Caravaggio

On Friday of last week I took Jeff House and Fiona Stevens to the exhibition of paintings by "Caravaggio and his followers" at the National Gallery. There were a lot more followers than works of Michelangelo di Caravaggio, but he was well represented by a selection of a dozen or more of his sacred and profane works. The latter are more interesting, paintings of common people: gypsy fortune tellers, card-sharps, pick-pockets, soldiers, riff-raff of the gutters of Renaissance Rome, with expressive faces, vivid movements captured like stop-motion photographs. The sacred paintings included St Francis of Assisi in a ragged, patched cloak, Christ's body being lowered from the cross, Abraham about to cut his son's throat until the angel points out the convenient ram. It was a very well spent morning. So today I rented a DVD called Caravaggio. It turned out to be a surreal version of his life story, with vividly evocative close-ups of some of his paintings, anachronistic touches like cigarettes and toques, a typewriter on which an art critic is painstakingly hunt-and-peck typing savage comments on Caravaggio's latest profane masterpiece, and the sound-track of a steam train when there is a love scene on the screen. It was weird, but worth seeing. Just barely: the set piece cinematography captured Caravaggio's style very well, and it was worth seeing for this, but not for any other reason. It would have been incomprehensible if I hadn't so recently learned a lot about this brilliant innovative artist.