Caravaggio - The Celebration of a Murderer
May 29 marked the 421st anniversary of seminal artist Michelangelo Caravaggio’s killing of an adversary on a warm Italian evening, not far from his hangout at Rome’s famous Piazza Navona. Rumor has it that the notoriously anti-social Caravaggio was attempting to castrate Ranuccio Tomassoni over the affections of a prostitute named Fillide, who was somewhat of a muse for Caravaggio.
He promptly fled Rome, spent time in Malta, and continued to paint when he wasn’t scuffling with people, attending court, or running from the law.
Though he had a complicated personal life, Caravaggio’s influence on art, theater, photography, and films is arguably one of the most profound of any artist in history.
Articulated by bold, often single light sources, where subjects emerge out of a murky dark background to force viewers to focus on dramatic scenes as conjured by his fevered brain, his style holds an enduring impact on visual arts to this day.
Film schools hold classes where students mimic his lighting style. In my own photography I often channel his memory with my subjects, using single lighting sources while favoring dramatic expression and poses.
Fortunately for him he lived at the ass end of the Renaissance in Italy, having been born in 1571, just about seven years after Michelangelo died, before dying himself after escaping prison and well, there’s a lot to unpack there.
Fortunately, because had he been born and active today, he most assuredly would be canceled, and his artistic contributions would never have seen the light of day. As it is, there are those who try to cancel him retroactively, as they do with other great artists, but as they say, the cat is already out of the bag, and it’s to our benefit.
This legacy of cancel culture will forever be a stain on those who practice it.
Like other art and culture destroyers throughout history – the Spaniards after the conquest of New Spain who eradicated almost all traces of Aztec and Mexican culture, the vandalism of the French Revolution, the suppression of artistic inquiry in Soviet Russia, to name just a few – these modern-day lightweights and cultural Marxists deserve nothing but heaps of scorn, shame, contempt, and humiliation.
One wonders why Caravaggio would fall into the crosshairs of the left, given their fondness of celebrating gays and pedophiles (reportedly Caravaggio wasn’t adverse to initiating his young charges into the ways of eroticism), sex workers (he often used prostitutes like Fillide as models in his paintings), and even other murderers.
Regardless of the motivation, the question remains, should artists or anyone of great achievement be canceled retroactively based on the peculiarities of the morality of the current time?
Turns out, I don’ t know. While I reflexively hold in contempt people who destroy culture and monuments to culture (such as the recent movement to erase the very founders and heroes of the United States), I also celebrated the tearing down of the Joe Paterno statue at Penn State in July 2012.
Joe Paterno, the head coach of the Penn State football team for forty-five years, was the winningest coach in college football, won two national titles, and had five undefeated seasons. If anyone deserved to be remembered for the ages, it was him.
But his lasting legacy will be of covering up information related to his former coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of forty-five counts of child molestation in June of 2012. Sandusky parlayed his connections and influence to start youth programs for at-risk kids, and used those programs to prey on the children. His first report of abuse came against him in 1971. That’s a prolific resume of a serial child molester.
Did taking down Paterno’s statue scratch my itch? Not in the least. I wanted the entire university razed and the earth salted to forever wipe out the stain of what happened on that campus.
Should an entire institution pay for the sins of a few? I had no problem with it. Yet, with a similar scandal concerning the Catholic Church, I thought why condemn an entire institution based on the actions of a few? Despicable as the scandal was, surely the church still can serve as a beacon of salvation for the masses?
There’s zero consistency in my moral position, yet I hold them both strongly.
Beliefs are just lies we tell ourselves to help make sense of a senseless world. Life is a series of contradictions that we organize based on beliefs that we adopt and then make judgments on, to have the contradictions have any sense at all.
One needs to have belief in order to make sense of the world, but beliefs have a tendency to calcify and instead of bringing freedom they can become a straightjacket - nothing, except faith and trust in God, is truly real, and nothing else will bring a ready answer to the impossibility of life.
Does Caravaggio deserve to be canceled? Surely not. Does Joe Paterno? Hell yes. Far from being wishy washy, the answer to many of life’s questions lies in this contradiction.
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