Calling St. Matthew
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| Calling St. Matthew |
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| Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio , 1599/1600 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 322 × 340 cm |
| San Luigi dei Francesi , Rome |
The Calling of St. Matthew is one of the most famous paintings by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio . It was created around 1599 or 1600 in the early Baroque style and is today considered one of the most epochal works in art history. It was commissioned by the church and is to this day in the intended place of the Cappella Contarelli in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome .
Order and other paintings
The client was the French Cardinal Mathieu Cointrel , called Contarelli in Italian . Originally, he had already commissioned Girolamo Muziano in 1565 , who never took action, and after him Giuseppe Cesari in 1591, who only completed the ceiling fresco and then did not continue working. Probably through the mediation of Caravaggio's patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria Bourbon Del Monte , Caravaggio received the commission for the painting and for two more for the Cappella Contarelli around 1597/1598.
A depiction of the writing Matthew with the angel was ordered as the altarpiece, a depiction of the martyrdom of St. Matthew as the right side painting and the vocation of St. Matthew as the left side painting . The painting with Matthew writing shows the Evangelist Matthew, the other two the Apostle Matthew. According to the understanding of the time, the apostle and the evangelist were identical people, but according to more recent scientific knowledge they are two different people.
The altarpiece first created by Caravaggio was rejected by the client, only the second variant was accepted. The next painting he completed was the calling , then the martyrdom .
Biblical basis
The vocation of St. Matthew is explained in the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 9, verse 9 ( Mt 9,9 EU ) briefly described: As Jesus was walking on, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs office and said to him: Follow me! Then Matthew got up and followed him. Matthew was a tax collector , a professional group despised at the time of the act depicted, so that the call to be a disciple of Jesus himself had to surprise him all the more, as Caravaggio put it in the painting.
Representation
The type of representation and the lighting make the picture one of the most popular Caravaggios.
Caravaggio divided those involved in the event into two groups: the two people on the right, Jesus and Simon Peter calling Matthew with a gesture , and the group on the left, to which Matthew himself belongs, who points his finger questioningly in astonishment, and his Companion figures. In a more recent interpretation, however, the art historian Sara Magister sees Matthew in the young man on the far left. The strangely weak gesture with which Jesus refers to Matthew is modeled on the gesture of Adam by Michelangelo. Although Jesus is actually the central figure, Caravaggio did not place him in the center of the picture, but to heighten the drama on the right edge and had him half covered by Simon Peter. Caravaggio only added the figure of Peter afterwards, as was determined after an investigation. The reason for this could be that the importance of the Petrine office of the Popes should be emphasized, since the Counter-Reformation was still clearly active during the period of creation .
The epoch-making thing about the depiction is that for the first time in art history a sacred act does not take place in a sacred setting or in an ideal landscape, but in an everyday room. Caravaggio emphasizes the everyday with the dusty window at the top right and the depiction of the clothing of the group of people around Matthew. It is normal street clothes at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. Century. The wall of the room is not whitewashed, the representation of the room itself is bare, so that the viewer's concentration is not distracted from the gestures of the people involved. Who, besides the three saints who are otherwise represented, is not recorded. Caravaggio is, however, known for having often portrayed people he knew, mostly his Lombard compatriots in Rome.
The chiaroscuro , the chiaroscuro , which was intensified to the extreme by the hard spotlight from the top right , had never before been shown in this drama. He had experimented with it, but not with this strength. It is no coincidence that the incidence of light comes from the top right. Caravaggio knew the picture would hang on the left side of the chapel, with a light window over the altarpiece. The picture shows Caravaggio at the height of his ability, which also includes the fine psychological consideration of the different behaviors of people in unfamiliar situations. While the young boy in the yellow-red robe in the center of the picture shrinks back and leans against Matthew, the one in front turns his face and body with interest to Jesus and Peter. In contrast, the two figures on the left appear completely indifferent. The lower one simply continues to count the money and has absolutely no interest in what is happening, as does the upper, older man who watches him through his glasses.
reception
The picture became one of the most famous Caravaggios because of the lighting and the relocation of a sacred act into a completely everyday frame. The following painters of the Roman school or those who also stayed in Rome, for example Annibale Carracci and his brothers, Domenichino , Guido Reni or Guercino , adopted in their works both the representation of profane frames for sacred events as well as those perfected here by Caravaggio Technique of chiaroscuro.
In art history it is controversial who of the depicted persons is the eponymous Matthew. It is mostly assumed that it is the bearded man who points at himself with a questioning look. The Freiburg art historian Andreas Prater argues against it that it is the beardless who counts money at the end of the table with his head bowed. The art historian Valeska von Rosen takes the view that Caravaggio deliberately left open who the depicted Christ calls. This ambiguity and playing with norms is a hallmark of his work.
literature
- Nikolaus Pevsner: Baroque painting in the Romanic countries. First part, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, Wildpark-Potsdam 1928
- Luciano Berti : Caravaggio: le storie di San Matteo . Florence: Sadea / Sanson, 1965
- Wolfgang Braunfels : Small Italian Art History. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7701-1509-0 .
- Rolf Tomann (Red.): The art of the baroque. Architecture, sculpture, painting . Könemann, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-89508-991-5 .
- Marco Bussagli (Ed.): Rome - Art & Architecture . Könemann, Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-8290-2258-1 .
- Irene Schütze: index finger - finger point. Concepts of the gesture in the debate about Caravaggio's vocation of Matthew , in: Margreth Egidi u. a. (Ed.): Gesture. Figures of the body in text and images . Tübingen: Narr, 2000, pp. 185-199
- Christiane Stukenbrock, Barbara Töpper: 1000 masterpieces of painting. Tandem Verlag, special edition hfullmann, 2005, ISBN 978-3-8331-6172-8 .
- Matthias Bleyl : Calling Matthew , in: The great cultural guide: literature, music, theater and art in five volumes; with the best from TIME. 5. Painting . Hamburg: Time lapse. Bucerius, 2008, p. 133
- Stefano Zuffi: The Renaissance - Art, Architecture, History, Masterpieces. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-8321-9113-9 .
- Luca Frigerio: Caravaggio: la Vocazione di Matteo . Milan: Ancora, 2017 ISBN 978-88-514-1932-5
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter Calvocoressi : Who's Who in the Bible . dtv-Sachbuch, 4th edition, Munich 1990, p. 183f.
- ↑ Elisabeth Lev: An old masterpiece viewed with new eyes. Zenit, September 7, 2012, accessed January 19, 2014 .
- ↑ Jutta Held: Caravaggio. Politics and Martyrdom of the Body . Reimer, Berlin 1996, p. 81.
- ↑ Andreas Prater: Where is Matthew? Observations on Caravaggio's beginnings as a monumental painter in the Contarelli Chapel . In: Pantheon 43 (1985) pp. 70-74, quoted from Valeska von Rosen: Caravaggio and the limits of what can be represented. Ambiguity, irony and performativity in painting around 1600 . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-05-006243-3 , p. 246 ff. (Accessed via De Gruyter Online).