Helen Langdon's ‘Caravaggio’

Introduction

This course will concentrate on one of the most common forms of art history writing – a biographical monograph about a single artist's life and work. You will be focusing on the way that one author, Helen Langdon, has used biography in her book about one artist, Caravaggio. In order to get the most out of studying this course you will need access to a copy of this book (ISBN 071266582x)

You will look in detail at the methods she has used to approach her subject and the different kinds of primary sources available to her. You will also be asked to think about how an artist's work relates to his or her life, and especially how useful it is to understand one in terms of the other.

In Section 1, you will be specifically exploring the methods Helen Langdon uses to construct her biography of Caravaggio and the way she has employed the sources available to her. Following on, in Section 2, you will consider in what ways an artist's life can help explain the art he or she produced. Section 3 will then compare other ways of interpreting works of art with those contained within a biographical structure, and consider the possibilities and limitations of the biographical monograph.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of postgraduate level study in Arts and Humanities.

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• analyse the pros and cons of the biographical monograph in art history

• examine the strengths and weaknesses of the biographical monograph in relation to other kinds of art history writing.

1 Caravaggio's ‘Life’

1.1 Biography and art history

The biographical monograph, that is, a book about a single artist and his or her works, is one of the most common forms of art history writing. Biography, as a literary form, applied to art history, is underpinned by the assumption that knowing about an artist's life can help to establish both the significance and the meaning of that artist's work. This is a very common, and it seems a reasonable, assumption to make in the interpretation of pictures. It is therefore a central theme in this course. Behind the assumption that an artist's life and the meaning of his or her work are closely related lies a series of other assumptions and traditions in the history of art.

1.2 The myth of the artist

Consider Howard Hibbard's analysis of Caravaggio's The Martyrdom of St Matthew in the Contarelli chapel (Langdon Plate 19 – see the Web Gallery of Art at http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/caravagg/04/index.html) from his monograph, Caravaggio (1983). Hibbard identifies the figure at the rear to the left of the semi-naked executioner as the artist's self-portrait: ‘a bearded, saturnine villain who is none other than Caravaggio himself’.

The ‘form of signature that was known in Italian Renaissance art’ refers to a convention whereby artists sometimes included portraits of themselves in their works to raise their professional status as intellectuals, rather than as mere craftsmen. That being said, Joanna Woods-Marsden in her book, Renaissance Self-portraiture (1998), specifically excludes Caravaggio's ‘portraits’ from her study because, she writes, ‘many of the issues addressed by Caravaggio's self-images are of a different nature from those that concerned artists in the previous 150 years’ (Woods-Marsden, 1998, p. 6). She does not explain how Caravaggio's ‘self-images’ are distinct (if they are in fact self-portraits): what is important in this context is the fact that she, like Hibbard, creates a ‘hostile’ character and singles Caravaggio out as an outsider.

The assumption that Caravaggio is present in his art carries with it considerable implications for writing about art and about the relationship of an artist to his or her art. Caravaggio's apparently dramatic art and life, tantalisingly absent in parallel historical material, has even led some historians to ‘embellish’ primary documents. In 1994 Caravaggio assassino was published, a now notorious monograph which although ‘presented as fact, was largely fictional’ (Langdon, 1999, p. 19). ‘It has already inspired other biographies, and details have seeped out even into some scholarly publications.’ Readers beware!

When Hibbard wrote his biographical monograph about Caravaggio in 1983 there were relatively few modern books already written about the artist. Recent years have seen a large number of books, including Langdon's, dedicated to the artist and his art. Writing about Caravaggio began during his own lifetime, in 1604, when Carel van Mander wrote the first literary source for his art and life. A further eight ‘Lives’ followed in the next century, the last of them written by Francesco Susinno and published in 1724 (you can find one of these writings under the 'View document' link below, and two further writings in Section 1.4). By that time a great deal of apocryphal detail had been added to the Caravaggio story. Thereafter Caravaggio fell out of fashion and from the eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth there was very little written about him. He was not even included in guide books to Rome until well into the twentieth century. Since the 1970s in particular, Caravaggio has returned to favour and he has become one of the most written about artists of any period. (Look at The British Library online catalogue to survey recent books about him.

Click to read Carel van Mander's writing on Caravaggio's life

Part of Caravaggio's attraction for his contemporary biographers and for modern art historians is precisely the mix of art and artist that Hibbard highlights in his analysis of The Martyrdom of St Matthew. Leoni's portrait of Caravaggio is the first illustration in Langdon's book because it is as much about the artist as it is about his art.

Hibbard's reference to Caravaggio as a ‘saturnine villain’ further exposes assumptions he is making about Caravaggio as an artist. The description ‘saturnine’ refers to one of the four humours or temperaments, each of which was linked to a planet (for a definition of the humours see Barker, et al., 1999, p. 153). The saturnine humour is melancholia, suffered most in the evening when the planet Saturn is in the sky. It was particularly associated with creative individuals such as poets and painters. Melancholia was certainly associated with artists at Caravaggio's time (Wittkower, 1961, pp. 293–4): Cardanus in 1561 described painters as ‘fickle, of unsettled mind, melancholic, and changeable in their manners’; and Michelangelo wrote these lines in one of his sonnets,

Some artists even pretended to be mad to impress clients with their genius. Giovan Battista Armenini, in his Dei veri precetti della pittura (1587), wrote that

Ever since the sixteenth century the idea of the artist – ‘a highly individualized professional type’ (Wittkower, 1961, p. 295) – as melancholic or outsider has prevailed, not least because it gave painters the same character, and thus status, Aristotle had ascribed to poets. Later it achieved renewed effect during the Romantic period in the idea of the ‘bohemian’ artist or poet. Still to this day the paradigm that artists are in some way ‘different’ persists. ‘Paradoxically’, Wittkower wrote, ‘the untrammelled individualism of twentieth-century avant-garde artists, their personality and social problems were ultimately derived from the Italian Renaissance, the period in history on which they heaped the fullness of their scorn’ (Wittkower, 1961, p. 199). Not only are artists traditionally stereotyped as ‘different’ but biography further separates them from ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ people simply by singling them out for literary attention.

The literary genre of biography relies on narrative. The narrative form structures the information in the book and it also makes the book appeal to the reader. Hayden White explains this appeal: ‘far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a metacode, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of shared reality can be transmitted’ (White, 1980, p. 6). This narrative structure explains why it is difficult to pick out only parts of a biography (and why, shortly, you will be asked to read the book all the way through). The biographical narrative is constructed with a beginning, a middle and an end to tell a good story about an individual's life – all the more readable if it were about a ‘saturnine villain’.

So was Caravaggio actually a melancholic or does Hibbard describe him as such because that is how artists were – or are – expected to be and because it helps create the dramatic figure Langdon identifies in her introduction? Behind this lies a bigger assumption: that we need to know what kind of person Caravaggio was or what mood he was in when he painted to appreciate his paintings. I will return to this assumption in more detail in the next section.

I asked Helen Langdon how she came to write about Caravaggio.

Langdon refers to her sense of Caravaggio being a tragic figure, and therefore an attractive subject for a biography that will make a good story, appeal to readers and – ultimately – sell. But Caravaggio's appeal to the biographer appears to be part of a circular process: artists are traditionally portrayed as melancholic or tragic figures with dramatic lives; Caravaggio was portrayed as a tragic figure; biographers are typically attracted to the tragic figure; therefore Caravaggio makes an ideal artist-subject for a biographical treatment. The publication of the problematic Caravaggio assassino, ‘which slips so dizzyingly between fact, fantasy and hypothesis’ (Langdon, 1999, p. 19), exacerbated the situation because of the spectacular, but falsified, material it contains about the allegedly murderous artist. Many recent writers have failed to question the reliability of this study, instead preferring to repeat its outrageous claims. The book has only added fuel to the fire of the Caravaggio cult.

1.3 Artists' ‘Lives’

Helen Langdon's subtitle ‘A Life’ points to a very particular combination of literary and artistic sources in her biography. Catherine M. Soussloff suggests that the literary genre of artists' ‘Lives’ has led to the artist and his work being ‘inextricably entwined’ in a way that does not happen in the ‘Lives’ of poets or prose writers (Soussloff, 1990, p. 154). Although she overstates the case, as recent biographies of novelists, musicians, etc. demonstrate, artworks can illustrate biography in ways that texts alone cannot; ways that make artists seem more present in their art

The confusion to which Soussloff refers concerns the nature of artist's ‘Lives’ as source material for art history, that is, as an explanation either of the artist or his works. We will consider this in more detail later in this section.

As a form, the biographical structure confounds the artist and his or her works to the exclusion of other factors: the narrative of the artist's life becomes part of the meaning of the artworks; these artworks are evidence of artistic – and sometimes ‘divine’ – genius; primary documentary testament, pictures and anecdote serve to reconstruct the appearance and presence of the artist. With the artist's life and work conflated, external influences become secondary: ‘the author … appears as a coherent and distinct individual whose coherent and distinct work derives from individual experience and genius, free of environmental influences’ (Thomas, 2002, p. 264). The myth of the artist as hero is reinforced through certain conventions of artists' ‘Lives’ (Kris and Kurz, 1979, pp. 13–60 and Thomas, 2002, pp. 262–6). In Renaissance ‘Lives’ the divine nature of the artist's gift is often described not only in his active career as an artist but in his birth and death as well. Vasari, for example, credited the very best artists with stories that apparently explained their later success. In Giotto's ‘Life’, for example, Vasari tells the story of the artist as a boy, aged ten, leading some sheep to pasture. At each place they stopped to graze, Giotto drew the sheep on a rock, from nature. Cimabue passed by and, impressed by his skill, took him off to his studio. Leonardo was a child prodigy, in everything from maths to music. Michelangelo, the epitome of the artist as divine master, was born under the constellation of Mercury and Venus, said to augur his great genius. (Immanuel Kant explains the origin of genius in his Critique of Judgement (1790) ‘… the word genius is derived from [Latin] genius, [which means] the guardian and guiding spirit that each person is given as his own at birth, and to whose inspiration … original ideas are due’ (Kant, 1987, p. 175).) He was also named after the archangel Michael because both he and, by implication, anachronistically, his artworks were considered divine. Even in death the best artists were like the saints: Vasari records that Michelangelo's body was still perfect and did not stink even twenty-five days after his death (Soussloff, 1997, p. 36).

If Helen Langdon's book Caravaggio: A Life is, then, part of this tradition, it is about a lot more than a sixteenth-century artist's working life.

1.4 The artist's ‘Life’ as a historical source

In the introduction to Caravaggio, and at different points in the book, Langdon discusses the comparative merits of different kinds of evidence. Her main form of evidence is textual rather than artistic, however. This is the key to the empirical method that she applies to her subject.

A great deal of what seems to be reliable fact about Caravaggio is open to question and interpretation. Throughout her book, Helen Langdon turns to discussion of the veracity of different sources and adds circumstantial evidence about patrons and the wider cultural context to fill in gaps and confirm otherwise unreliable information about Caravaggio. In fact, few artists have surrounding them as much primary source material as art historians would like to be able to recreate their career or to reinterpret their works. With so few other sources surviving, artists' ‘Lives’ can and have taken on a significance and weight that they simply do not support or often deserve.

Part of the ‘confusion’ Soussloff refers to in Section 1.3 is the status of an artist's ‘Life’ as a source for other discussions of an artist's work. Are ‘Lives’ primary or secondary sources?

In Soussloff's book, The Absolute Artist (1997), the author develops her point about the problem that artists' ‘Lives’ create when used as a primary source. Indeed, ‘assumptions regarding the artist and work of art appropriated from the biographical literature have determined art history's view of these subjects and also of itself’ (Soussloff, 1997, p. 77). She notes, for example, that even Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860, English translation 1878) is based largely on artists' ‘Lives’ (though it is thematic rather than biographical in form). In this context, according to Soussloff, it is no wonder that Burckhardt is able to celebrate ‘The Development of the Individual’ as one of his sections.

1.5 Further reading

Battersby, C. (1989) Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, London, Women's Press.

Kris, E. and Kurz, O. (1979) Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

Soussloff, C.M. (1997) ‘The artist in nature: Renaissance biography’, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 43–72.

White, H. (1990) Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wittkower, R. and Wittkower, M. (1969) Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution, New York, Norton.

2 Artists and their art

2.1 Understanding an artist's art

Bernard Berenson wrote his book about Caravaggio (1953) because,

For Berenson, making Caravaggio ‘as much of an artistic personality as Leonardo, or Giorgione’ allowed him to be incorporated into the art historical canon or mainstream. The canon itself consists of mostly male, white, western artists (Perry, 1999).

Despite significant challenges in recent years to the paradigm of the monograph, books about single artists – with their characteristic glossy illustrations and occasional catalogues – are still among the most common and popular forms of art history writing. Undoubtedly nineteenth- and twentieth-century values, which promoted the idea of ‘the artist as romantic genius’, still hold sway, particularly in more popular histories. Behind the persistence of the monograph lies the assumption that remains dominant in contemporary thought – that to understand an artwork one must also understand its creator.

When I talked with her in 2002, Helen Langdon explained why she had adopted the method she had for writing about Caravaggio.

Langdon clearly finds Caravaggio's personality in his art but she resists ‘subjective meditations on his inner thoughts and feelings’. While she suggests that ‘a psychoanalytical approach offers very little’ to an understanding of Caravaggio and his art, she nevertheless tries to ‘contextualise his violence and his sexuality’, admitting them as factors in attempting to understand his art.

2.1 ‘Every painter paints himself’?

Art history methods of biography or ‘Life’ writing attempt to link an artist to his art. Why do we need to know about an artist's life to know about his art in the first place? Why might Helen Langdon want to explain Caravaggio the man and not just his world or his art? Behind this questions lies a problem central to art history. Do we need to know about artists to know about their art?

Martin Kemp gives the link between an artist and his art a historical complexion:

These are powerful models for any writer about Caravaggio. The way that Caravaggio's art was judged depended more on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Renaissance rhetorical traditions which deliberately link his art and life than on any objective analysis of his work.

2.3 Biography and psychobiography

A significant, inescapable identifying feature of the twentieth century was the birth and development of psychoanalysis. Combined with romantic notions of the artist-genius and the attractiveness of the artist's ‘Life’ as evidence for writing the history of Renaissance art, psychoanalysis further ensured the continued success of the monographic construction of art history. A good example of this overlap between the increasingly redundant/discredited ‘Life’ of an artist and the more recently adopted psychoanalytic theories, is the recourse to the individual's childhood. The inclusion of the artist's childhood in a biography is acceptable because, according to psychoanalysis, the earliest development of the personality, created by events experienced in early life, will explain what happens to the individual subsequently. ‘The individual's life history is the route to the understanding of his personality’ (Kris and Kurz, 1979, p. 14).

Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) short but groundbreaking psychoanalytic study of Leonardo da Vinci was published in 1910 and revised in subsequent editions to 1923. It was Freud's only attempt at ‘psychobiography’ and it was criticised as soon as it appeared. He tried to pre-empt criticism in Chapter 6 of the study, and in doing so explained his thinking behind his method. Biographers on the whole, he wrote,

He then goes on to ‘summarise what we have been able to discover about the course of his [Leonardo's] psychic development’ which reveals Freud's objectives in writing the book.

Freud's study is clearly not so much about Leonardo in particular as about the creative process in general and the limitations of conventional biography which exclude discussion of it. One important effect of Freud's psychoanalytic approach was to entwine more closely what he defined as cause and effect – the artist and his art – in the creation of artworks. But Freud uses artworks as evidence for the artist's personality; the psychobiography does not aim to interpret the works of art themselves. Significantly Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood relied explicitly on works from the artist's own hands – Leonardo's writings, paintings and drawings – and not on biography because, he argued, this was based on cumulative history which produces legend rather than fact. Through that primary evidence, Freud was looking for ‘truth’ about a historical individual by subjecting that individual, or rather, products from the hand of that individual, to a clinical session.

In the end Freud's book says more about psychoanalysis than it does about the artist or art history, but the method – connecting the development of the individual self to the products of that individual life – has proved irresistible to subsequent scholars and a defining feature of modern consciousness. Freud's psychobiography has been discredited in its details but its broader implications have proved more difficult to shake off. Ernst Gombrich criticised psychoanalytic interpretations of art in general terms in a lecture he gave to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in November 1953.

Gombrich concludes that while ‘taste may be accessible to psychological analysis, art is possibly not’ (Gombrich, 1971, p. 43). Perhaps taste or fashion will determine whether an artist's work is studied in the first place but it will tell us little about the artist or the works. The context in which the artist lived and worked, beyond the images and texts specifically produced by that individual, are more significant aspects in rebuilding the artist's activities, as Langdon's biography illustrates. What psychobiography does is almost irretrievably to attach the artist to his art. ‘The “story” in psychoanalysis can be told from only one point of view, that of the analysand’ (Soussloff, 1997, p. 127). I would argue that the two need to be separated, for inextricably united they are as much a problem as a solution to their understanding.

2.4 The intentional fallacy

In the final sentence of the Gombrich quotation in Section 2.3, he claims there is only one reason why what the artist meant could matter to us and that is the artist's meaning or intention is ‘the real, the true meaning’.

Questions about interpretation of works of art by resorting to the artist's intention were brought together by the literary theorist William K. Wimsatt and the aesthetician Monroe Beardsley in their article ‘The intentional fallacy’, first published in 1946. The article remains an important point of arrival or departure for debate about the relationship of the artist to his or her art. They summed up their criticism (the fallacy) of the recourse to the artist's intention as follows:

The interpretation of a work of art, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue, lies outside and beyond the artist. Studying an artwork to find the artist's state of mind is quite different from the interpretation of the artwork itself.

According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, then, Langdon's Caravaggio would be a personal study, something they suggest is quite different from an artist

2.5 Is the author dead?

When Roland Barthes (1915–80) wrote ‘The Death of the Author’ (first published 1968, reprinted in Barthes 1977), he did not mean that, like Wimsatt and Beardsley, the author had been, or should always have been, absent in the interpretation of art works. Instead his position is a historicised one: while once it might have been acceptable to refer to the author in the interpretation of an art work, now, in a post-modern world, it is not. Michel Foucault (1926–84) responded to Barthes (though not by name) in his paper ‘What is an Author?’ (1969). In it he discusses the value-laden term ‘author’ to qualify and retrieve something from Barthes's rather terminal ‘Death of the Author’.

2.6 Caravaggio's sexuality

‘Caravaggio studies’ often provide good, and sometimes extreme, examples of the ways in which an artist's identity can be bound up in his work and vice versa. In the case of Caravaggio it is difficult to avoid assumptions about his sexual orientation in any modern study of his art. Bold statements sometimes presume that this is a resolved issue: he was, for example, ‘The one major painter of the late Cinquecento whose sexuality is otherwise freely expressed in his oevre’ (Saslow, 1986, p. 200). But what has consideration of Caravaggio's sexuality got to do with the interpretation of his paintings?

John Gash, in his review of Langdon's Caravaggio for the Burlington Magazine, noted that the book avoids entering into discussions of the artist's sexuality even though this has long been an element of his artistic personality.

Alan Jenkins, reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, makes similar observations about what he refers to as Langdon's ‘innocence’:

Gash identified Langdon's ‘narrative framework’ as a constraint to the consideration of Caravaggio's psyche. A close reading of part of Langdon's book will consider her approach to this difficult issue. Chapters 6 and 8 of Langdon's Caravaggio focus on some of the most problematic issues and images of Caravaggio's oeuvre.

Langdon is not alone. Creighton E. Gilbert in his book, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, similarly picks piece by piece through the evidence contemporary with his practice. He concludes that, ‘we cannot be certain what the artist's personal sexual interests were, and it is also possible that, as a brilliant figure painter, he might have created imagery separate from his personal life’ (Gilbert, 1995, p. 191).

