Caravaggio and the Painters of the North at the Thyssen Museum

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• published: 20 Jun 2016
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There are cities and moments of explosive creativity in the history of art. The Paris ‘avant guarde’ or the pop artists of New York, for example. Rome, in the early 1600s, was home to another of those outbursts of originality. There, in 1596, the young painter Michelangelo Merisi, Caravaggio arrived from his native Milan: with a brilliant talent and a revolutionary spirit. Without preliminary drawings, he painted directly from life: people from the neighbourhood and local taverns, immortalised if not always sanctified. Caravaggio was a painter and a violent man, fascinated by the moment: able to capture with a precocious photographic talent the exact second when a lizard bites the hand of his model, causing him wince: an artistic first. Violence, one of the characteristics of Baroque painting, abounds in scenes of tension: when the Angel of the Lord stops Abraham's arm a split second before it reaches the neck of his son Isaac, or when blood spurts from Holofernes’ neck, to the disgust of his executioner, Judith. Among the thousands of young men who came to Rome in those prodigious decades and admired Caravaggio, many were French and Dutch. In Rome, there were so many painters because there was also an extraordinary demand for art, both civil and religious. Thanks to this artistic coexistence, the genius of Caravaggio had a decisive influence on painters like Rembrandt, Rubens, Vermeer, and Velázquez. The exhibition, “Caravaggio and the painters of the north” brings together 12 original works by the master and forty more by TerBrugen, Nicolas Regnier, Van Honthorst and other Dutch, French and Italian painters who lived through the violent years of the birth of Baroque. Indeed, the same decades as Shakespeare and Cervantes. Today we see them as classical paintings, but exhibitions like this at the Thyssen Museum allow us to travel back in time to understand just how much life, struggle and drama is contained in the history of art. This is Caravaggio’s last painting. The arrow, blurred by speed, enters the chest of Saint Ursula, who confronts her martyrdom and her end. Behind, Caravaggio himself looks on with a mixture of fascination and horror. From 21 June to 18 September, travel with the Thyssen Museum back 400 years to the Rome of Caravaggio and the painters of the north.