A young woman is leaning against the wall of an old building, holding an infant in her arms. She is gazing downward upon two figures kneeling before her with their hands folded as if pleading to her. In reality, they are praying full of adoration, for the woman is the Holy Virgin Mary. The child in her arms — the young Saviour. This month’s inspirational artwork is the Madonna di Loreto by Caravaggio.
As the very first inspirational artwork of the month on The Painter’s Gaze and in celebration of the Feast of the Assumption I chose the Madonna di Loreto by none other than my personal favourite painter, Caravaggio. This painting represents one of my earliest encounters with the greatest Italian master of the baroque and I have a vivid memory of the impression it made on me at the time. I believe it is fair to say that this picture played a decisive role in turning my own heart towards this marvellous world of light and shadow, which Caravaggio revolutionised and truly made his own more than any other artist that came before him.
Michelangelo Merisi, born in 1571 and better known as Caravaggio, named after his Lombard hometown, realised this artwork sometime between the years of 1604 and 1606. Upon fleeing from his birthplace of Milan at the tender age of 21 over a violent altercation with the police, he arrived in Rome later that same year, where he quickly gained popularity for his artistic talent and notoriety for his heated temperament. Thanks to his connections to the powerful Colonna family as well as Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte he was able to make a small fortune by painting one commission after another. Initially he was most sought after for his secular works, such as The Cardsharps, The Lute Player or The Boy with A Basket of Fruit, but eventually religious paintings for churches and chapels became his bread and butter. His first work of Christian art is his 1595/96 painting of Mary Magdalene, today to be found in the Galleria Doria Pamphilij in Rome. Early on he proved to be an extraordinary painter in the truest sense of the word: While many of his contemporaries preferred to carefully draw out and design their compositions before putting paint to the canvas, Caravaggio, the young, hot-blooded man that he was, decided to work straight on the canvas and develop his pictures in a much more organic, spontaneous manner. A painter of the Lombard school through and through, he was known for his use of chiaroscuro, which is the sharp contrast between light and shadow that today we associate more than anything with baroque painting.
