Genoese art patron Marcantonio Doria. The painting was finished in May and arrived in Genoa in mid-June 1610. Ursula was a venerated but almost completely legendary figure. In typical fashion Caravaggio dispels traditional religious iconography associated with Ursula — a crown, halo, palm branch, the 11,000 virgin martyr companions — for the painful moment in her story when the Barbarian king shoots the arrow into Ursula’s chest that kills her.
Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula marked a watershed in European art. His revolutionary style inspired subsequent generations of painters, such as Artemisia Gentileschi (1593—1651), Giovanni Baglione (1566-1643), and Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), that became known as the Caravaggisti. He also influenced international Baroque artists including Spaniard Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) and Dutchman Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). see – https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/the-martyrdom-of-saint-ursula-caravaggio – retrieved October 15, 2024.
