Seeing is Not Believing: Art, Incredulity, and Caravaggio`s Tempting

Seeing is Not Believing:
Art, Incredulity, and Caravaggio's
Tempting Touch
Heather Diack
"Look, but don't touch" is the mantra-like reproach that the modern
museum directs at viewers. Ironically, however, the artistic principle of mimesis
deliberately threatens and tempts the viewer's self-restraint. Considering that
art's solicitation of the impulse to touch has been seen as a measure of its
success, the designation of such sensual desires to a state of perpetual limbo in
the modern museum hints at the tense relation between seeing and believing
that lurks in the understanding of 'art'. Sight itself is merely the most obvious
sense implicit in the visual arts; it never stands alone. Mining the paintings of
Caravaggio for evidence, I will demonstrate in this paper how the context of
Renaissance/Baroque Italy's intense preoccupation with the battle between the
human senses and their capacity to inform both faith and knowledge affected
tangible repercussions on the very concept of art.
Howard Hibbard calls Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610)
"the most arresting European painter of the years around 1600."1 The choice of
the word "arresting" seems here to serve a double task: firstly, to accurately
describe the effects Caravaggio was able to capture and produce with his work,
holding the viewer's attention/ and secondly to off-handedly comment on
1
Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, 2"d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) 7.
Even such casual rhetorical devices as "holding" attention reflect how deeply embedded a
sense of touch is to human perception and understanding.
2
Caravaggio was criticized for depending too heavily on his eyes. In the
Caravaggio's renown as the "most arrested" European painter of his time as
well. 3 Contemporary biographers through to historians today have been
fascinated with linking Caravaggio's tempestuous psychological character and his
cinquecento, the prevailing trend "in both art and theory, was to exalt 'perfected
nature' rather than the mere imitation of what the eye sees.'-s An investigation of
artistic works. The infamous characterization perpetuated of Caravaggio is one of
vision and visuality was extremely critical to the world of Caravaggio and his
a dangerous and unpredictable man. Details such as the striking abundance of
contemporaries. Sight was, and remains, a contentious site of investigation. An
decapitation scenes in his work are cited as proof of his fascination with violent
Italian contemporary of Caravaggio, the revolutionary Tuscan scientist Galileo
circumstances. Here, I am primarily interested in the self-reflexive aspects of
Galilee (1564-1642), was also working at this time, discovering optical devices
Caravaggio's work, the 'self' that I am looking for is not Caravaggio's personal
such as the telescope with the far reaching effects of displacing man as the
self (as in other biographical interpretations), but rather his paintings' self.
center of the universe. As Galileo's story demonstrates, challenging conventions
Agreeing that Caravaggio was cunning and daring has led me to look for
of perception was a dangerous game. Philosophical thought at the time was
moments when his paintings confess their awareness of being paintings. Thus,
intimately bound with theology; knowledge and religion were inseparable. Galilee
an understanding of the central expectations of 'art' in Caravaggio's day will be
was persecuted for disproving the order of things in the humanist world.
of strategic import to understanding the possible tropes that compose and are
Similarly, Caravaggio would antagonize the norms of the art world.
By appealing to the basest of the senses, touch, through the most
embedded in painting itself.
If the prescribed rules of what is 'good' art can be articulated, then its
counterpoint of what is 'bad' art can be deduced. During the Renaissance there
was a revival of antique texts that discussed the tenets of admirable art.
Measured against such writings, Caravaggio was renowned as "an iconoclast in
the eyes of his contemporaries because he refused to subscribe to the idealistic
theories of the Renaissance. "4 These idealistic theories were based on and
privileged of the senses, sight, Caravaggio's works seem to bear witness to the
fact that these senses are only diametrically opposed when based on cultural
notions of the hierarchy of the senses. In reality, as Caravaggio's approach
indicates, sight and touch are intrinsically related, and even contentiously one
and the same. Others such as Descartes also likened seeing to touching? Such
analogies are not without consequence.
A conception of human existence based on dialectic oppositions, such
derived from an accretion of stories and attitudes surrounding 'art,' beginning
with Aristotle and continuing into the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Caravaggio's documented position within this artistic tradition should
be discerned as both a result of historians' efforts to categorize painters and of
as sight versus touch, was formative to life in the seventeenth century. For while
it is true that the word "baroque" was not applied to the visual arts before the
end of the eighteenth century, its fundamental opposition to a classical style was
Caravaggio's own artistic practice. Caravaggio's real rebellion was that he
refused to follow the model of painting that advocated that an artist begin with
disegnO' rather than nature.
6
3
Caravaggio was a "notorious painter-assassin": he killed a man in 1606 (Hibbard 46).
Hibbard 46.
5
f!isegn~ he:e refers to preparatory drawings and designs (conceptual as well as formal).
Dtsegno 1_s ~1scussed and defined by Giorgio Vasari in his 1568 edition of Le vite de' piu'
e~ce/~entt pttt?n, _scultori e ~rchitettori as the intermediary between nature and painting;
G1org1o Vasan, Lwes of Arttsts vol. 1 & 2, ed. George Bull (New York: Penguin Classics
1987).
