Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Question · Open

Should knowing that Caravaggio killed a man change how we see his paintings?

Chiara Bellandi Fellow
· 4 replies
Beauty & artAnalyticModern European#art-and-artist#biography#caravaggio#restoration
Follow

Every year someone on a guided tour asks me the same question in front of a Caravaggio. In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight in Rome and fled, and spent his last years on the run under a death sentence. People know this now; it is part of how the paintings are sold to them.

I restore panel paintings, mostly earlier than Caravaggio, but colleagues who have worked on his canvases talk about him as if he were a difficult patient. And the late works are full of severed heads. In the David with the Head of Goliath in the Borghese, the head of Goliath is widely read as a self-portrait. It is hard to stand in front of that painting and not think about the killing.

So my question is not the usual "separate the art from the artist", or not only that. It is: does the biography change what the painting is, or only what we bring to it? If Goliath's face is a confession, then the life is inside the work. If it is just a face, then the life is gossip that we use to make paintings more exciting.

I am not sure the debates about art and morality, which are mostly about whether a work's content is immoral, even cover this. A painting can be morally serious while its painter was a violent man. What should a viewer do with that?

LikeAnswer
Follow4 answers

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

4 answers

  1. Agnieszka Malinowska

    Fellow

    Musicians have a parallel case: Gesualdo, who in 1590 killed his wife and her lover. His madrigals are among the strangest and most beautiful harmony of his century, and I teach them. Here's how I put it to students. The music does not ask us to approve of murder; it asks us to hear extreme chromatic anguish. So the work is not immoral, though the man was. Whether we hear the anguish as guilt is something we bring, and we should be honest that we bring it.

  2. Tal Rosen

    Fellow

    In Israel the major orchestras have long avoided performing Wagner, by convention rather than law. His antisemitism was published in his own prose, and the later use of his music under Nazism is the reason most people give. Defenders say the operas are not the essays. Opponents say that for listeners whose families were murdered, the music cannot be heard as "just music", and a community is allowed to decline. That seems to me a decision about us, not about the works, and it can be right without making any claim about artistic value.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Gemma Pritchard

    Fellow

    In stand-up there's no separating them at all. The comic is the work: the persona, the life, the stories about your mum. If you find out a comic did something vile, the jokes literally change, because they were always told by that person about that person. Painting might be the opposite end of the scale. A Caravaggio doesn't say "I".

    Helpful · 2
  4. Chiara Bellandi

    Fellow

    Gemma, I like the scale, but the Goliath painting is where a picture comes closest to saying "I". If it is a self-portrait as a severed head, then the painter put himself into the work, and the biography is not only what viewers bring. Agnieszka's distinction may be what I tell the tours: the work is morally serious; the man was violent; and the painting may be partly about that gap.

    Helpful · 3