‘Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy’ comes to India: Behind the enduring legacy of Caravaggio, a painter & an outlaw

So when Caravaggio broke away from the tradition of depicting her as a grand levitating figure among angels in Heaven, it turned heads. He painted her alone in a portrait, with dramatically enhanced facial features in a pitch-dark room, her ear exposed, her arms clasped, her eyes and lips half open, looking above.

Why is Caravaggio, one among the many criminals and artists of 1500s-1600s Rome, still the talk of art historians?

His origins — and how he stood out with them in hand

The arrival of the painting in India comes after a centuries-long journey. Caravaggio is thought to have painted Magdalene in 1606, which only surfaced to the public in 2014 after lifetimes of being known through copies.

He had just fled Rome, his hometown, to escape a death sentence for murdering a man in a brawl.

Unlike many artists of his background, when Caravaggio became a painter in the 1600s, producing three heads a day on small canvases to pay his bills, he lacked access to either workshops or the patronage of a rich man. It would take him being noticed on the streets to attain these. He was called a “common criminal”, with a handful of petty crimes and altercations under his police-recorded name.

At a time when still life was considered cheap, and art in Rome was witnessing the grandeur of Mannerism (elegance, fantastical proportions and poses) and depictions of the heavens itself, Caravaggio earned his popularity through being shaped by his circumstances.

Biblical figures in Caravaggio’s paintings were based on real models, sometimes even himself, complete with dirt-filled fingernails and sweat, such as in “Boy Bitten by a Lizard”, which was among the earlier paintings that first caught the public’s attention. Plump, obscenely detailed cherries — considered cheap and useless — are often pictured in a fruit basket at a table of God’s disciples in his work. The way his class position uniquely shaped his style is precisely what eventually attracted the attention of patrons, Caravaggio’s biographers would go on to write, years later.

Boy Bitten by a Lizard by Caravaggio. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The light, the darkness and what came in between

Rich, almost unrealistic bodily poses of Mannerist paintings were swapped out by Caravaggio for moments of drama among realistic figures, uncovered by an excruciating light. His technique — referred to as chiaroscuro, of which he is among the most prominent users in history — slices the characters’ body parts into the scene of drama and out by using light and darkness in high contrast to each other, as opposed to a continued garden of beauty.

Caravaggio’s mastery over chiaroscuro, also seen in Mary Magdalene and his most noted paintings like “Judith Beheading Holofernes”, partially comes from the fact that he literally had to resort to a suspending light on the ceiling to paint his models. But it also holds a lamp to characters’ hesitations, thoughts and humanness in the Bible — often in places where they had not been written.

Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Despite the gradual lean of Roman society towards “realistic” depictions of human figures and contrast in art, as evidenced in the rise of the Baroque movement in 1600, Caravaggio made the technique his own.

Realism in art — particularly in depictions of the Bible — at the time emerged soon after the Protestant Reformation, because the Catholic Church wanted art to “help Christians reconnect with their faith”.

But Caravaggio himself was no angel. One account of his antics in 1604 reads that at a restaurant, he was angered by a waiter who told him to figure out which artichokes on his plate were cooked with butter and which with oil. The maestro proceeded to throw a plate at the waiter and threaten him with a sword.

No scholar on the artist could reduce him to a mere member of a shifting time, despite its obvious influence.