'
4
Hibbard 46.
Ancient notions of "extramission" (the belief that optical rays that issued forth from the
eyes were thought to touch the object seen) from medieval Byzantium, continued into the
Renaissance. Vision was haptic as well as optic, tactile as well as visual. Disparate sources
also suggest that Byzantines regarded vision as performative, in the sense that looking was
doing. See Robert S. Nelson, "To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium,"
Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000) 143-168.
7
92
,., 93
nevertheless manifest due to that culture's "attempt to define itself with respect
to the tension it so acutely felt between the demands of reason and feeling.''8
The reification of the senses that links sight with reason and relegates
touch with feeling further problematizes this situation. Perpetual tension is
paramount. Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (1508) on the ceiling of the Sistine
important example is Cicero's De Inventione that describes Zeuxis' picture of
Helen, formed from a combination of the most beautiful features of many
models. Because men of the Renaissance believed that antique artists had made
this type of selection, they also thought that ancient art was more worthy of
emulation than nature itself. 13 Bellori criticized Caravaggio on such standards.
Chapel sustains this logic. For while this piece, which is absolutely foundational
[He] recognized no other master than the model, without selecting
to the modern conception of Western art, shows life being activated finger to
from the best forms of nature - and what is incredible, it seems that he
finger, from the divine to man, it only insinuates touch: "These hands do not
imitated art without art [pare che senz'arte emulasse l'arte] ...despising
touch; they nearly touch. ' 19 By implication the act of creation is envisioned as
the superb statuary of antiquity and the famous paintings of Raphael,
tactile in origin. The daring Caravaggio breaches the space in between,
he considered nature to be the only subject fit for his brush. As a
simultaneously exacerbating and satisfying this primary desire to touch.
result, when he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and
Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), writing before Caravaggio's time, was
Glykon in order that he might use them as models, his only answer
responsible for the Renaissance revival of Platonism. 10 In his commentary on
was to point toward a crowd of people, saying that nature had given
him an abundance of masters. 14
Plato's Symposium he expounded on how touch was the lowest of the senses1
stating that: "Nature has placed no sense farther from intelligence than touch."11
Similarly, another Platonist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) also
described in his Oratio (1486) the precarious danger of bodily attraction as it
resided in the hands, ruminating on how touch would be responsible for hurling
An ancient precedent for Caravaggio's reaction here could have been Pliny's
description of the painter Eupompos in his Natural History, who, when "asked
which of his predecessors he followed, pointed to a crowd of men, 15 and said
the soul not up, but down the ladder of ascent. 12 Amidst this environment that
denigrated the explicit nature of touch, Caravaggio's sensuousness would
13
certainly be viewed as rebellious.
Significantly, the idealistic theories of art that were emphasized during
the Renaissance were often predicated on earlier stories from Cicero and Pliny.
Looking back to these texts, Caravaggio's contemporaries grasped stories to
exemplify and rationalize their own artistic endeavours and mandates. An
8
Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, "The State of Research in Italian Painting of the
Seventeenth Century," The Art Bulletin LXIX A (December 1987): 494.
9
Renee Weber, "A Philosophical Perspective on Touch," Touch: The Foundation of
Experience, ed. Kathryn E. Barnard and T. Berry Brazelton (Connecticut: International
Universities Press, 1990) 16.
10 M . .
. ar]one O'Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from
Mtchelangelo to Calvin (Leiden: Brill, 1998) 4.
11
Marsilio Ficino, "De vita," trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clarke, Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies 57 (1989): 124.
12
Boyle 5.
Hibbard 46-47.
Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de'Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Moderni (Rome, 1672)
~1bbard 201-202 (my emphasis). Whether Bellori's anecdote is true or not is in many ways
Irrelevant. For even if it is false, such fictions certainly add to a richer reading of
Caravaggio's paintings. Vasari for example is not always consistent and his is certainly an
embellished chronology of art, inflected with anecdotes, but the significance of his Lives
should not be underestimated. Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey have noted in their
article on the "State of Research in Italian Painting of the Seventeenth Century" that to
analyze seventeenth-century works out of context from the rhetoric that surrounds them
deprives history of its fascinating complexity. Furthermore, that "seventeenth-century
Italian art is [itself] rhetorical does not seem an especially revolutionary perception"
(Cropper and Dempsey 495).
15
The responsive gesture Caravaggio makes in Bellori's anecdote resonates with our
argument. "Pointing to the fact" is not a haphazard gesture. The instinctual reaction of
pointing/reaching outward from the self is an elementary and natural way to show
~vidence. "Look here," the admonitori in so many religious paintings throughout history
mdicate. In that this gesture again binds sight to tactile demonstration, it illustrates the
interrelationship between eyes looking and manual showing. The gesture of pointing
guides the narrative in many Caravaggio paintings. Examples include Abraham and Isaac
(1601-02) in which the angel intervenes not simply by grasping Abraham's hand but more
importantly by pointedly giving instruction; in the Calling of St. Matthew (1599) three levels
of pointing operate, stretching from the figure of Jesus and echoed all the way to the
14
.
