J.-E Berger Foundation: Caravaggio

Depiction of Night, or the Birth of Chiaroscuro

It is Caravaggio who invented "chiaroscuro" cast in the role of a work's principal dramatic agent. Other Italian painters who preceded him also attempted to portray night.

Giotto at Assisi
Chronologically speaking, the first attempt is signed by Giotto. In the fresco cycle the Legend of St. Francis of Assisi, visitors to the basilica are struck by a painting of night: Innocent III's Dream In his dreams, the Pope is visited by St. Francis upholding the sagging church. How does Giotto depict night? He portrays the Pope stretched out on the bed of his bedroom, which is open in the manner of a stage setting. The scene is flooded with daylight, on the basis of a convention obeyed by this post-Medieval artist: only the fact that the Pope sleeps reveals that this is a night scene.
Piero della Francesca at Arezzo
The arrival of the Renaissance brought with it a growing search for verisimilitude. In his magnificent fresco series, the Story of the True Cross, Piero della Francesca attempts to portray night in the scene Constantine's Dream . He does so by handling the scene in a camaïeu of grays, thus producing a monochrome effect of light that differs from Giotto's daylight. We do not yet find the light-and-dark effect that would suit this scene, which remains conventional.
Tintoretto in Venice
Night was increasingly portrayed during the surprising trend that followed upon the great age of the Renaissance, namely Mannerism (ca 1520 -1600). This school of thought focused on intellectual concerns and scholarly research. In such a spirit, the decors, atmospheres and particular incidents were left to the artists to decide.
Tintoretto painted the Adoration of the Three Wise Men as an open stage where we see the Holy Family, the Three Wise Men and the usual worshippers, bathed and highlighted by an already distinctive light provided by a tiny night light hanging a few meters above the scene. There is an attempt here to convey reality, natural details, light, but without transgressing medieval conventions.
Jacopo Zucchi
The consensus among art historians is that it was Jacop Zucchi who gave the world a first picture of night. His Psyche's Dream reveals an attempt, however modest, at distinguishing the zones of light and dark on the bodies of Psyché and Eros, to lend coherency to the depiction of night.
Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. St. John the Baptist, Basel Kunstmuseum. John the Baptist, Bâle Kunstmuseum.
Traditional representations of John the Baptist are of an adolescent, accompanied by a lamb, foreshadowing the Passion of Christ. But this portrait of him is a far cry from the Florentine and Roman High Renaissance portraits that make an ephebe of this saint, in Greek fashion. Here we have a 17th-century young man with obviously Italian features and a pallid complexion: the portrayal is forthright and eschews the idealism imposed on the plastic arts by prior generations, in particular with respect to pictorial language. This realist approach is a key concept for understanding Caravaggio's impact.
The most striking element of this painting is the light distribution. The background is plunged in total darkness. No trace of the setting is to be seen - no familiar objects or landscape or grotto situates this work in a defined site. It is as if a backdrop were stretched out behind the scene. The backdrop is in fact night - a deep brown night, almost black, where light brutally brings out the shoulder, leg, and profile of the adolescent, together with the body of the lamb.
The technical name for painting using light effects is "chiaroscuro". It is Caravaggio who invented "chiaroscuro" cast in the role of a work's principal dramatic agent.
Caravaggio, The Night Prince
In painting darkness and light, Caravaggio never worked mechanically. He had no interest in producing something new merely for the sake of novelty. His idea was to invent a new language, not in the cause of naturalism but in that of mysticism. Caravaggio renounced the epiphanies, the saintly icons multiplied by hundreds by the Mannerists; he was fed up with ascensions of the Virgin surrounded by angels and pink swirls.
Caravaggio was a mystic, a believer whose faith was deep-rooted. His idea was to give Divine Will another mission, another instrument: light as the instrument of God's will. There is no light without shadow, no shadow without light. Caravaggio extricates man from shadow to bring him to light, and this light traces His message in the night. Caravaggio cannot be considered a realist painter, no matter how plebeian his models. The underlying aim is supernatural, spiritual. What lends life to anonymous creatures is the hand of God, as represented by a shaft of light that falls on the Chosen One.
This painter's orchestration of his compositions transforms the play of light and dark into a vital dynamic agent. The human body thus loses the basic role attributed to it by the Renaissance: in Caravaggio's work, light serves as a signifier. It traces reality, underscores and exalts it, serving principally to create dialogue between the figures, a dialogue of gazes. Light defines the relationship between the figures portrayed. The light sought out is a light born out of nowhere, a revelation of divine origin. Beyond the genre scenes and the chiaroscuro technique, the resulting oeuvre is imbued with mysticism. This light of divine origin traces reality, but also helps us to understand such reality. Nonetheless, this oeuvre cannot be labelled realist: indeed, he was attacked by art critics because "He does not know how to observe reality". For Caravaggio, the mission was to create a miracle, to reveal the hand of God.