To Caravaggio scholars, whose discipline became academically viable
when the artist's reputation rebounded in the 1950's, "The Taking of
Christ" was a famously vanished work, known only through copies made by
the artist's followers. Harr's rich and wonderful book, "The Lost
Painting," is an account of how, in 1990, the original was found. I'm
tempted to quick-key a cliché and say the book reads like a thriller,
because it's as gripping as a good one and even kicks off with the
ritual opening: a brief prologue suggesting the high stakes of the game
afoot, followed by the introduction of an unlikely and unprepossessing
but, in the end, surprisingly resourceful heroine. She is Francesca
Cappelletti, a 24-year-old graduate student in art history at the
University of Rome who is about to stumble upon Something Really Really
Big. In truth, the book reads better than a thriller because,
unlike a lot of best-selling non-fiction authors who write in a more or
less novelistic vein (Harr's previous book, "A Civil Action," was made
into a John Travolta movie), Harr doesn't plump up his tale. He almost
never foreshadows, doesn't implausibly reconstruct entire conversations
and rarely throws in litanies of clearly conjectured or imagined
details just for color's sake, though he does betray one small weakness
in this regard: whenever his subjects are out and about, the sun always
seems to be slanting low across the rooftops of Rome or bathing the
church domes of the city in a golden light while the swallows of spring
circle and pirouette overhead. On the other hand, if you're a sucker
for Rome, and for dusk, you'll forgive these rote if poetic
contrivances and enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life
in the city, as when - one of my favorite moments in the whole book -
Francesca and another young colleague try to calm their nerves before a
crucial meeting with a forbidding professor by eating gelato. And who
wouldn't in Italy? The pleasures of travelogue here are incidental but
not inconsiderable.The foreground pleasures are those of a
police procedural. In order to gain access to the archives of a noble
Roman family, Francesca chats up a dotty old marchesa using all the
cunning of a Columbo snuffling around for an inadvertent clue. It is in
that archive, while researching the provenance of another Caravaggio
painting (a young, nude and flirty John the Baptist with his arm around
an interested ram), that she and her colleague, Laura Testa, discover
the 1603 ledger entry, which becomes the first important signpost
leading to the identification of "The Taking of Christ." As the players
in this drama multiply - and given the career stakes, everyone involved
seems remarkably decent; the book could have used a good villain - we
are treated to an art historian's version of "C.S.I." Canvases are
X-rayed and scanned with infrared light, paint surfaces are examined
for telltale traces of the painter's M.O. - the way Caravaggio, who
didn't work from preparatory sketches, scored the ground of his
paintings with the nonbusiness end of his brush to work out his
compositions. Terms such as craquelure - an old painting's
characteristic "web of fine capillary-like cracks" - are tossed around.
"The Taking of Christ" is one of the artist's most intimate religious
paintings - a tight medium shot in Hollywood terms, the action filling
the frame with a choreographed immediacy Michael Bey must admire if
he's ever seen it.
Jesus, off center, calmly accepts his fate, hands
clasped, gaze downcast. Judas has just kissed him, the apostle's face
inches from his master's, his left hand still gripping Jesus' shoulder,
the two locked in a complicated embrace of love and betrayal while a
pair of Roman soldiers move in - the decisive moment, in
Cartier-Bresson's term. And on the far right Caravaggio has painted
himself, raising a lanteene. But left hanging, as many critics have pointed out, is the
question of Caravaggio's literal role in the scene: mere bystander or
member of the arresting party? Is he faithfully illustrating God's
design or implicating himself in Judas's treachery? Caravaggio
frequently painted himself into his works, often behind a patina of
self-loathing, at least to post-Freudian eyes. (In perhaps the most
dramatic example, a painting of the victorious young David, he used
himself as the model for Goliath's severed head, a look of nauseated
despair on his face as his blood drains from his severed neck.) It is
this conflicted quality that roils so many of his paintings of
martyrdoms and miracles; he may have intended his high-beam lighting to
dramatize God's divine love and judgment, but coupled with the dark
backgrounds and deep shadows, the effect, as in "The Taking of Christ,"
can also be isolating, each figure swaddled in its own gloom. So, yes,
certainly a genius, and an attractively tortured one at that, though
Harr records Benedetti's observation that Judas's left arm is too
short, a clumsy error of perspective on Caravaggio's part: "It looks
like he painted the shoulder and then didn't have enough room for the
arm." Of course: nobody's perfect. Maybe Caravaggio was hurried. Maybe
he was lazy. Maybe he didn't notice. But it is that teasing interplay
between craft and inspiration, between a painting's physicality and its
import, between what is knowable about art and what, ultimately, is
not, that resonates throughout "The Lost Painting" and underscores a
satisfyingly ironic coda: In 1997, seven years after it had been
painstakingly restored, its provenance documented, and its place
rightly restored among Caravaggio's canon, "The Taking of Christ" was
discovered to be infested with biscuit beetles, a common household
pest, which were feeding on all that rabbit-skin ox-bile glue that had
been used to repair it. Despite the heroic efforts recounted here,
ashes-to-ashes can hold true, it seems, for paintings as well as their
painters.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.