94
95
"'V
that one ought to imitate nature itself, and not another artist."16 The pointing
reaction, the reaching demonstrative gesture, is revealing. With the assistance of
such tales, Caravaggio's intimate relationship to nature above idealism has been
cemented in the history of art as his greatest fault.
By accounting for details in Caravaggio's work in relation to written
texts such as Pliny's, an argument can be developed that Caravaggio's paintings
towards it. Notably, Fra Girolama Savonarola, in a sermon of 1496,21 argues
against the 'success' of Zeuxis' art, claiming that such deception would work only
on birds, not on men with good eyes. Savonarola extends this assertion to make
a comparison between the inability of human eyes to be fooled by such tactics
and how men with good spiritual eyes can distinguish what is and is not God's
work.
In the lesser mentioned second phase of Pliny's anecdote, Zeuxis'
similarly function as rhetoric, that is revealing of, and critically engaged with,
visual style itself. 17 Caravaggio was after all "viewed from the start as a polemical
competitor, Parrhasius, answers with a similar rebuttal. Parrhasius presented a
master of naturalistic effects."18 As veritable analogs to Cicero's most exalted
curtain, and Zeuxis urged Parrhasius to draw it aside, to let him see the
forms of rhetoric, Caravaggio's hands themselves were designed for the art of
competing painting. Zeuxis then reaches for the curtain to pull it back, only to
persuasion.
realize to his dismay that it is a trompe l'oeil painting, and that, being so fooled,
Persuasion itself, as a rhetorical skill, is often aligned with the ability to
he must admit that he has lost. Parrhasius' success is revealed when Zeuxis
deceive by verisimilitude. A seminal text that stages this as the criterion of
touches the painting. The crucial point in this instance is that a man was fooled,
successful, or 'good,' art is Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Creighton E. Gilbert
or even more impressively, another artist, overcoming the Savonarolan objection
calls Pliny the Elder's written description of the competition between Zeuxis and
that only less intelligent creatures would be victims to such visual illusions.
Parrhasius (Natural History 35, 66) 19 the most famous trompe roeil 20 Trompe
The feat of fooling another artist as a measure of artistic prowess is
l'oeil in its usual function seeks to please by first deceiving and then by inducing
pervasive in the history of art. Stories of other artists identifying with the fooled
admiration for the maker's skill. The story is organized in three phases, but
Zeuxis abound in the Rennaissance. Annibale Carracci related trying to pick up a
interestingly, only the first is quoted in most common references. In this first
book while visiting the studio of the admired Sassano, only to find it was painted
phase, Zeuxis exhibits a painting of grapes that is so successful that birds fly
paper. 22 And long before the Carracci, "Filarete around 1460 report[ed] himself
fooled by painted fruit, in the studio of an artist in Venice, who, [arguably], was
Marco Zoppo."23 Art historians have similarly held a higher respect for the
perceptions of artists. Even Hibbard, writing in 1983, says of Caravaggio's
biographer Baglione, whose Lives were published in 1642, that since Baglione
questioning hand of Matthew; this kind of movement is reiterated in the Supper at Emmaus
(1600), where the composition is supported primarily by the triangular tension of
significant, and eye catching, arm gestures, beginning with the disciple on Jesus' right
hand side who is fixated the moment, before movement in a state of shock 1 to Jesus'
uplifted hand as he blesses the meal, and ending in the emphatic gesture of the disciple on
his left side whose both arms are outstretched in exclamation.
16
According to Hibbard, the citation of Eupompos was a cliche in the Renaissance (Hibbard
48).
17
" ... rhetorical being [essentially] a system for stylistic analysis and practice", Creighton E.
Gilbert, "Grapes, Curtains, Human Beings: The Theory of Missed Mimesis/' Pictorial Mimesis
Before and After 1500, Kunstlerischer Austausch (Berlin: Akademie, 1993) 415.
18
The history of Western "Art" has been dramatized as a competition with its inevitable
series of winners versus losers, (ie. the visible and the invisible) in th~ art world. We still
feel and feed the effects of such models. Gilbert 415.
19
Gilbert 415.
20
Gilbert 413.
was himself a painter in Rome during this entire period, "we have to take all his
statements seriously."24
21
Fra Girolamo Savonarola,"Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria [di] Girolamo Savonarola "
L'arte del quatrrocento nelle testimonianze coeve, ed. Paolo Ghiglieri (Rome: A. Belardetti
'
mu~
22
Gilbert 414.
23
Gilbert 414.
24
Hibbard 8.
96
,..
