THE TAKING OF CHRIST BY CARAVAGGIO ( 1602) - NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND

 

The Taking of Christ

By Caravaggio ( 1602)

National Gallery of Ireland

 

One of the very interesting things about The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio is the way in which he utilises other senses in the work, thus heightening the already overloaded visual content with an aural element also which I personally think heightens the intensity of the impact of the audience ( notice I did not say viewer ), as they are not only being assaulted by an overwhelmingly visual experience, they are also being bombarded aurally.

Samuel Beckett made the very interesting observation when discussing the orchestral work of Beethoven that the composer used to harness silence in order to lend greater poignancy to the music that prefigured the pause, and of course which came after. In a very similar way, I would postulate that Caravaggio in this very impressive work uses what could be described as a semiotics of sound particular in the remarkable gesture of the apostle on the extreme left in the painting who has his arms outstretched in such a dramatic fashion, almost like the movements of the arms of a  conductor bringing an orchestra to a climax, or to a Beethovenian pause! Their very symbolism, placed directly alongside the head of the Christ figure, help as a counterstroke, literally, to the main event which is being depicted; the kiss that Judas places upon Christ’s cheek as a signal to the soldiers accompanying him that this is the man they are looking for. The fact that the painting hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, opposite Merrion Square only a few paces from the house where Oscar Wilde was born is simply a remarkable coincidence; Wilde of course famously wrote:

 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

 

Though Wilde could not have been referring to the Caravaggio, as the painting was only discovered long after his death in the 1990s in the house of the Jesuits not far from Merrion Square on Leeson Street.

The fact that Caravaggio paints himself into the canvas holding a lantern up over the assembled group, so that he can actually see the face of Christ ( one is reminded of the Rolling Stones song from the album Exile on Main Street ) merely adds to the drama of the moment. Caravaggio was a violent man, he had fled his native Milan in 1592 after having had a violent encounter with a police officer, wounding him, and he when after successfully setting himself up in Rome, he was soon seen swaggering around the capital city with apparently a manservant in tow, duelling with anyone who was brave enough to take him on. Caravaggio, like Wilde, was a gay man, but unlike Oscar he was also an incredibly violent one. He eventual murdered the son of a powerful family 4 years after The Betrayal of Christ and was eventually to die in very dubious circumstance in 1610 having spent his last four years trying to evade his fate. Accounts differ as to how he actually met his fate, but some think that the family of the young man whom he killed finally might have finally caught up with him. Whatever way he did eventually meet his death, his life was one of violence and we can not only see this in this magnificent work, as I have already said, we can also, if we listen very carefully, hear it!

We should not be so surprised, Arthur Rimbaud, the famous 19^th century French poet, in a letter to Paul Demeny ( 1871) , writes of the ‘systematic derangement of the senses’ in which the poet, or in this case artist, can see sound, hear sight! By re-organising in the work of art the different senses in this manner, the poet writes, one could better intensify the work and therefore make it all the more Real. Total communication. Ideas of inclusivity being triggered here too of course, over 100 years before Howard Gardner ( 1983)  popularised the idea of multiple intelligences and which has had such far reaching consequences on teaching methodologies today, particularly in terms of presenting school curriculums within the context of inclusivity. Artists like Caravaggio, Beethoven and Rimbaud (geniuses all) are simply total communicators, utilising every sense imaginable, and twisting them, in order to get their ideas across. This is what is happening in Caravaggio’s   The Taking of Christ. We, the audience, are privy to the great darkening storm which is going on in the tableaux. The chiaroscuro technique is of course not just literally technical brilliance, it is also metaphorically imbued to the point of complete breakdown. For the dark is vision eternal of the errant wanderer. Caravaggio would go onto spend the remainder of his life fleeing from his pursuers who would hunt him till the ends of the earth and on his way he would paint religious paintings, each more devasting as the next. The contents getting darker and darker, think of David with the Head of Goliath which he painted in his final year. There he is as the decapitated head of the monster, he knew the darkness was eventually going to close in; you can hear it whispering to you like a fell wind.