At the end of 2023, the Museum of Art Pudong and the Borghese Gallery in Rome will jointly launch Caravaggio and the Baroque Miracle (car**aggio.).Wonders of the Italian Baroque), as Caravaggio's largest collector, the Borghese Museum and the Museum of Art Pudong have joined hands with five institutions to collect 6 original Caravaggio works and more than 40 works of Baroque artists, making this unprecedented "Baroque miracle" possible.
View view of Caravaggio and Baroque Miracles, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023
The Boy with the Fruit Basket
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi).
c. 1595.
Oil on canvas, 70 x 67 cm
Collection of the Borghese Museum, Rome.
Caravaggio's masterpiece, Boy with Basket of Fruit, created around 1593, is the centerpiece of the exhibition. The work not only reflects the rudiments of Caravaggio's early artistic style, but also reflects the challenges of his Roman career, interpersonal contacts and genius through subtle clues. The naturalistic attitude and treatment of light and shadow that were never seen before are displayed in the painting, revealing Caravaggio's innovation in the art of painting. The painting not only shows his mysterious and unfamiliar technique, but also provides us with a window into his personal life and the artistic ecology of Rome at the time.
View view of Caravaggio and Baroque Miracles, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023
Michelangelo Merisi was born in the small town of Caravaggio in the Lombardy region of Italy, so he was called Caravaggio (Carabaggio) to distinguish him from the sculptor Michelangelo. Lombardy artists are known for their use of realism and strong contrasts of light and shadow, characteristics that are fully reflected in Caravaggio's work. His bold use of light and shadow and realistic depictions of everyday scenes have made chiaroscuro a serious theater of art history, a radical revolution in the legacy of the High Renaissance.
Caravaggio in 1593 had just arrived in strange and competitive Rome from northern Italy, where he studied in the Dapino workshop (Giuseppe D'arpino) painted still life themes such as flowers and fruits. The work was originally in the collection of Knight Giuseppe Cesari, whose Sicilian friend Mario Minniti continued to inspire him in the painting. They later left Dapino's studio to sell paintings through the dealer Costantino. These works related to still life accompanied Caravaggio's early years in Rome with his rise to fame.
View view of Caravaggio and Baroque Miracles, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023
From the boy's basket to the minutiae of the basket and fruit, Caravaggio paints spots, fungi and eggs in the brightly colored basket, which is a symbolic contrast to the beauty and cleanliness of the model. We will see the prevalence of this realist style in the genre paintings of the Dutch ** period in the 17th century, which shaped a new international art market with secular tastes dominated by middle-class portraits and exhortatory metaphors. However, in Catholic Italy, where the Renaissance was at its highest, Caravaggio bore the brunt of abandoning the ideal beauty of the old world and inviting the ** to immerse himself in the sensory experience with the special trial effect of a serious theater, which was tantamount to launching a general declaration of war against the fruits of the Renaissance.
View view of Caravaggio and Baroque Miracles, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023
The tension between his contemporaries, especially the artists of the Bologna School, and him dominated an eternal dialogue about the history of style. The latter took pride in upholding Raphael's hey-Renaissance tradition and created the prototype of the European classical academy. Guido Reni, who is listed with Caravaggio in this exhibition, is known for his balanced, elegant and bright academic style. There was a striking clash of styles between the Bolognese and the Lombards, which also constituted what Gombrich called a war of tastes. This kind of war is not only reflected in the vassal elegance, but also creates a great real conflict.
View view of Caravaggio and Baroque Miracles, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023
Guido Reni (1575–1642), Bologna's tallest Baroque artist, was called "sacred" during his lifetime, referring to his celestial talents and subject matter. But the gods of the art world weren't always kind to Rainey, and by the 19th century, Rainey's looking up at the Madonna began to look a little sweet to many connoisseurs. John Ruskin was one of the most famous, and he had an extreme dislike for Rainey. Rennie's rediscovery in the mid-20th century was eventually accompanied by the rediscovery of Caravaggio, his opponent in papal Rome. It was this pair of sacred rivals, but a combination of gamblers and assassins, who, interestingly, were also favored by the Borghese family. Rainey was in debt due to a gambling addiction, and Caravaggio couldn't contain his fiery temper and rushed to the left and right. Piercing the veil of art history, we find a community of bizarre and exotic artists, but this does not affect the charm of art history in the slightest. As Gombrich said:
There's really no such thing as art at all, just artists, and they're men and women who have an amazing talent for balancing shapes and colors to get the "right" effect. What is even rarer is the person with integrity, who refuses to stop halfway, and is always ready to give up all the low-hanging fruit, all superficial success, to go through the toil and pain of the work in a down-to-earth manner. (The Story of Art, Gombrich).