97
In the often occluded third phase of Pliny the Elder's account, Zeuxis
tries again, 25 this time offering a painting of a boy carrying grapes. Again birds
flew towards it, and Zeuxis again understood that he had lost, for the birds were
undeceived by the boy and not afraid to fly towards his painting. Yet, based on
this logic, Parrhasius did not win either: because the real test evidently would be
to create a human figure that produced the same results as Zeuxis' grapes or
Parrhasius' curtain. That Parrhasius' work was a play on the expectations of that
particular moment and setting is also significant. It needed to be staged in order
to function.
great competitor. 28 If any work can be said to reconstitute the third phase of
zeuxis' and Parrhasius' competition, it would be Caravaggio's early painting of a
Boy Carrying a Basket of Fruit (1593-94). Caravaggio's cine pure still life, Basket
of Fruit (1593), from about the same year could be understood as an attempt to
recreate Zeuxis' first try. 29 The manner in which the Basket of Fruit exceeds the
table's surface, sticking out over the edge, emphasizes the invitation to touch
that Caravaggio has cleverly embedded in this work. The basket balances
precariously on the edge, suggesting the tentative relationship between art and
the viewer's reality.
Among assertions regarding what composes 'good' art, the most
Strikingly, the theatre also implicitly assumes a relationship between
sight and knowledge: "The theatre, as has often been remarked, shares the
same root as the word theory, theoria, which meant to look at attentively, to
behold."26 As a related aside, "behold" is another word that implies tangibility,
and attests to the integral relationship between sight and touch, vision and
sensuousness. The temptation to touch is evoked most often by the sight of
desire. Other words, such as apprehension (or apprehandsion) are also linked to
knowledge and comprehension (or comprehandsion). 27 Again, the deep dialectic
between sight and touch is linguistically and significantly embedded at the base
of Western aesthetics.
That Pliny's text was well known in his culture, and could possibly have
served as an inspiration, is shown by the citation of it by Annibale Carracci, his
famous is surely Giorgio Vasari's (1511-1574) three-part history of The Lives of
the Artists (1550,
2nd
ed. 1568) and his description of art's qualitative progress.
His measure of the improvement of the second period over the first was a work's
closeness to nature, which could therefore be verified against the 'real' thing.
The third period is defined as the height of perfection by Vasari, which logically
leads one to assume that art in this period was completely identical to nature.
However, this is not the case. Arriving at the third phase, the criterion of
naturalism fades away, and instead Leonardo and the others are praised for
technical qualities such as grace and mobility, or for rivaling classical antiquity.
Sometimes they are said to surpass nature, which is not the same thing as
identifying with it: "Here as in Pliny's three-part story perfect illusion seems to be
stated at first as the goal, but it is not where we arrive; [paradoxically] at the
moment it seemed to be complete, other concerns supervene. "30 The desire for
perfect mimesis is perpetually subverted, and yet, perhaps precisely because of
25
Norn:an Bryson in his book Vision and Painting: the Logic of the Gaze (1983), relies
on the argument that mimesis endures as the most basic litmus test of good
art m the Western tradition of art, yet amazingly he reports only the first two phases of
Pliny's s~o~. ~e overwhelmingly exclusion of Pliny's third phase from scholarship is
perhaps 1nd1cat1ve of the complicated issues such scenarios engender.
26
_J~y 23. For a history of the word, see David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision:
Nihiltsm and the Postmodern Situation (New York: Routledge Press, 1987) 99.
26
A s_ense of the tangible is embedded in both comprehension and apprehension.
Accordmg to the Oxford English Dictionary "to comprehend" is defined as to seize, grasp,
lay hold of, catch, entrap. On the other hand, "to apprehend" shares much the same
connotations and denotations, being defined as to lay hold upon seize to arrest take
possession or embrace either physically or mentally. Intellectu~lly, a~prehensio~ also
suggests recognition and understanding, and potentially fearful anticipation of what one is
becoming conscious of by the senses; http://dictionary.oed.com.
em~hat1cally
its unattainability, mimesis remains the single agreed test of good art. 31
Caravaggio's work was revolutionary in relation to the traditions both of
art and nature, the twin foundations for reformist criticism and the revival of the
arts. In his painting, he was able to closely reflect the reigning, and competing,
28
Gilbert 415.
Gilbert elaborates on how Caravaggio exalted still life to the status of high art in Italy
with this picture. Gilbert 415.
30
Gilbert 417.
31
Gilbert 418.
29
98
,.
99
tenets of artistic epistemology in the early modern period. His was a "self-aware
a scene vividly encapsulates a central truth surrounding the Italian Baroque: it
image.'m
was a period where everything was coded, ripe for intrigue and suspicion.
