of Northern art, itâs hard to spend very much time in front of a Jan Breughel painting. The magnificence of each flower and of the overall arrangement can be grasped within seconds. By contrast, the strangeness and originality of Caravaggioâs still life reveals itself in stages, and can command our attention, our fascination, for hours.
If the pears and apples in The Basket of Fruit seem slightly beyond their prime, the fruit in Bacchus has progressed considerably further in the direction of outright rot. Itâs almost as if the painter had, on completing the still life, stored the fruit basket in a closet and brought it out later to adorn the table of his pleasure-loving god of wine. Of course, Bacchus is associated with autumn and the harvest, which would make the fruit appropriately past season, and yet you canât help thinking that a god could, if he wished, find it in his divine power to offer us something more appetizing than a wormy apple, a rotten peach, and a burst pomegranate.
The whole painting is full of humorous touches and clever contradictions. Yet though many critics have applied themselves to unraveling its allegorical nature as a parable on the theme of short-lived love and fleeting youth, few seem to have noticed how witty it is. Perhaps itâs too perplexing to imagine that someone as aggressive and tormented as Caravaggio could have had a sense of humor.
But surely the painter must have noticed that his adorably fleshy young godâanother heavy-lidded, dark-eyed, smooth-skinned, curly-haired vision of Mario Minniti, half reclining on a Roman couch draped in a white cloth that could be a continuation of Bacchusâs revealing togaâmakes no effort to hide a set of unmistakably dirty fingernails. The daintiness with which he holds his wine glass emphasizes the griminess of the fingers with which he grasps it, just as the smooth plumpness of his flesh and the outrageous campiness of his grape-leaf headdress contrasts with the muscularity of his biceps. His face and hands are as red as those of the Sick Bacchus were green, and though his seductive eyes meet ours as he gazes out of the canvas, itâs his gorgeous rounded shoulder that the light of the painting wants us to admire.
Bacchus represents one of the last times that one of Caravaggioâs limpid, half-naked pretty boys would stare seductively at us, inviting us to contemplate and, if only we could, touch the living, embodiment of sheer carnal perfection. From now on, when Caravaggio found it impossible to resist the urge to paintâor the popular demand forâsuch subjects, the assumption would be that the lovely boy was the young Saint John the Baptist. The ironic touches and the excessiveness of the Bacchus was perhaps a signal that its creator had explored the limits of the magic that paintings like this could work on Del Monte and his circle. By then such depictions may have come to seem too easy, and Caravaggio, like any great artist, was in all likelihood growing restive with the work he could do with practiced assurance but without any particular sense of discovery or challenge.
And so we can watch him cautiously testing his own limits, as well as the boundaries of what he would be permitted to do by the rarified circles in which he moved. In two of the paintings he completed at the timeâ Boy Bitten by a Lizard and Medusa âhe moved from the alluring and the charming to the grotesque and the extreme. Both works are animated by violence, not violent action so much as the dramatic and sudden response to violence. We can only speculate about what a relief it must have been for Caravaggio to edge toward a mode of expressing an element that must (whether buried or overt) already have been present in his personality.
Boy Bittten by a Lizard is, like Bacchus , a bit of a joke. The lizard that has emerged from an arrangement of fruit to bite the boy on the finger has a sexual connotation thatâs
If the pears and apples in The Basket of Fruit seem slightly beyond their prime, the fruit in Bacchus has progressed considerably further in the direction of outright rot. Itâs almost as if the painter had, on completing the still life, stored the fruit basket in a closet and brought it out later to adorn the table of his pleasure-loving god of wine. Of course, Bacchus is associated with autumn and the harvest, which would make the fruit appropriately past season, and yet you canât help thinking that a god could, if he wished, find it in his divine power to offer us something more appetizing than a wormy apple, a rotten peach, and a burst pomegranate.
The whole painting is full of humorous touches and clever contradictions. Yet though many critics have applied themselves to unraveling its allegorical nature as a parable on the theme of short-lived love and fleeting youth, few seem to have noticed how witty it is. Perhaps itâs too perplexing to imagine that someone as aggressive and tormented as Caravaggio could have had a sense of humor.
But surely the painter must have noticed that his adorably fleshy young godâanother heavy-lidded, dark-eyed, smooth-skinned, curly-haired vision of Mario Minniti, half reclining on a Roman couch draped in a white cloth that could be a continuation of Bacchusâs revealing togaâmakes no effort to hide a set of unmistakably dirty fingernails. The daintiness with which he holds his wine glass emphasizes the griminess of the fingers with which he grasps it, just as the smooth plumpness of his flesh and the outrageous campiness of his grape-leaf headdress contrasts with the muscularity of his biceps. His face and hands are as red as those of the Sick Bacchus were green, and though his seductive eyes meet ours as he gazes out of the canvas, itâs his gorgeous rounded shoulder that the light of the painting wants us to admire.
Bacchus represents one of the last times that one of Caravaggioâs limpid, half-naked pretty boys would stare seductively at us, inviting us to contemplate and, if only we could, touch the living, embodiment of sheer carnal perfection. From now on, when Caravaggio found it impossible to resist the urge to paintâor the popular demand forâsuch subjects, the assumption would be that the lovely boy was the young Saint John the Baptist. The ironic touches and the excessiveness of the Bacchus was perhaps a signal that its creator had explored the limits of the magic that paintings like this could work on Del Monte and his circle. By then such depictions may have come to seem too easy, and Caravaggio, like any great artist, was in all likelihood growing restive with the work he could do with practiced assurance but without any particular sense of discovery or challenge.
And so we can watch him cautiously testing his own limits, as well as the boundaries of what he would be permitted to do by the rarified circles in which he moved. In two of the paintings he completed at the timeâ Boy Bitten by a Lizard and Medusa âhe moved from the alluring and the charming to the grotesque and the extreme. Both works are animated by violence, not violent action so much as the dramatic and sudden response to violence. We can only speculate about what a relief it must have been for Caravaggio to edge toward a mode of expressing an element that must (whether buried or overt) already have been present in his personality.
Boy Bittten by a Lizard is, like Bacchus , a bit of a joke. The lizard that has emerged from an arrangement of fruit to bite the boy on the finger has a sexual connotation thatâs
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