Caravaggio Story (#8)

Half of the art I saw at the Uffizi art museum in Florence was lost on me. I enjoy art, I enjoy looking at it and sitting across from it and thinking about it. I like the time and patience you need for it, and that’s why museums are lost on me – I cannot give that much attention to so many paintings, and so I feel half-assed in my considering them. Ten rooms into the Uffizi I was breezing through like a horse with blinders, barely giving each piece a look. I didn’t want to, to be honest, I’d never get out. Somewhere, though, near the end of the first floor, across the room, I saw a painting. I still don’t know what it was that grabbed me; maybe it was the darkness of it, how it looked like a hole in the wall, and so different from everything else hanging in the room, on that floor of the building perhaps.
I walked over and stared. Front, center and alone in the frame was a half-clothed person holding a glass of wine. The bulging bicep seemed male, but the arched eyebrows and thin shapely lips were feminine. The figure leans forward with the large wide glass full of red wine, almost offering it to me. His or her face was red, glowing, drunken. The first few moments I failed to see the crown of leaves, of grapes, circling the figure’s head. There was also a bowl of fruit, a carafe of wine, as well as a splash of cloth in the frame, but I gave those details only a passing glance, because the person his or herself dominates the entire work. The face is relaxed, but gently smiling, the bare breast, which I now see is flat like a man, is in the picture’s middle, and the figure’s hand grips the half removed shirt suggestively. This thing oozes with something sensual - innuendo is palpable. Sex, or drink, or anything else seems too obvious, it just has a feeling of indulgence.
I’m no mythological scholar, but in the three or four minutes I looked at the piece, the god of wine and indiscretion was impossible to misplace; this was Dionysus, Bacchus. My tunnel vision didn’t lighten, though, after those first few minutes of observation, barely moving outward to the work’s details, I stared at the face. The face, the expression, it is so, suggestive. So damned lustful. That is a look one doesn’t see frozen very often, that look of comfortable, patient, unconcerned, oily expectation. I would allow no child of mine to leave the house in the company of someone with that face.
At some point I looked down, reflexively: Caravaggio, Dionysus. I didn’t know much about who he was, but I know that Caravaggio was one of the most famous painters of the Baroque.
My earlier attention to less interesting pieces in the museum put the other students ahead of me, and not wanting to be left behind when they exited the museum, I hurried along. I gave Caravaggio between five or ten minutes of my time and that was the last of my contact with the painting, at least until I got back to Rome and on the computer.
Now I know Dionysus was one of Caravaggio’s earliest paintings when he became successful, produced in 1596 for a cardinal, his first major patron. The teenage boy used as a model is prone on a mattress in the cardinal’s palazzo, but there is a good deal more important information in the work that escaped me in the Uffizi. The carafe of wine has a reflection, one with a painter and an easel in it, and the wine in the glass ripples due to the model’s stressed hand, and, most strikingly, all of the fruit is rotten. Caravaggio tricked me - while I focused on the lustiness of the figure, I failed to see the clues to the image’s artificiality, to the painters own criticism of the character. Just as Bacchus mythologically lures people into his world with his seductive sensuality, eventually leading to their crazed destruction, Caravaggio lures one into the painting with his engrossing figure, only to make them blind to his criticism of that very man.
I had stopped in my tracks and walked all the way across that museum room to be made a fool of by a 400-year-old dead man. Caravaggio’s Dionysus is perfectly understandable, to one with my basic understanding of Greek mythology, or someone without, it’s that simple. The lustfulness, the critique of it, the rot and the comeliness are all there to anyone who takes the time to look.