While paintings of still-life subjects may not have been particularly
caravaggio, his person and his art, accord perfectly to such tensions. Cropper
fashionable in Rome in the early seventeenth century, such pictures were
and Dempsey have asserted that, "Caravaggio explicitly gives the lie to the
popular in antiquity. Pliny the Elder's descriptions of Zeuxis' paintings are but one
traditions of art (to which he was certainly not indifferent) by representing its
example. Considering that men of the Renaissance raked Pliny for details on the
fictions or visions of the supernatural according to the non-historical accidents of
lost art of antiquity, it seems predictable that still-life representations would be
particular and everyday experience."38 Their choice of the word "lie" is another
revived in Italy. 33 Making these "stills" appear alive was intrinsic to 'good' art. 34
revealing commentary on Caravaggio's artfulness, as synonyms for 'artful'
The Boy Carrying a Basket of Fruit illustrates that Caravaggio's realism
was itself highly selective. Scholars remain uneasy regarding how to resolve the
include not simply skillful and adept but also cunning and disingenuous. It seems
that Caravaggio's style leads him to be suspected of insincerity.
discrepancy in his rendering of the boy "which betray[s] a crude technique and
There is a soliciting aspect to the Boy Carrying a Basket of Fruit that has
fumbling knowledge of the body"35 in contrast to the extreme realism of the fruit.
been commented on by many writers. 39 The viewer is temptingly invited to touch
According to Hibbard, in some of Caravaggio's paintings such conflicts in the
both the boy and the fruit. The boy's look to the viewer is one of provocative
work are so great "as to make us think that he is satirizing Renaissance art."36
daring. I would argue that the soliciting aspect that appears so obviously here
Surely the explanation is more complex than satire; irony and deliberate
appears again in most, if not all, of Caravaggio's paintings. Sensuous solicitation
ambiguity are definitely aspects of Caravaggio's masterpieces.
is integral to Caravaggio's art.
The poorly painted boy being could be read as a visual example of
Representations of the theme of touch recur abundantly in Caravaggio's
Cicero's "sprezzatura' or "careful negligence,"37 as a kind of calculated
paintings. One memorable example is Boy Bitten by Lizard (1593-94) [Figure
carelessness on Caravaggio's part that deceptively appears uncalculated.
1].40 It is with this work that an exploration of startling, momentary action and
Castiglione's The Courtier (1528), probably one of the most read books of the
still-life first become fused. Hibbard also cites the origins of Caravaggio's famous
Renaissance, also discusses such provocative games. Section 13 of Castiglione's
(or infamous) chiaroscuro technique in the Boy with a Basket, drawing attention
book describes rhetorical competitions that use the technique of "sprezzare,"
to the "strong diagonal shadow cast by light apparently entering the room from
fittingly staging situations amidst a courtly setting replete with ambiguities. Such
above, [and calling this] the beginning of Caravaggio's 'cellar light'."41
Caravaggio's technique of exaggerated light-dark contrasts is also further
developed here, and will continue to increase as his oeuvre progresses. Viewing
32
Victor Stoichita, "Introduction; Pictorial Mimesis Before and After 1500," The Self-Aware
Image: An Insight Into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997) 409-412. However, it is important to recognize that thE) "self-aware image"
was not exclusive to Caravaggio or the 17th c. An example of a striking precedent is
Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror(1524), which highlights specifically not only
Parmigianino's virtuosity as an artist but, moreover, his acute awareness of being just that.
33
Hibbard 17-18.
34
Ludovico Dolce compliments Protogenes' art in his Dialogue in these terms; Ludovico
Dolce, "Dialogo della pittura intitolato I'Aretino" (Venice, 1557), Dolce's "Aretina" and
Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, trans. M. Roskill (New York: New York University
Press, 1968) 153.
35
Hibbard 17.
36
Hibbard 49.
37
Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore (London: Harvard University Press, 1996) 78.
38
Cropper and Dempsey 498 (my emphasis).
For example, Howard Hibbard discusses this and Donald Posner uses such elements to
develop his homoerotic interpretation of Caravaggio (Hibbard 17).
40
Both Baglione (the biographer closest to Caravaggio) and Mancini mention the Boy Bitten
by Lizard as one of Caravaggio's earliest works. Giovanni Baglione, Vite de' pittori, scultori
ed architetti dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII dei1S72 fino a' tempi di Papa Urbano VIII nel
1642 (Rome, 1964); translated as "Life of Caravaggio" in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio
(New York: Haper & Row, 1984) appendix 351-356; and Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni
sulfa pittura (c.1617-1621), trans. H. Hibbard, Caravaggio (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)
appendix 346-351.
41
Hibbard 19.
39
100
w
101
the boy's alarmed reaction as the result of the lizard hiding in the jasmine and
· ht, but also on the dangerous desire to touch incited through vision. The
519
roses, further suggests the possibility that there exists more than meets the eye,
Narcissus myth highlights self-discovery while complicating the interdependence
Touch here produces a startled reaction; pain and shock are
between sight and touch, deception and revelation.