Caravaggio's Secrets (Bersani and Dutoit, 1998) includes an interpretation of the Capitoline St John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram) (see Colour Plate 2 below). Bersani and Dutoit's reading of a Caravaggio painting is very different from Langdon's historical, literary and artistic contextualisation. They call upon the audience/viewer to bring to bear a Freudian psychoanalytic schema in the interpretation of the painting.

Perhaps Caravaggio was homosexual. Perhaps modern readings of his art are better able to explore this difficult area of his work because modern art historians are better equipped with Freudian and psychoanalytic understanding of the development of human identity. Or perhaps modern interpretations are not better but only different because writing about art has as much of a history as art itself. Perhaps the main issue being explored in the problematic issue of Caravaggio's sexuality is not so much to do with the historical artist but how the modern world explores its own identity by imposing its priorities or dilemmas on the past. The increased popularity of Caravaggio's painting in recent years is undoubtedly due to interest in human sexuality, homosexuality, and gay culture and politics. As a result, contemporary interpretations of Caravaggio's art seem remarkably complex in comparison to older, more conventional ones. Langdon's interpretation seems very convincing and straightforward in this context. Because she insists on finding empirical evidence for her analysis of artworks, rooted in ‘contemporary’ sources, she cannot permit – or she avoids – a ‘queer’ reading of his pictures. The main point here is that it is easy to confuse the reclamation or reinterpretation of paintings by Caravaggio with the recovery of Caravaggio himself.

2.7 Art, life and the interpretation of pictures

David Carrier's book, Principles of Art History Writing (1991) considers the way that Caravaggio has been constructed as an artistic personality (the relevant chapter is below). The objective of Carrier's book as a whole is to demonstrate that the ‘appeal to the artist's intention adds nothing’ to the interpretation of his artworks (recall the discussion of Wimsatt and Beardsley in Section 2.4), a difficult issue as so much art writing depends on exactly this approach. ‘Because we know much about Caravaggio, it is natural to interpret his art in relation to his life’. Indeed, ‘In principle, a uniquely correct re-creation of an artist's mental states should be possible. In practice, because the evidence is incomplete, that goal may not be achieved. The multiplicity of interpretations of an artwork reflects this unfortunate fact’ (Carrier, 1991, p. 7).

Carrier concludes that ‘how we understand the relation between early and modern art-writing depends on our interpretation of the early accounts’. The early accounts of Caravaggio's life are themselves problematic, subject to literary and cultural conventions. Arguably, all history consists of a dialogue between the past and the present. If it were simply a matter of reconstructing the past then only one book on any person, place or period might be necessary.

If there were such a thing as a complete, final, unquestionable history no one would ever write a book or an article about Caravaggio ever again. This is unlikely because arguably it is not in the nature of history to be complete, final and unquestionable.

2.8 Further reading

Gombrich, E.H. (1971) ‘Psycho-analysis and the history of art’ in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (2nd edn), London, Phaidon, pp. 30–44.

Iseminger, G. (ed.) (1992) Intention and Interpretation, Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

Shiff, R. (1996) ‘Originality’ in Shiff, R. and Nelson, R.S. (eds) Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 103–15.

Soussloff, C.M. (1997) ‘The artist in myth: early psychoanalysis and art history’ in The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 112–37.

Spitz, E.H. (1985) Art and Psyche: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

3 Interpreting works of art within and outwith biography

3.1 Three interpretative methods

If the work of art has an existence beyond that of its maker, what are the limits of interpretation? This is a huge question, and possible limits and methods of interpretation are continually being propounded within the discipline. Helen Langdon chose to set Caravaggio's art within his life, with all the associations connected to the artist's biography. This course will look at ways in which the work of art can be interpreted within and outwith references to the artist who created that work.

If David Carrier's (1991) view that paintings should not be interpreted in humanistic terms, that is, with reference to the ‘mental state of the artist’ is correct, what alternatives are there? (Bersani and Dutoit (1998) provide one alternative model in which the viewer with a Freudian conceptual schema is introduced into the equation.)

In this section then, you will consider the relative merits of three interpretative methods applied to Caravaggio's work:

• historical/cultural context (Langdon), which relies on empirical evidence and observation from the artist's immediate contemporary vicinity;

• style/formalism (Freedberg), which sets Caravaggio's painting in a broader visual context;

• subject/iconography (Rudolph and Ostrow), which questions the meaning of a single artwork, according to its subject.

If the work of art has its own life beyond the narrow remit of the artist then several other methods of interpretation are available. How, for example, does Caravaggio's work relate to the art produced before and after him? Langdon writes that, ‘In the middle years of the century … art was dull, and many painters limped haltingly along in the shadow of the divine Michelangelo’ (Langdon, p. 51). It was only when the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel was unveiled and then considered that Michelangelo's ‘godlike creativity’ lost its attraction.

Michelangelo is a pivotal figure in the definitions of Renaissance art, partly due to the efforts of Vasari who idealised him. (Questioning and debating Michelangelo's status is a feature of current ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Early Modern’ studies.) Traditionally, the Renaissance period is defined as a reawakening of awareness of the significance of classical antiquity and human potential. The High Renaissance represents its culmination in figures such as Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. But what happens after the High Renaissance?

