A year and three days ago I attended an exposition, here in Utrecht, of Caravaggio’s work. It was like if the Louvre would have send a small daughter to visit Utrecht. But it wasn’t only the Louvre, it was also the museum Uffizzi, and the Vatican museum, and quite some others. They exposed, among others, “the entombment of christ” and “the meditation of Saint Jerome” and, to my fascination, “Medusa”. The experience of seeing in front of my own eyes, about half a meter away from my face, paintings that I have been admiring for a lifetime in books and posters, it is hard to describe in words. Hard enough that has took me this long to make something of the notes I wrote, a year and three days ago.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sant_Jeroni.jpg
Is Saint Jerome crying? or does he smiles? Perhaps the softness of his knee is an intimate reminder of something, an answer to the smile, or the cry. But then why is this softness anchored in a lack of definition, when the nipple is delineated in glorious, almost obscene, resolution? Is this a choice, a balance with the almost forgotten, barely suggested mouth and navel? Just like his eyes, so deeply shadowed that don’t manage to convey anything? Is this what impact us like a physical thrust, the uneasy balance between evocative softness and sharp sensuality, of shadowed mistery and clear indication?
The skull in the table has the same shine that all the skin of Saint Jerome, but his scalp. Above which, the suggestion of an halo, sheds grace. Also on us, looking at this 400 plus years after it was painted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entombment_of_Christ_(Caravaggio)#/media/File:Caravaggio_-_La_Deposizione_di_Cristo.jpg
The only eyes, to the sky. The hands, delicately posed on the wound and in the navel almost as a caress, perhaps as the caress of the spear. The hands that are about to actually penetrate the wound. And the skin, the skin of Christ so different of the men that are about to entomb him, and so similar to the skin of the women that mourn him.
Nobody bears the sight of his face. An open face, even if the mouth is a rictus and the eyes are closed in pain. An ample forehead, that outshines an almost suggested long mane of falling hair.
And his muscles, the strong muscles on his arms and legs, muscles perhaps designed to bear all what we have done in the 2000 years hence.
A god, or his son, can not be weak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa_(Caravaggio)#/media/File:Caravaggio_-_Medusa_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
As if we could escape, in the last moment, the tragic destiny of being ourselves. But it is late, it is too late. The body already far away, abandoned. The mouth fixed in a aethernal cry, as if dying would be, also, a way of turn into stone.
Is the blood another purple mant, like the one Saint Jerome wears? Or are those bloody smears ropes that try to anchor us to a haven that we have already left?
And the snakes. A knot in the face and a life behind, many lives trying to escape the dying head, just like the gargoyles try to escape their cathedrals. Or the snakes as the arms of the ultimate octopus, deep in the abyss of being incapable of looking, or loving, anybody.
The horror of being an assessinated assassin, a terrible woman finally defeated by an artifact of men, perhaps the relief of not being the monster no more. Or perhaps the ethernality of being remembered as a beast without redemption.
The horror.