From Botticelli to Caravaggio
Madone du Magnificat, Botticelli
During the Renaissance, Botticelli invented, dreamt up, a Madonna. Botticelli's friend, Marsilio Ficino - a humanist, philosopher, and theorist - favored the Platonic method of attaining supreme beauty. In his Madonna of the Magnificat, for example, Botticelli had no need to reproduce a single face to depict his angels. In order to rival nature, he used the faces of several children or adolescents to reconstruct a perhaps impersonal, but nonetheless living, angel. An angel far more touching than the little rascals, with their dirty hands and impulsive gestures, who served as models to the painter and remained blissfully unaware of their own grace.
Botticelli's angels, built up out of memories and superposed layers of beauty, retain their whiteness, their meditative attitude, their silence: the five angels could be five dreams of the ideal adolescent. By contrast, Caravaggio was not inspired by utopia, by dreams. It was beyond his power to envision a saintly face such as depicted by a Botticelli or a Raphael. A madonna painted by Caravaggio - his Madonna of the Pilgrims (or Madonna of Loreto), for instance - had to come alive in flesh and blood, in her pain and suffering, in her light. Nor did Caravaggio invent his models, or even less, seek them out among the Roman nobility, flattering this or that daughter of a noble with the role of Lucretia or St. Anne. It was in lowly dives, in this or that inn, off the street that he sought them, a procedure that soon came to be considered as scandalous.
St. Matthew and the Angel, his first piece for the Contarelli Chapel (S. Luigi dei Francesi), in 1600, was removed on the day of the chapel's inauguration.
The man who had served as model for St. Matthew was one of the neighborhood's most ill-reputed drunkards: his black and neglected footnails in the foreground incurred such disapprobation that the painting had to be taken down immediately. Caravaggio set himself to the task of providing a second version. Death of the Virgin would be refused once the secret leaked out that the corpse of the Virgin was modelled on the corpse of a drowned girl pulled out from the Tiber.
