Carracci and Caravaggio, Their Masterpieces in the Santa Maria del Popolo
one of the great things of being in rome is you can just walk up to a church and you'll find some beautiful treasures inside this is the Santa Maria del Popolo that you see behind me hidden underneath all this scaffolding because they're restoring it but inside there's a chapel that contains two caravaggio's and you can just walk in and have a look and that's exactly what we're going to do. Now once we've entered the church you need to get all the way up to the choir because there just to the left of the choir that's where the chapel is and there are by the way quite a few other chapels we've just passed them all ignoring them completely and they are filled with beautiful works of art as well but i think you'll have to do another video on those we are heading to that chapel just to the left of the choir and we're going to give you a little bit of background before we get to the paintings by caravaggio by the way it's worth noting that even when you stand right in front of the chapel you can't really see the caravaggios you actually have to go in to see them because they're on the side walls now the chapel it's known as the Cerasi chapel because it was built or commissioned by a man named tiberius Cerasi he had been the treasurer general to the pope and i guess he made quite a bit of money because he commissioned this chapel and for it he employed some of the most sought-after artists in all of Rome he very much went for the top of the line the most fashionable artist at the time in the city for instance he bought his little chapel and had it rebuilt by Carlo Maderno and Maderno had made his name a few years before by designing some facades of some smaller churches he had done that so very very well that the pope had commissioned him to build the facade of saint peter and i think most art historians would agree that this design was not the best possible but still it's clearly a very prestigious assignment and he was still working on that and gerazi managed to get him to build his little chapel as well and then he employed two different artists to decorate the chapel on the one hand caravaggio obviously and he was to make these two paintings that this video is really about but the whole chapel was designed by Annibale Carracci and Annibale Carracci was one of the other great fashionable artists of of its time of its generation he was working on a much larger project at the time which was a whole series of frescoes in the palazzo Farnese just across town and Carracci was a really famous and popular painter but he worked in a very different style from Caravaggio his work was much more colorful and and brighter and some would say prettier because he didn't go for that typical realism that caravaggio liked so much Carracci most likely designed the entire chapel but the actual work the stupid ornamentation and the paintings on the walls and all that was left to his assistants most notably inocenzo taconi and it's actually kind of strange that it was that the entire chapel wasn't done just by karachi in his workshop for some reason Cerasi decided to use another painter for these two paintings on the sidewalls and one with a very very different style to Carracci but caravaggio had just become very famous he just finished his work on the contarelli chapel there he had painted a series of paintings depicting the life of saint matthew and that had been his first public commission so these were the first large works that could be viewed by anyone not just the owners of a painting because of course usually if you own a painting it's in your house and only your own family and your visitors can see it now this cycle in the contarelli chapel had made his name throughout the city by the way if you want to know more about it i have made a video about it as well and all you have to do is follow the link that i'll add at the end of this video but it meant that caravaggio was very much in demand he was the fashionable painter to hire but still it's unclear why why chiragi chose to combine two so completely different painters for this one little chapel what is clear though is that they had to work together and they actually did there was a design made by Carracci and caravaggio had to fit into that design he had been given dimensions to make his paintings in and well he was very much aware of what the rest of the chapel would look like when it was finished of course he knew the work of Carracci so he knew what to expect and even though this video is mainly about caravaggio we have to have a look at karachi as well because well it's a lovely painting and it's it's there and what we see here is the scene of the assumption of the virgin according to catholic dogma mary was transported to heaven with both her body and her soul well actually the story it's a little bit more confusing there are two competing narratives and both were believed by various people and they were at some point combined into one dogma but i think that was only done in the 1950s but there's these two stories and the story is as follows at some point mary was old and an angel appeared before her to announce that she would die after three days and then mary asked the angel to bring the apostles to her now they had spread out across the world and they were transported by angels on clouds to marry and on that third day they assembled around her bed and saint peter held a mass at her bedside and in the third hour of the night she died jesus