The Observer, February 8, 2008
Volume XL, Issue 16
Masterful cinematography leads a turbulent portrait of Caravaggio
Angelo Longoni's film about the life of Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio owes its rich stature and finely realized settings to the work of Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and the charismatic acting of Alessio Boni in the lead role. Although produced for television in 2007 by RAI as a two-episode, three-hour biographical sketch, Caravaggio has been seen in European film festivals and was shown to American audiences at New York's Lincoln Center as a heavily reworked cut. Filmed to evoke the striking contrasts of light and shadow of Caravaggio's sublime paintings, Storaro's remarkable work deserves wider recognition as Oscar season approaches.
Three hundred years elapsed after the painter's death before Caravaggio's contributions to art were rediscovered by the public. Storaro's critically acclaimed depiction of the artist's life has been shown only to select groups of film connoisseurs, and a wider circulation of this film's unique craft deserves a much more immediate recognition.
Longoni's episodic narrative centers on 21-year-old Caravaggio's arrival to Rome as a volatile and haggardly misfit of explosive temperament with a notoriously troubled existence. The painter's dark interior life is closely reflected by the film's carefully-controlled lighting, and the conception of his large-scale works is portrayed as fitful bursts of hallucinatory inspiration. Much like the painter's work, the light in most interior scenes of the film usually emanates from a single source, often from above, and contrasts earthy subjects with distilled spirituality. Late-Renaissance Italy comes to full life as the film was shot on location in Rome and Sicily using a large cast, elaborate sets, and the interiors of famed palaces. The dramatic momentum of the film is propelled by the painter's ability to find himself at odds with almost everybody he encounters, including his esteemed patron Cardinal del Monte and the Medicis, and the action is carried by the numerous brawls, swordfights, and duels that ensue throughout. Alessio Boni gives a dynamic portrayal of the painter, thatprecariously balances a sensitivity to his surroundings with a mercurial and short-tempered disposition on the constant brink of madness.
Presented with luminous reverence, many of Caravaggio's most famous paintings are featured, including Boy with a Basket of Fruit, David with Head of Goliath, Cardsharps, and perhaps most notably, The Calling of Saint Matthew, which is effectively shown as appearing before the painter as an ecstatic testament to his own abilities. Although the film introduces a range of characters – Caravaggio's alleged male and female lovers, the rivals with whom he battles, and his powerful supporters – it is in fact the characters with whom the painter does not speak that there is the greatest communication. From the start, the artist's unusual fascination with natural subjects and models extends to an almost dutiful fascination with death, and the camera closely follows his facial reactions as he examines corpses he encounters, and the visages of executions. A very telling scene follows the anguish of Caravaggio as he endured the burning of heretic philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno as a metaphor for the artist struggling against the opposing forces of the world.
The fragmentary plot of the film is only increased in the cut-down version seen in film festivals, and there is a perplexing lapse in continuity as the late Caravaggio encounters the Knight of Malta, who had given him his prized and emphatically guarded sword; their melodramatic reunification has little context beyond unexplained nightmarish flashbacks. Nevertheless, the film leads with fateful inevitability to the artist's demise with a finely balanced blend of imagery, foreboding, and controlled intensity. The fever-pitch emotionalism and richness of the pictures evoke the lavish Italianate tableaux of Luchino Visconti and the early Gregory Markopoulos, but the inward tension of Storaro's Caravaggio has a vitality uniquely its own.