It is possible that when Caravaggio painted Narcissus he could have
expressively dramatized by the boy's face and his recoiling hand, the delicacy of
which contrasts effectively with the look of sheer disgust that he makes. The
42
figure's "awkward protruding shoulder"
been thinking of Alberti's words:
is present again, as in the Boy Carrying
Narcis, who changed into a flower, was the one who invented painting.
a Basket of Fruit The exposed shoulder as a device to solicit touch is
For what else do you imagine that painting does if not reflecting
overwhelmingly recurrent in Caravaggio's work. The bare, highlighted shoulder is
appearance through art as the surface of water reflected his face7 46
similarly offered to the viewer in Bacchus (1597), and Sick Bacchus (1593-94).
These shoulders are sensuous invitations for the viewer to touch, not chiefly
because they are shoulders, but because they are depicted in such an extremely
realistic style, enticing our desire to test them and verify their realness; thereby
enacting Pliny's story of mimesis.
Tellingly, the mythical themes that Caravaggio chose to depict were
particularly those that expressed "a certain anxiety about vision's malevolent
43
power,"
most notably that of Medusa (1598) and Narcissus (1597). The story of
Narcissus ties in beautifully with a discussion of the link between sight and
touch, for while it is Narcissus' sight of himself that captivates him initially, it is in
fact his desire to touch his own image that proves fatal. 44 It is the actual
satisfaction of optical desire through touch that is lethal. This reading would
seem to validate the Platonic order of the senses. When Narcissus eventually
touches his own reflection, in order to verify its truth, he becomes transformed
into a flower, forever fixated on observing himself in the water. While touch, in
contrast to sight, has been slandered for being "based on the immediate,
discontinuous, unrelational contact with ... objects it can grasp in the here and
45
now,"
crediting Narcissus with the genesis of painting may have been contentious for
caravaggio, inspiring him to play with the complicated levels of representation
involved in the story. The myth of Narcissus functions also as a lesson about
'safe distances' for looking. Furthermore, it seems to me that the emblematic
value of this painting lies not only in the chosen theme as in the way it was
treated. Here Narcissus is suspended in the moment before the touch. Choosing
to capture this particular moment is again reminiscent of Michelangelo's artful
strategy in his conception of The Creation. Both narratives hinge on the
anticipation of a simultaneously uncertain and yet highly predictable conclusion,
with touch as the focal catalyst. With this painting Caravaggio vividly stages the
"fundamental conflicts of mimetic representation," by portraying and containing
an image that is not simply duplicated within its frame but also, to a certain
point, reversible. 47 His arms form a circle encompassing both his original self and
his reflection and work effectively as a meditation on representation and its
limits. 48
the contradiction of making perpetual fixation the result of touch in the
Narcissus story gives touch another identity altogether. Touch becomes the
vehicle for permanence. This myth itself is thus not simply a commentary on
The Narcissus myth is yet another instance in which the attempt t? ~est th~ veracity ~~
the image is pivotal. Narcissus' integral role in the theoriza~io~ of ~amtln~ dunng the 15
century emphasizes how duplications, reflections, and conv1ncmg s1mulat1o~s of the ~orld
were formulated as an artistic ideal. Leon Battista Alberti, II trattato della plttura e I cmque
ordinl architettonici, ed. G. Papini (Lanciano: Carabba, 1934).
47
Stoichita 410.
46
42
Hibbard 43.
Jay 28.
44
Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Michael Simpson (Amhearst: University of
Massachusetts, 2001) 407.
45
Jay 22.
43
48
Stoichita 410.
102
....
103
Two paintings by Caravaggio that further investigate and depict the
from the young man's hand without being noticed. 53 Her victim is only able to be
fallibility of sight are the Cardsharps(1594) and the Fortuneteller(1598-99). 49 In
victimized because he is drawn to her, misled, through his sight. He is infatuated
each instance the narrative instructs that the hand is quicker that the eye, and
by what he sees, which dulls his tactile sense that he is being robbed.
that the human ability to grasp knowledge solely through the eyes is weak. Both
Furthermore, Caravaggio's deployment of the character of the fortuneteller
display the need to trick in order to prosper. 50 These works are instances of
comments again on the profound interrelationship between sight and touch: the
Caravaggio's revolutionary use of everyday subjects as models and everyday
fortuneteller sees into the future through the hand. In this instance it is arguable
activities, without idealization, as scenes. Alike in style and content, the
that sight, not touch, interprets the hand. However, the fortuneteller's holding of
Cardsharps and the Fortunete!ler feature closely framed, three-quarter length
the young man's had is vital. Both senses are required and inseparable to the
figures. 51 In the Cardsharps, the deceitful youth who hides the Five of Hearts
fortuneteller's art.