came down from heaven to collect her soul and the next day or i don't know maybe a few days later but i guess the next day the apostles went to bury her and during that burial angels appeared and lifted the body of mary up into the heavens and for centuries there have been discussions whether or not she was transported with body and soul at the same time and that's why i guess now the dogma is that jesus came back again during the burial and returned mary's soul to her and then she was lifted with body and soul anyway in 1600 when Carracci was to paint a scene he simply assumed that it was both body and soul that we lift it up because we can see she's awake and looking up at heaven and she's carried by various angels who don't just carry her but also look up at her lovingly you can also see that she's quite young which is of course at odds with the story but it had become tradition to depict mary as a young woman no matter what stage of her life it was in because it was believed that because of her purity she never aged now you can see the tomb where she'd been lifted from and around it are apostles there are only 11 of them 9 in the background and of course in the front you can see saint peter and saint paul you can recognize them by their traditional colors peter wears yellow over blue and also he has just his fringe of white hair and his bold on top and then he has this curly white beard these are simply the traditional ways in which he is depicted because of course we don't know what he actually looked like saint paul is on the right side and he wears pink or red over green these are also the traditional colors he has a brown beard and usually he's depicted as completely bold but not in this case but what's important is to note that saint peter's on the left and saint paul is on the right because that corresponds with the placements of the paintings by caravaggio because the entire chapel is divided up into the left side dedicated to saint peter and the right side dedicated to saint paul and of course over the altar the most important part we see the assumption of the virgin karachi used very bright colors and large figures with clear motions to show us what they're doing and everything you see is very very light and for good reason he was good at painting these altar scenes for small chapels because you have to imagine that these chapels are quite dark there isn't that much natural light that comes in in fact the only natural light that comes into this chapel comes from a window above the assumption of the virgin and that of course doesn't shine directly on the painting so the altarpiece is in shadows and can only be seen by candlelight and that's why it's a good idea to have bright colors there but you can also see that's a very different approach to the one that caravaggio used but before we get to him we're going to have a bit of a look at the ceiling because there the story of the assumption simply continued you can see that mary there is crowned in heaven by jesus this is one of the scenes painted by innocence and this is one of the scenes painted by inochenzo taconi and perhaps here you can also see that on the left there's a scene involving saint peter and on the right one involving saint paul you can recognize them by their colors and in both cases they are confronted by jesus now the scene with saint peter is known as domine cuovares meaning lord where are you going it's a story from the acts of saint peter which are not part of the bible and the story is that saint peter decided to flee rome because he feared persecution and as he fled along the appian way outside of the city he met jesus carrying a cross and moving towards rome so peter supposedly asked him lord where are you going and jesus replied that he was going to rome to be crucified again and that's when peter knew he had to turn around and go back to rome specifically to be persecuted which fits nicely in this place because directly beneath it we see the crucifixion of saint peter by caravaggio on the other side we see saint paul kneeling in front of a vision of christ this one is not as clear as the other one that is i'm not sure which of the stories it tells there are two candidates it could be paul in third heaven which is mentioned in the second letter to the corinthians and it could also be christ ordering paul to leave jerusalem which is in acts 22 17-21 but then again maybe it's simply both by the way you can also see that the central panel is carried by angels made of stuko that's of course because that scene is in heaven these are all these details that most people will miss when they visit the chapel because you're sort of overwhelmed by how much there is to see and people pretty much then focus on the caravaggios but it is worth noting that the whole thing was made after one design that and that there's one consistent iconography for the entire chapel so that the all the stories that are told are integrated because of course as i said the stories in the ceiling are directly linked to the stories you see in the paintings by caravaggio there are even more scenes to the sides of the chapel next to saint peter here you see a couple of them there are scenes from his life and there's some about the life of saint paul on the other side and actually just to the left in this picture you can see the edge of a little monument and that's the actual funerary monument for Cerasi he was buried there in 1601 and it's worth noting he had only bought the chapel a year before by the time