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PROTAGONIST / BEYOND THE CANVAS
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f people’s most common reaction when faced with
a work of contemporary art is to say “I could have
done that!”, in front of a painting by Caravaggio, the
impulse is the opposite: admiration and almost a whit of
I awe. Such is the prodigy that the Italian artist was able to
produce on his canvases that the question inevitably arises: how
did he ever manage to paint like this? And, above all, how could a
character as intemperate, brutal, inclined to every vice and any dis-
traction perfect such a refined and in some ways still unexplored
technique? The Caravaggio character is an extraordinary jumble
of contradictions, and it would be an untimely and presumptuous
act to think of finding the mysterious thread that held everything
together, that allowed him to stand before his easel and create
those wonderful masterpieces which more than 400 years later still
fill people’s eyes with astonishment. However, we can still discover
something new. For example, a few years ago, the convergence of
observations by an Italian scholar at Studio Arts Centers Interna-
tional in Florence, Roberta Lapucci, and one of the leading art-
ists of our day, David Hockney, led to the certainty that Caravag-
gio used his studio as a camera oscura: illuminated from above,
the image of the subject to be portrayed passed through an aper-
ture and was projected onto the canvas through a lens and a mir-
ror. In almost total darkness, in a brief space of time the painter
sketched the image projected onto the canvas with a mixture of
substances that were visible even in the dark.
On the canvases Lapucci found residues of mercury dust taken
from crushed fireflies, which were also used for creating special ef-
fects in theatres. The discovery aroused worldwide curiosity, and
the BBC dedicated a successful documentary to it. David Hockney
wrote a book about it, which is also a fascinating manual, practi-
cally indispensable to anyone who paints today. But our curiosity
about Caravaggio is never satisfied... For example, one may won-
der how he managed to paint his scenes immersed in violent chia-
roscuros. It is a question to which the new explorations made first
on the occasion of the Roman exhibition of the fourth centenary
of his death in 2010 and then for the Milan exhibition (which by
no coincidence was titled Inside Caravaggio) help to give a possi-
ble answer. To understand, we have to use a little imagination. Car-
avaggio’s studio certainly did not have windows: if there were, then
they were carefully obscured. The walls, as testified by Giovan Pie-
tro Bellori in his Lives written shortly after the artist’s death, were
‘coloured of black’. That is, all painted black. So where did the
light come from? This
is revealed by one of
the frequent testimo-
nies in the tempestu-
ous life of Caravaggio:
a lawsuit filed by Pru-
denzia Bruni, owner
of the house where he
worked, in which it is
alleged that the artist
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