behind his back is visible to the viewer. Caravaggio lets us into to his secret. The
Hands figuratively embody and signal the "touchable quality of the
cards themselves evoke Narcissus' mirror again, with the youth to the left
Baroque."54 Probably the most startling use of the hand in Caravaggio's work is
accordingly self-absorbed. 52 Meanwhile the third gambling figure in the
his Doubting Thomas(1602-03) [Figure 2). 55 Perhaps more than any other work,
background motions vividly with his fingers, signing to his accomplice across the
this painting powerfully addresses the unstable relationship between sight and
table which cards his opponent holds. Tellingly, this cheater also wears gloves
touch. Christ's imperative response to Thomas' request to see his wound is for
with holes ripped into the ends of the fingers, allowing dexterity and sensual
Thomas to do far more than look-he must more viscerally touch. 56 While the
access to the markings on the cards. Touch is both the means to access the
subject of the Doubting Thomas, a scene of confrontation between Christ and his
card's identity and the means to cheat; in other words, touch allows for the truth
disciple after the Resurrection, was popular well before Caravaggio's painting of
that makes deception possible. This complex game is one of sense perception, a
it, his depiction of the scene was decisively different from those that had gone
competition enacted through sight and touch.
before. It was "Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio who at the end of the
The theme of a young man being duped is central to both images. In
sixteenth century pressed the sense of touch to experiential realism."57 His
the Fortuneteller the gypsy's visible seductiveness allows her to steal the ring
unusual choice of the three-quarter length format for this crucial narrative of
faith was unprecedented. 58 Showing the figures cropped, "has the immediate
49
There are of course two versions of the Fortuneteller. Here I am interested solely in the
earlier version, c. 1594-5, (115 x 150 em), housed at the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome.
However, a discussion of the comparative development of Caravaggio's artifice between
these two versions would be interesting to explore in another paper.
50
Similarly, Carel Van Mander (1604) commenting on Caravaggio's innovative style,
describes it as a means of survival for Caravaggio: "Lady Luck will rarely come to those
who do not help themselves, and usually we must seek her out and prod her on."
(Hibbard 344).
51
A cropping device Caravaggio uses stunningly in many works to heighten the viewer's
participation in the scene, a narrative formula known to Caravaggio from Lombard and
Venetian examples. Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon, 1998) 74-75.
52
Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art Preposterous History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999) 77.
53
Guilio Mancini writes "he shows the Gypsy's slyness with a false smile as she takes the
ring of the young man, who shows his naivete and the effects of his amorous response to
the beauty of the little Gypsy who tells his fortune and steals his ring" (Hibbard 350).
54
Bal188.
55
Also known as the Incredulity of St. Thomas, (107 x 146 em), in Stiftung Schlosser und
Garten, Sanssouci, Potsdam.
56
"The pericopes, [the scriptural counterparts of Magdalen and Thomas], unique to the
gospel of John, were successive in it so that exegetes could not fail to remark the contrast"
(Boyle 187). Mary Magdalen also desires to touch Christ's body, but in opposition to
Thomas, her request is denied. Christ's response to Mary Magdalen is the famous "noli me
tangere." That the Magdalen story is a foil to Thomas is accentuated by the fact that these
incidents follow one another in the Bible.
57
Boyle 190.
58
Albrecht Durer (1471-1510) was similarly fascinated by the tactile and manual motif in
this Biblical story, and therefore employed the iconography of Christ grasping Thomas'
104
105
effect of reducing the distance between painted image and spectator," forcing us
A contemporary example that testifies to the emblematic importance,
"voyeuristically, to witness the gruesome detail of Thomas's probing finger
(an importance that reaches well beyond its Christian significance to comment on
parting Christ's flesh."59 There a forcibility and agency on the part of Christ in
'art' and aesthetics), that the pericope of the Doubting Thomas continues to
Caravaggio's image as there is in no other.
solicit is a photograph by the contemporary German photographer Thomas
Thomas' hand verifies, for his eyes, the truth of Christ's identity. Again,
Struth. 64 His body of work consists primarily of photographs taken in museums to
the hand is the site of confirmation. For Thomas, the dictum "to-see-is-to-
capture the relationship between viewers and works of art. This returns the
believe" is insufficient; "the fault of Thomas, the doubter and experimenter, was
discussion to the "look, don't touch" exigent set out at the beginning. Struth's
that he had the plain evidence of the sense of sight yet demanded the added
testimony of touch."60 As the story goes: Blessed are those who believe without
having seen. 61 Thomas demonstrated that faith was, for him, bound to the
version of the Doubting Thomas at The National Gallery in London (which does
the affects such a narrative contains) shows a rope protecting the painting,
senses. The troublesome sin of idolatry, an issue of contemporary religious
preventing the touch. And yet the photographer here seizes a moment where a
debate, manifested itself literally in this way: the desire to touch the divine.
not feature a painting by Caravaggio's hand but is nevertheless demonstrative of
viewer re-enacts Thomas' impulse to touch, and rebelliously breaches the proper
Caravaggio's extreme reliance on heightened naturalism aims at
distance between image and viewer in the museum. The intensity of emotion
convincing his viewers in a similarly bodily way. 'Good' paintings Uust as in
and startling effects of Caravaggio's works elicit such reactions from the viewer.