he died he was 57 years old and that wasn't considered to be old at the time for rich people gerazi was only 56 when he bought the chapel so perhaps he had had some disease or was generally in bad shape or something and because not only did he commission all of this he stipulated that it had to be done by july of 1601 so pretty quickly and as it happened that was a little bit too late because he died on the 2nd of may of that year so just a couple of months before his own deadline and by that time most of the work had been done the chapel had been rebuilt all the decorations by takoni had been made the karachi was finished and put in place only the two paintings by caravaggio weren't there yet but then again it wasn't his deadline yet but as it happened he eventually wouldn't make his deadline he would be several months too late and the reason he didn't make that deadline may very well be that the first versions of these two paintings were rejected by gerasi and he had to start over and what we see in the chapel are the second versions oh i forgot to mention that this this design of the chapel was quite usual i mean that you have one wall dedicated to saint peter and another one to saint paul and the altar to the virgin mary particularly in rome this was quite normal because peter and paul are the main patron saints of the city and the fact that peter's on the north wall and paul is on the south that had actually been done in different chapels so it may have been traditional there was in fact one very famous precedent although it was famous at the time and hardly known today and that is because today that particular chapel isn't open to the public but at the time of caravaggio it was and i'm talking about the cappella paolina which is in the apostolic palace in the vatican it's a chapel right next to the sistine chapel but as i said not open to the public today i think it's only used for private masses for the pope and the conclave gathers there to hear mass before they go into the sistine chapel to elect the new pope but it's called the chapel of paul because it was built under pope paul iii he had been the pope that unveiled the last judgment by michelangelo in the sistine chapel if you want to hear by the way the story of the sistine chapel i've made a series of three videos about that and you can see them here but after he had unveiled the last judgment in 1543 he implored michelangelo to paint the two walls of his new own chapel which michelangelo did quite quickly as it turned out because he had many other jobs to get to and he finished it in i think in no time at all in a couple of months and michelangelo had become so incredibly famous he was this sort of superstar that an entire generation of artists started copying everything he did he is by far the most influential artist in all of history and in the generation well actually during his lifetime and in the generation after he died you really couldn't get away from him and it's often said that it took the genius of caravaggio to find a new direction for art he was ever famous for not following michelangelo he claimed that he never looked at other art and he was only inspired by what he could see in nature and it must be said that that was mostly true but it was an exaggeration because he did look at existing art and he looked particularly well at the work of michelangelo and he was in a way inspired by him but not in the sort of slavish way that the generation before him did in what we call the mannerist he took this completely new direction after studying very carefully what michelangelo had done because just look at the way that michelangelo painted saint peter in the capella paulina and then see how caravaggio painted it and also for saint paul he really looked closely at the work of michelangelo even though the current ones look very very different but remember this is the second version of the painting and the first version of it we still have this is that first version of the conversion of saint paul it's now in the balbi collection but can you see that the way saint paul is lying on the ground it sort of resembles the one of michelangelo and for some reason this version was rejected at least that's what we think happened because the first biographer of caravaggio it was called giovanni bagliani he told us that he said that the first two were painted in a different style and the patron didn't like them now it's possible that that happened it happened more often to caravaggio that his first versions were rejected but in this case perhaps it isn't true because you see these two paintings were mentioned in an inventory of a man called giacomo sanesio i'm not entirely sure if i pronounced that right but this is the way it's spelled and that was a very very powerful man in the vatican and he was also a great collector of art and he was known to use his influence to acquire works of art that is at some points he may have pressured caravaggio or Cerasi to sell him these works but it could also have been that he simply bought them after they had been rejected and this first version is much more crowded you can see saint paul lying on the ground covering his eyes because he's just been blinded by divine light and an angel comes in from the top right and that's apparently the one delivering the message to saint paul or saul as he would have been called at the time but there's also this strange looking soldier to the left that looks a bit drunk or something and there's this panicked horse that is not