The Power of Art - Friday 9.00pm BBC2


Last Friday evening I caught The Power of Art on TV. This was the first episode of 8 week series covering a whole range of artists - the first being the story of Michelangelo Merisi di Caravaggio.

Starting in his home town, moving to Milan and then on to Rome, Carravagio bagan to really attract attention and win some great commissions from the church. Working straight onto the canvas wthout first taking time to make preliminary drawings Carravagio's passionate, immediate and more importantly brutally real stlye really caught the imagination of the church. Traditionally a painter's job was to romanticise and glorify religeous stories, however Caravaggio thought otherwise. Many of the gospels, depict pain and suffering resulting in some kind of enlightenment. Caravaggio painted the precise moments of suffering and enlightenment in everyday settings, featuring everyday people. This served to maximise the impact and severity of each teaching.

Consequently, Caravaggio's work hits you between the eyes. He painted the exact moment when gruesome events took place - he captured the essence or horror of each moment, depicting the facial expressions and body contortions that communicated the intensity of the situation. He ingnored formalised composition and injected passion and life into his work.

Caravaggio also attracted attention as a personality. He was often found drinking, carousing, and brawling in the streets of Rome - his antics landing him in real trouble when he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, local hard man and play boy. So he fled Rome with a price on his head and arrived in Naples. Here he actually settled a bit and produced some more great work under the patronage of the Colonna family. However this was short lived, and he headed off to Malta in an attempt to become a knight. This was so that he might be granted a pardon by the Roman authorities for the death of Tomassoni.

He managed to get his knighthood by winning over the senior officials with his painting skills but after a short time hi temper revealed itself once more and was again involved in more fighting. It was reported that he had threatened and been abusive to the other knights in the order. Eventually this led to him being kicked out and labelled as a "foul and rotten member." He then went to Scicily and then back to Naples, but died suddenly from a fever. Although there seems to be much specualtion around his final days.

Overall - what a legend the bloke was a total madman yet produced some of the most moving pictures of his time!

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this weeks episode on Bernini. My final thought being - what a really inconvenient time to put such a great program on...