Giorgio Vasari wrote his Lives of the Artists (1550 and 1558) on the assumption that the great Michelangelo had perfected art. According to Vasari, under the shadow of Michelangelo Italian artists rooted their art in ‘nature’ – nature perfected by the artist's intervention and study of antique models. Ernst Gombrich explains some of the implications of Michelangelo's shadow for subsequent artists:

‘Decline’ after renaissance has been associated with both the Mannerist and Baroque styles which label the subsequent periods (Mannerism c.1510–20 to 1600; Baroque 1600–1750). In the following extract consider how one particular author, S.J. Freedberg in his book Circa 1600 (1983), tried to define Caravaggio's role in Rome in terms of these style labels. Freedberg's book is more strictly academic than Helen Langdon's. It consists of three lectures which were presented to an academic audience in the USA in 1980. In the following extract about the St John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram) (below), now in the Capitoline Gallery in Rome, Freedberg treats Caravaggio's painting quite differently from Langdon.

Click to view Colour Plate 2, Caravaggio's St John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram),1602, oil on canvas, 132 x 97 cm, Musei Capitolini, Rome. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Click to view Agnolo Bronzino's St John the Baptist, 1550–5, oil on wood, 120 x 92 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Click to view Annibale Carracci's Model Study for an Ignudo of the Farnese Gallery, c.1595, pencil on paper, Louvre Paris. © RMN Photo: Gérard Blot.

Click to view Annibale Carracci's Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, 1595-1605, full fresco, Palazzo Farnese Gallery, Rome. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Click to view Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling (detail), Ignudo (male nude on left above the Erythræan Sibyl), 1508-12, fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Freedberg clearly sets out to show how Caravaggio's art differed from that of the Mannerist painters. In terms of the pattern of rise–decline–rise suggested by Gombrich, Caravaggio had to be ‘radical’ and ‘new’. He is also confirming what Caravaggio's early biographers wrote about his so-called naturalism. They too tried to explain Caravaggio's art in relation to a larger framework of the Mannerist ‘movement’ which fits the chronology between the High Renaissance ‘perfection’ of Michelangelo and Raphael and the reflowering of the arts in the so-called Baroque age in reaction to the ambiguity of the Mannerists. Langdon considers this Mannerist context in Chapter 3, in particular on pages 51–2.

John the Baptist is one of the patron saints and a national symbol of Florence so he is a popular subject for artists working in the Florentine tradition. The domination of Florentine art is one of the reasons that Freedberg can compare a painting of John the Baptist by Bronzino (see above), a Florentine, with Caravaggio's Capitoline St John, because by implication, the subject of Caravaggio's painting is given a Florentine complexion. Caravaggio never worked in Florence but if he is to be associated with the canon he must be attached somehow to the Florentine tradition (which Vasari largely constructed).

To make Caravaggio appropriate to his comparison with the Mannerist Florentine Bronzino, Freedberg focuses on the treatment of the male nude and its varying degrees of artifice – a typically Mannerist feature. He then emphasises the ‘effect of sacrilege and shock’ which Caravaggio creates by referring back to Michelangelo but which seems more like Baroque intent. Caravaggio is, nevertheless, clearly an outsider to any movement, although he can be associated with both Mannerist and Baroque style.

Both Langdon and Freedberg refer to the Capitoline St John as being St John the Baptist. Identification of this particular saint contributes to their argument: Freedberg to fit Caravaggio into the Florentine tradition, and Langdon using it to identify the patron (p. 230). Moreover, the forward momentum of biography does not allow Langdon to stop to consider paintings in much detail beyond their relevance to the artist's life.

But what if this painting were not St John at all? This leads to another way of interpreting pictures outwith biography; iconography which concentrates on the subject of the picture. In the November 2001 volume of Art History there is an article by Conrad Rudolph and Steven F. Ostrow, ‘Isaac Laughing: Caravaggio, non-traditional imagery and traditional identification’ (see plates below). You can find Art History online at the Open Libr@ry.

Click to view Colour Plate 2, Caravaggio's St John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram),1602, oil on canvas, 132 x 97 cm, Musei Capitolini, Rome. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Click to view Caravaggio's Sacrifice of Isaac, c.1603, oil on canvas, 104 x 135 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

The footnotes to Langdon's Caravaggio refer to a myriad of other debates that surround Caravaggio's paintings, who or what he was painting, for whom, when and why. (The commission and subject of the paintings for the Contarelli Chapel is a good example of this. See, for example, footnote 28 in Chapter 9, or footnote 40 in Chapter 7, and Puttfarken, 1998.) The very different priorities of Langdon's Caravaggio do not allow her to enter into most of these debates other than as extended footnotes.

Although they are very different, each of these three interpretative strategies relies on understanding Caravaggio's art in his contemporary context. Caravaggio himself is more or less present as a historical player choosing to paint how and what he did because of his patrons’ wishes, his artistic context, or the wider literary or cultural context.