Pliny's story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius) thus are like reincarnated corpses; they
Aligning Caravaggio with St. Thomas seems a natural elision, considering how
induce
"proof-according-to-St.-Thomas-seeking-to-touch-the-resurrectedChrist."62 Perfect mimesis would be something like this, at once horrific63 and
paradoxically Caravaggio "more than any other Renaissance artist[,] professed to
believe only in what he saw."65
awe inspiring. Because of Caravaggio's realistic style it is as if we, the viewers,
The tear in Thomas' shirt is structurally the same as Christ's wound;
the
are witness to a resurrection at every viewing.
there is a visual rhyme between the wound and the tear. The tear is offered to
the viewer in much the same way that Christ's wound is volunteered to Thomas.
With this echo, this syntactic relationship, there is a shift and the viewer is
wrist that dated back to the thirteenth-century church of St. Thomas in Strasbourg and was
explored by northern artists. Caravaggio was the first Italian artist to do the same. Walter
Friedlander discusses how Caravaggio "followed Durer's lead in showing Christ helping
Thomas to touch his wound." Walter Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, Revised Edition
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 162. "Helping" sounds here like a grave
understatement: "No longer aloof and authoritative, but intimate and involved, [Jesus]
gazes down intently at the hand exploring his wound" (Boyle 191). Boyle elaborates here
on how the practice of poking fingers into sacred or solemn places as a test of truth has
been historically important to Italian culture, citing the famous Mouth of Truth, in the
portico of the Church of Santa Maria, as an example. This round stone. was believed to bite
off the fingers of "artful" liars or perjurers.
59
Puglisi 216.
60
Boyle 193.
61
"Jesus said afterward, 'Because you have seen me you have found faith. Happy are they
who never saw me and yet have found faith'" (John 20:24).
62
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 80.
63
"The surgical detail of the picture is unbearable - or would be, were it not for the
counterbalancing composition. Caravaggio placed four heads in a concentrated diamond in
the center of a canvas that is artfully planned and plotted, which is to say that it is
unnatural" (Hibbard 167-68).
invited to draw an equation between Thomas and themselves - the implication
being that they are in the position of the unfaithful disciple, and in this instance
it is Caravaggio's cut that solicits our fingers. Reminiscences of this seminal "cut"
reappear over and over again in Caravaggio's work. 66
64
Though Bal claims that Caravaggio's Incredulity of Saint Thomas is emblematic of her
own project of drawing connections between Caravaggio's work and contemporary art, she
surprisingly omits Struth's work.
64
Hibbard 168.
65
Hibbard 168.
66
Examples of Caravaggio's obsessive "cut" include: the head of Medusa, the Burial of St.
Lucy, David with head of Goliath, Judith and Holofernes, Salome with head of St. John the
Baptist, and the Beheading of St. John. Bodies that are living in Caravaggio can also be
read as dismembered by the technique of chiaroscuro; for example, the Sacrifice of Isaac,
106
....
107
In the story of the Doubting Thomas the finger stands in for the eye; it
is a metaphor for the eye. Those who need to see or touch are aligned with
incredulity. But Caravaggio's paintings deny tactile reassurance primarily because
they cannot be read by the finger, or the eye, due to his intense chiaroscuro,
which compromises clear figural contours, emphasizing the tension between
touch and sight. What we expect to see in full light is shadowed: Christ's face.
We are forbidden from using our fingers to read his features. 67 Caravaggio
invites the viewer's touch only to confound it by showing that it cannot be
sustained. Nevertheless, the temptation to touch is hard to resist.
The human senses during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were
caught in a paradox of valuational understanding. Art was one theatre in which
this polemic was played out. Art itself was deliberating between a contemplative
ideal (signified by sight) and active reality (signified by touch). The work of
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio embodies this tension. By affectively
paralleling the model of St. Thomas, Caravaggio's art solicits sensual judgment.
The desire for tangible faith that was so prevalent in Caravaggio's day is
figure 1: Boy Bitten By Lizard, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1593-4.
reiterated and problematized provocatively in his paintings. Louis Marin was
certainly not the first to blame Caravaggio's artistic rebelliousness for destroying
the art of painting. 68 Baglione writes explicitly in 1642 that "some people thought
he had destroyed the art of painting."69 I would argue that he did nothing of the
sort; rather, by returning to an interrogation of the historic interrelation of the
senses that informed the epistemology of painting, he provoked renewed interest
in art. With his finger on the pulse of 'the' essential tensions in Italy (both
aesthetic and religious), Caravaggio represents a wave of realism that "refreshed
tired styles and reawakened interesf0 in an art that had strayed too far from life
in the pursuit of an ideal. "71
St. John the Baptist, and Sleeping Cupid, in which shadows literally undercut the viewer's
ability to perfectly see figural contours.
67
Reading with fingers here harkens back to the gambler in the Cardsharps once more. The
implicit question seems to be two-fold: whether or not we trust the image, and whether or
not the image can trust us.
68
Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
69
Giovanni Baglione, trans. Hibbard 355.
70
Many artists after him followed his example, forming the school of the Caravaggisti.
71
Hibbard 49.
figure 2: Doubting Thomas, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1602-3.
108
....,
109