mentioned in the bible but can be seen on the fresco by michelangelo strangely also paul is barely dressed he has a helmet although it has fallen off and he's wearing this sort of military style garment from the waist down i'm not entirely sure what it's called but it is based on the idea that paul was a roman soldier which is often claimed and has for a long time been believed but i don't think that he actually was or i don't think that that's what people believe these days because of course he was a tent maker and a rabbi but he was also a roman citizen and he was on his way to damascus and he had been very critical of christians and while he was on the road to damascus he had a vision and he was blinded by a heavenly light and a voice said to him why do you persecute me and he would remain blind until a man called ananias came from damascus to greet the blinded soul he touched his eyes and then he could see again now this first version is painted on wood as was stipulated in the contract both paintings were to be made on wooden panels but the two that are in the chapel now are both on canvas wood was more expensive than canvas at the time in italy so it again indicates that character didn't mind spending a lot of money on it but many painters preferred to work on canvas and more to the point caravaggio clearly did because most of his work is on canvas even when he had a choice between materials now let's return to the second version the one this video is actually about and now finally we're going to have a good look at it because this is a far superior painting in my very humble opinion to um to that first version you see that first one is is crowded there's too much going on and here in the second one it's much more focused on that fallen man on paul the man we see here lying with his face towards the edge of the painting with his arms spread out and in this case the other man and the horse are there as well but they're not panicked and they're placed to the background so that you can see paul on the ground with the light that shines on him which because that is what the story is about this time of course he's fully dressed which makes a lot more sense and you can see that he's dressed in the correct colors green and well in this case it's a reddish instead of pink but that's a matter of interpretation painters were free to choose that he had a helmet he's lost it it's right next to his head and he has a sword at the side because at the time in 1600 they were clearly of the opinion that that paul was a soldier and to make him more roman he's actually shaved he doesn't have a beard because he was a roman and romans used to shave and of course it's meant to show us that he was young but as i said the main role is played by light you can see that light is shining from an unseen source and it shines directly on him on paul you can see that there's shadows on the outside of both of his arms so the light is shining on his face on his torso on his heart because that's where it hits him he is in religious ecstasy and it's worth noting that he is the only one who sees that so the light is a divine light not an actual light because neither a horse or the man holding the horse has any idea of what's going on and that's why this is such a powerful painting because it focuses directly on the story itself and it doesn't have all kinds of things happening around it that don't really matter and if we look at the other painting the crucifixion of saint peter you can perhaps even see more clearly that he took a number of cues from michelangelo and then did it very much in his own way the story that is told by the painting is that saint peter was martyred he was going to be crucified in rome or well just outside rome because crucifixions were done along the roads that would lead into rome and that happened because he had first fled rome and then returned which is the scene that we see above this painting in the ceiling as i told you before but he was going to be crucified which was not an unusual way to execute people in the roman empire and he requested not to be crucified the way his savior had been so instead he was crucified upside down and this was well known as a tradition within the story of saint peter and it's told in the so-called acts of saint peter that's not part of the bible they are considered apocryphal and what we see is he has already been nailed to the cross and now they're erecting it upside down of course and it's a very unusual scene to make to pick that moment the moment that he's being erected the entire scene of the crucifixion of saint peter is quite unusual because when you see a crucifixion it's supposed to be the crucified christ not saint peter so to see his martyrdom well that wasn't done that much but later in the baroque it would become much more popular to see this very moment the struggle to erect the cross and painters would have taken their cue from this very painting because it became so much more popular to show movement and action a more dramatic sort of scene and it was then used as an alternative to just showing saint peter's standing with some keys in his hand which was the the usual way to depict him but here we see these three executioners they're trying to get the cross upright well upside down but upright anyway we can only see part of the face of one of them the others we can't see their face at all and no doubt that's on purpose because that makes them anonymous they're just doing a job we're not supposed to engage with