View view of Caravaggio and Baroque Miracles, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023
The 16th century coincided with the rise of Protestantism and the historical stage of Catholicism's self-reflection. It was a time of great oddity, and in The Deadly Lilies, the sculptor Cellini wrote passionately in the Florentine vernacular about the brawls in the dark taverns, the gambles of the goldsmiths, and the sacks and defenses of Rome. Caravaggio was rising in such a restless era, and his career and exile to the south were linked to the intricacies of the Cardinal Patrons, the Knights of Malta, the Assassins of Naples, and so on. His life was full of shock and fog, as is his work, symbolizing the drama and complexity of the Baroque period. It's a feast of light, shade, sensuality and earthly beauty.
The epoch-making modern tendencies of Caravaggio's work can still surpass Reney's diverse, but essentially classical, talents. Caravaggio injected a mote into the angels of the work, which Rainey could not have. Their rivalry and assimilation became plausible from the evolution of Rainey's paintings—his style was not only balanced but also varied, and some of his late works seem to have been heavily influenced by chiaroscuro, absorbing Caravaggio's dark tonalism in a sense.
Crown of Thorns, Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi).
Year 1602-1603.
Oil on canvas, 178 x 125 cm
Collection of the Banco Vicenza of the Municipality of Prato.
In the late 16th century, the great conflict over loyalty to the heart was much greater than during the Renaissance, and justification by faith caused by the Protestant Revolution was part of the larger picture of the ageOn the other hand, the indispensable merger of angels and motes into one, and the obsession and magnification of the self make it difficult for the artist to believe in his inner beliefs. Caravaggio's "Crown of Thorns", a slightly later work, powerfully depicts the suffering of **. In this painting, ** endures a crown of thorns of mockery and torture before being crucified. Caravaggio's use of chiaroscuro dramatically accentuates the emotional intensity of the scene. The realistic depiction of the pain and the callous indifference of the tormentor evokes a strong emotional response. This work exemplifies Caravaggio's skill in conveying deeply human emotions and religious themes with astonishing realism.
The crown of thorns is the crown that Jesus wore at the time of his crucifixion recorded in the New Testament. It was forcibly put on by Roman soldiers who were teasing him in the courtyard of the Doge's palace in Rome to mock him, the "King of the Jews". The Gospel of Matthew reads: "And he made a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and put a reed on his right hand, and knelt before him, and mocked him, saying, 'Long live the King of the Jews!'"Confronting pain and sadism is at the heart of the work. The two torturers strike the crown with sticks, a rhythmic, brutal hammer that inflicts pain and feels pain, pain and divine joy sometimes mix, like the bitter ** of Borges's poems.
Caravaggio's patron, Vincenzo Giustiniani, an intellectual and collector who wrote in his later years a treatise on art, proposing twelve grades of artistic achievement. In the highest ranks, he specifically named Caravaggio and Carracci for their success in combining realism with personal style. Caravaggio's Coronation of Thorns is the embodiment of Giustiniani's point of view, in which the painting depicts reality and cruelty with keen observation, while using classic compositional techniques to show the scene of patient suffering.
View view of Caravaggio and Baroque Miracles, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023
Self-Portrait of a Mature Man
Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
In addition to the diverse collection of Baroque paintings that follow Caravaggio's motifs and compositions – all of which present endless echoes of the Baroque in their classic schema – the exhibition also conceals Bernini's secret work, Self-Portrait at a Mature Age. This is an oil on canvas painting by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which is said to have been first discovered in Room XIV of the Borghese Gallery in Rome, Italy. The metaphor of finding a portrait in the labyrinth of huge Baroque buildings is fascinating, depicting the Baroque giant, known for his sculpture and architecture, as a mature and graceful man, sitting sideways in front of the viewer with his face slightly turned.
View view of Caravaggio and Baroque Miracles, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023
Bernini is painted with an innate lightness and arrogance, which slides away from the gaze we have seen from Caravaggio's boys. Now piercing through history, in Bernini's wordless portraits, the ineffable essence of the Baroque era is preserved – the dramatic personality, the fog of emotion, the dynamism of intentionality and the imposing theater that constitute the grandiose and imposing human world. Sometimes we feel that such a feast full of conflict and intoxication is too satisfying, but we cannot escape the heat of this rolling red dust. In the 1933 fantasy film King Kong, the screenwriter prompted the ruthless director to utter the famous line "It's the Beauty Killed the Beast."" ）。The Si people have passed away, but the eternal stage lives on, interpreting the endless joys and sorrows and songs of the world.