3.2 Interpretation beyond biography

The three interpretative strategies outlined in the previous section, and represented by Langdon, Freedberg, and Reynolds and Ostrow, largely rely on recreating the context contemporary with Caravaggio's painting. Other interpretations seem to have more to do with the context and priorities of the modern historian. If, therefore, the interpretation of a work of art is about more than the artist's particular intention regarding that work of art, then, as Martin Kemp asks,

Helen Langdon deliberately constrains her analysis of Caravaggio's paintings to the scope of sources contemporary with the artist. In fact she does not write about Caravaggio's thoughts or other mental processes in her book because the source material does not allow her to do that. But what does ‘writing about Caravaggio’ mean? Does it mean only admitting information and sources contemporary with the subject? If the subject is a painting by Caravaggio rather than Caravaggio the person then a very different answer will be produced to these questions.

Since at least the fifteenth century the subject represented for artists the complexity of the reflective and deceptive relationship between art and nature. The humanist Leon Battista Alberti wrote in his treatise On Painting (1435) that the artist is better than the mere craftsman because he can change paint into nature. He illustrates his point with the story of Narcissus.

This strange passage leaves the relationship between Narcissus's flower and the flower of painting unexplained. Narcissus was not an artist but his story says something about the complexities of the relationship between art, nature and the viewer. The message that the myth contains is extended by recent discussion of Caravaggio's painting. More than any other representation of the subject, it is Caravaggio's Narcissus that seems to invite most discussion, due, no doubt, to the enigma of Caravaggio the artist that makes his painting so popular today.

Mieke Bal's book, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999), examines Caravaggio's painting, Narcissus, not for what can be discovered about its origins but for the effect that it has on the present. She considers, in particular, the ways in which Caravaggio's art has been quoted in the work of several modern artists. ‘Like any form of representation’, she explains, ‘art is inevitably engaged with what came before it, and that engagement is an active reworking … This process is exemplified by an engagement of contemporary culture with the past that has important implications for the ways we conceive of both history and culture in the present’ (Bal, 1999, p. 1). ‘Quoting Caravaggio changes his work forever’ (ibid.), declares Bal, and in doing so creates the self-reflexive discourse of the art which allows a ‘reversible relationship’ between past and present. Earlier, Gombrich had put it slightly differently:

If, for example, Caravaggio's Capitoline St John is in fact Isaac Laughing, there is good reason why it has taken so long for the title to be ‘corrected’. The title effectively sets the description and interpretation of the painting in such a way that it is difficult to ‘unscramble’. The analysis of Caravaggio's Narcissus by Mieke Bal below frames the consideration of the painting in very modern, fluid terms. Bal relies heavily on the complex psychoanalytic research of Jacques Lacan (1901–81) (the relevant part of which will be outlined below). She uses Lacan's reversible – or mirror – relationship between the viewer and the viewed to extend her argument about the interpretation of past art in modern terms.

The self-reflexive discourse of the art which allows a ‘reversible relationship’ between past and present, allows Bal to base her analysis of Narcissus not on the artist's intention but on the viewer's interaction with it. Fortunately, Bal points directly to her method – the application of the theories of child development and the ‘mirror stage’ with which Lacan extended the work of Freud. In this explanation by Rosalind Minsky, it is obvious why Bal sought to link Caravaggio's Narcissus with Lacan's theories. The one rather neatly describes the other.

Bal's interpretation of the painting could not be more different from Langdon's. Conveniently, Helen Langdon reviewed Mieke Bal's book and in her review explained why the two approaches are so very different.

But, as Kemp warned, there is a natural gap between an image and words which means that they will never be one and the same thing. Langdon's boundaries are defined by her desire to keep to the seventeenth-century sources and avoid ‘twentieth-century myth and speculation as much as possible’. In the same chapter that Langdon considers Narcissus she goes on to look at other pictures such as the Victorious Cupid which can be linked to the contemporary popularity of emblem books – literary and pictorial mottoes which usually relied on classical sources. The sources Caravaggio probably employed for subjects such as Narcissus and Cupid were obviously complex, and would have been designed to appeal to and flatter the intellect of his patrons. (Similarly modern interpretations of the same paintings are perhaps also primarily designed to show off the intellectual prowess of the writer.) There is a careful balance to be struck between the image and the interpreter.

In the 1546 edition of Andrea Alciati's Emblematum liber there is an emblem that illustrates the difficult and ultimately irreconcilable relationship between words and images. See below for the illustration from the book. The accompanying text reads as follows:

Click to view Emblem 69 Self Love, reproduced in Alciato's Emblemata (Book Of Emblems), 1546, 49.8 x 38.6 cm. Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections.

If Caravaggio did rely on emblems for some of his subjects, then it is no wonder that modern scholars have not been able to define them exactly. That is not in the nature of the genre. Recourse to emblems as sources returns discussion of Caravaggio's art to the search for his original intentions – what was his source?

3.3 ‘Intentionality’

Is the work of art a free-standing artefact to be interpreted entirely on its own terms, extracted from its historical context, as Bal does it? Or can the artist and the artwork be brought back together again without committing the intentional fallacy?

Joseph Margolis makes several important points about the relationship of an artwork to its maker which has significant implications for the limits and possibilities of interpretation of works of art. Margolis puts it thus:

Margolis is making a point about a similarity between artworks and persons (including the artist). That similarity is the way they share intentional structures. These are structures that create ‘aboutness’, that is, what something possesses to be ‘about’ something. Just as we can take different perspectives on a human life over time, so we can present alternative interpretations of the artwork.

A biography is just such a ‘defensively affirmed … narrative account’. In particular, the art historical biography brings together the intentional structures of both artist and his or her works.

Michael Baxandall uses a very similar notion of intentionality to Margolis. According to Baxandall, reconstructing the entire mental set of an artist and his context does not close down the interpretation of an artwork but deepens and broadens it. At the beginning of the essay on Picasso's Portrait of Kahnweiler in his important book Patterns of Intention (1985) Baxandall considers the important issue of ‘intentionality’ for the interpretation of artworks outside biography. Note that he distances himself from the Wimsatt and Beardsley discussion of intention in his reference to ‘a poem’.

There is a tension between the historical object as it was created and as it is now. According to some writers, such as Mieke Bal, that tension creates new artworks and ideas. Tension and constant reinterpretation, according to Michael Baxandall, are in the nature of the continuing dialogue that artworks naturally provoke.

The kind of dialogue constructed around artists and their work will depend on the objectives of the viewer or writer who is studying them. A biographical monograph is one way of structuring the study of artists and their art and with it come a number of particular advantages and constraints on the subject matter.

3.4 Further reading

Baxandall, M. (1985) Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Interpretation of Pictures, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

Olin, M. (1996) ‘Gaze’ in Shiff, R. and Nelson, R.S. (eds) Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 208–19.

4 Conclusion

The biographical monograph is probably one of the best ways of writing appealing and accessible art history. Helen Langdon's Caravaggio is an attractive and well-written narrative of the life and work of an important and allegedly infamous artist. We learn about a set of artworks in a particular context and at the same time get to know a ‘new friend’ whose personality and environment seem to speak through the illustrations. The biographical structure is also a convenient way of controlling a large quantity of material to form a coherent and tidy narrative of an artist's life – and a quick look at the range of sources and contextual material Langdon has used reveals the enormity of her task.

Although the biographical monograph is one of the most common – and popular – forms of art historical writing it is based on problematic assumptions that have prevailed in the discipline since before Vasari in the sixteenth century. The biographical structure conflates the life of an artist with his or her work in such a way that it seems that the only way to find the true meaning of a work of art is by recreating the artist's intentions. A psychoanalytic approach is an extreme way to unite the artist and his or her work, especially if the art historian's intention is to ‘get inside the head’ of the artist. This is clearly impossible, unless the art historian intends to embellish the history with fiction. That said, psychoanalytic approaches can still be useful if the artist and his or her work are separated – because the artwork has a life beyond that of the artist.

It has not been the intention in this course to do away with the biographical monograph as a way of writing art history. Rather is has been to deconstruct the method so that you can choose to use it, or not, fully aware of its possibilities and its limitations. Ask yourself, when you write about an artwork, are you in fact writing about the artist?

References

Acknowledgements

This course was written by Dr Carol Richardson

The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this course:

Course image: Francisco Antunes in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence.

Carrier, D. Principles on Art History Writing, 1991, pp. 49–79. Copyright © 1991 by The Pennsylvania State University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

Articles on Carel van Mander, Giulio Mancini, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori all from Hibbard, H. Caravaggio, 1983, pp. 343–87. © 1983. Reprinted by kind permission of Thames and Hudson Ltd, London.

Foucault, M. ‘What is an Author?’ (1969) from Bulletin de la Societé Française de Philosophie 63, no. 3 (1969). © Society of College of France.

Colour Plate 1: Front cover of Helen Langdon's Caravaggio: a Life, Chatto & Windus, 1998, hardback. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Colour Plate 2: Caravaggio, St John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram),1602, oil on canvas, 132 × 97 cm, Musei Capitolini, Rome. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Colour Plate 3: Caravaggio, Narcissus, c.1597, oil on canvas, 110 × 92 cm. Galleria Nazionale D'Arte Antica (Palazzo Barberini), Rome. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Plate 1: Agnolo Bronzino, St John the Baptist, 1550–5, oil on wood, 120 × 92 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Plate 2: Annibale Carracci, Model Study for an Ignudo of the Farnese Gallery, c.1595, pencil on paper, Louvre, Paris. © RMN Photo: Gérard Blot.

Plate 3: Annibale Carracci, Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, 1595–1605, full fresco, Palazzo Farnese Gallery, Rome. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Plate 4: Michelangelo, Sistine Ceiling (detail), Ignudo (male nude on left above the Erythræan Sibyl), 1508–12, fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Plate 5: Caravaggio, Sacrifice of Isaac, c.1603, oil on canvas, 104 × 135 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

Plate 6: Emblem 69, Self Love. Reproduced in Alciato's Emblemata (Book Of Emblems), 1546, 49.8 × 38.6 cm. Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections.

Caravaggio, Sacrifice of Isaac, c.1603, oil on canvas, 104 × 135 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

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