them it's all about saint peter we have to focus on him and not the executioners and we can see that they're having a bit of trouble there this cross is heavy and with a man attached to it they struggle to get it up can you see by the way that there's a blue robe lying in the right hand corner saint peter is supposed to wear yellow and blue so that's his mantle because people were apparently undressed before they were crucified and you can see that saint peter is well aware of what's happening he's he hasn't fainted he's awake he lifts up his head and even though he must be in pain he still tries to get up from the wood of the cross you can also see that he's bleeding from these wounds and there's a little subtle detail there because can you see his feet they are fairly clean the caravan was famous or maybe infamous for painting people with dirty feet even saints but if you look below one of the executioners has his feet towards us the soles of his feet and you can see that those feet are really really dirty and in comparison saint peter's feet are very clean so that's probably meant as a reflection of his clean soul of his sainthood or whatever and that man that's crouching there he seems to try and lift up the cross with his back he's pushing down on the ground with his hand on a shovel i think we're supposed to see that as that he's been using that shovel to dig a hole the hole where you would place the cross in now if we look back at the version of michelangelo you can see on the one hand that it's a mirror image of caravaggio but there's a number of things that are very much the same one is that saint peter also looks up from the cross in this case he's angry he's defiant which in a way reflects his character because in the stories in the bible of saint peter he's always the one that's decisive or angry and sometimes aggressive you know when jesus was arrested he was the one who rushed forward and attacked one of the soldiers only to be stopped by jesus but also below him you can see that there's a similar crouched figure and he's actually still digging a hole in the ground with his hands because he has put a shovel to its side but he's the one digging the hole where the cross is going to be placed in so in many ways you can see that both paintings reflect on michelangelo's work in the chapel in the vatican but that's where the comparison ends because of course caramaggio only made a reference to these paintings he didn't try to copy it because he made a very different version they're much more dark and much more focused on the saints by the way you see that stone that lies right in front of the painting and if you look closely you can see that there's rocks in the background now of course originally peter was called simon the name peter well at some point he was known as kefir in aramaic and in as kephas or cephas in greek and the latinized version of that is petrus which in english is peter but the original word meant rock as in the latin word for rockets petra and that's of course because jesus famously said that simon was the rock his church would be built upon so he's referred to as simon simon peter or peter but i think it's safe to say that the rocks we see up front and in the background are there in reference to his name and in this painting just as in the in the one of saint paul light is of course very important in telling the story because everything is dark except for this one source of light that falls on saint peter you can actually follow the shadows and see where the light is coming from and it comes from somewhere outside of the chapel probably one of the windows on the other side of the transept it's an actual window in the church but peter is not looking towards that light and he's also not looking at us at the viewers he's looking away in a specific direction and he is in fact looking at the altar in the actual chapel because that's where his savior is now only one of the executioners the one of whom we can see a bit of his face seems to follow that same gauge of saint peter but we'll never know if he sees the same thing now in both of the paintings the perspective is made so that the best place to see it is not standing right in front of them you're supposed to see them at an angle and that means you have to stand right outside the chapel right at the entrance of the chapel to see them correctly and that's of course where visitors always are because you're not allowed in so all the pictures you usually see of these paintings are therefore not at the ideal angle because caravaggio realized that people would never be standing right in front of them and while painting them he noted where the light would come from and where it would shine on the paintings so that he could incorporate that in his painting and make it fit better in its surroundings so it would in his own way fit perfectly in the chapel and the best way to experience that of course is to go and see it for yourself now to do that you have to go to rome and let's face it you have to do that anyway at some point in your life and it's not a bad thing to do i mean they have brilliant food and wine and lovely people and more art and you can shake a stick at but before you go and pack your bags please hit the the like button if you enjoyed this video and if you haven't already then of course subscribe to this channel because then you can more easily see everything else that i've made and i'd like to thank you very much for watching and see you again soon bye
2020-12-28 00:57
