London is a killingly boring, sad city overcastted with depressed people in funny accents that seems awfully provincial coming from New York, but their art museums are choke-full of high-class art exhibitions. On a recent weekend there, my wife and I sank into major shows of the art of Caravaggio (National Gallery), Joseph Beuys (Tate Modern) and Bruce Nauman (same venue).
I had long for catching “Caravaggio: The Final Years” ever since I felt under the spell of a powerful chronicle of the artist’s last dark struggles written for the New York Times by Keith Christiansen, Curator of European Paintings at the Met and part of the curatorial team behind this much-touted exhibition. The show initiated in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, as “Caravaggio. L’ultimo tempo. 1606-1610”; Mr. Christiansen had gone back to New York in awe and shock for what he had prepared and seen there. His and Caravaggio’s emotions were energetically transmitted into words to spread and read. I enjoyed and felt the Times article as much as I lamented and sobbed my loss of the exhibition, which was originally intended to travel to the Met but had to be withdrawn. Then it all went to sleep for a while, until a friend advised me, “going to London? Don’t miss Caravaggio!”. I did not, thanks to him. But the fuss failed to live up to the (high, very high) expectations.
Caravaggio’s last, obscure and extraordinary years saw him wander, physically and intellectually, between Naples, Sicily (Palermo, Siracusa, Messina) and Malta, and back to Rome, which he never reached. Merisi left some astonishing examples of his somber, strongly human art in Sicily, now sheltered in museums in Siracusa and Messina I was unable to visit in my stay in the island. This exhibition would have been an opportunity to see the much missed Sicily masterpieces, but –despite presenting two of the three surviving paintings, the two kept in Messina- the Siracusa painting (the magnificent “Bury of Saint Lucy”) was absent from the London display, and those two in exhibition, hailed as masterpieces, were too much varnished, darkened and unreadable as to impress. Similarly, the huge altarpiece from the Co-Cathedral of Saint John in Valletta, Malta ("The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist"), never travels, and the other Malta painting presented in Naples (“Saint Jerome Writing”) didn’t make it to London. The superb “Seven Works of Mercy” conserved at the Church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Napoles did not travel to London, either. The grand “Nativity” from the Oratorio de San Lorenzo in Palermo, one of his most astonishing masterpieces, was robbed for by the Mafia in 1969 and has never reappeared.
What we had left in London, thus, were easily accessible paintings from London itself, the Met, Cleveland, Madrid, Rome or Florence (many of them I had seen), badly lightened and assaulted by excited crowds of elders armed with audio guides. The space was tiny and narrow and the masses were overwhelming, thanks to the greediness of the National Gallery; the masterpieces, missing. Caravaggio’s brutal humanity and straightforwardness was there, but almost buried despite its amazing strength. All I can recall back in New York is not awe or astonishment, but the disappointment and anger of such a messy loss. Feelings, otherwise, Caravaggio would have readily taken as definers of his extraordinarily difficult life.
