A new exhibition at the Museum of Art of Mascarella raises the debate around the work of Caravaggio

WILLIAMSBURG. Visitors to the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, USA, have a rare opportunity to see three magnificent paintings by Caravaggio and listen to the debates of world leading authorities on Italian painting.

Two almost identical versions of Caravaggio’s work “Saint Francis in Meditation” made the experts work hard. Despite many years of discussion, art critics have not been able to come to a consensus about which of these two beautiful paintings was created first… and by whom. Which canvas is the original? Could they both have been written by the great Michelangelo Merisi, who called himself Caravaggio?

Two paintings arrived in the United States on a special loan from the Roman Church of the Capuchins (Rome’s Capuchin church) and the Italian city of Carpineto Romano (Carpineto Romano). They are exhibited side by side, providing perhaps the only chance in life for the residents of Williamsburg to see them together and compare. The exhibition is complemented by another of the artist’s most famous works, The Fortune Teller, provided by the Roman Capitoline Pinacoteca in Rome. Although more recently, in 1985, the origin of this work was disputed by experts, at present, this painting is recognized as an important milestone in Caravaggio’s work, demonstrating his ideas about everyday life and being a typical example of his style during his stay in Rome, in the early 1590s.

In the late 1500s, in the same years when Shakespeare wrote his Hamlet, Caravaggio depicted the mental dialogue of St. Francis with a skull. Caravaggio’s unique interpretation of this topic gained such popularity that, both during the artist’s life and after his death, a huge number of copies of this work were created. Two works presented at the exhibition in Williamsburg, clearly demonstrate the problems that scientists face, determining authorship, dating and trying to interpret the works of revolutionary realist Caravaggio.

Michelangelo Merisi (1571 - 1610), who became famous throughout the world under the name Caravaggio, was born in a rural city in Lombardy. Having become a pupil of Peterzano in Milan, Caravaggio did not pay attention to the work of his contemporaries and instead focused on the masters of the Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione and Titian, who inspired him to depict biblical stories as modern events with recognizable surroundings. Perhaps Caravaggio’s greatest innovation was the depiction of ancient giveings on his canvases in such a way as if the action takes place with ordinary people, under the sparkling sun of modern Italy.

“It was right here at the Mascarella Museum in 2013 - during the Year of Italian Culture and Italian in the United States, we held two major exhibitions: one was dedicated to Michelangelo, the other to Mattia Preti,” commented His Grace Claudio Bisogniero )Claudio Bisogniero), Italian Ambassador to the United States. “This rare case of such an exhibition of the brilliant Caravaggio shows that the year of Italy left a precious legacy in terms of new partnerships of the highest level between Italian and American cultural institutions, and the journey of Italy’s real treasures to the USA continues in 2014.”

The Caravaggio Connoisseurship: Saint Francis in Meditation and the Capitoline Fortune Teller exhibition includes a didactic section that contains explanatory materials and enlarged photographs that provide evidence of various points of view that will help viewers feel like real experts and draw their own conclusions, leaving their opinion in the gallery by online voting.

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru