{"id":266862,"date":"2026-01-31T09:10:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T09:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/266862\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T09:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T09:10:15","slug":"the-moment-caravaggio-became-caravaggio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/266862\/","title":{"rendered":"The Moment Caravaggio Became Caravaggio"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Caravaggio, “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” (1595), oil on canvas (all photos Lisa Yin Zhang\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

Certain artists arrive to us fully formed. The Baroque artist Caravaggio \u2014 iconic for his dramatic chiaroscuro and stormy disposition \u2014\u00a0is certainly one of them. I\u2019ve always wondered about that process of canonization: Would a Caravaggio really stand out in a room of lesser-known contemporaries?\u00a0<\/p>\n

My visit to the one-room exhibition Caravaggio\u2019s \u201cBoy with a Basket of Fruit\u201d in Focus<\/a> at the Morgan Library & Museum suggests: Yes. The painting is modest in size \u2014\u00a0a little more than two feet (~61 cm) across \u2014\u00a0smaller, even, than some of the works that surround it. Its lighting isn\u2019t dramatically different from the others. And yet it has this immense gravitational force.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Michelangelo Merisi, as he was known then, painted \u201cBoy with a Basket of Fruit\u201d in around 1595, when he was an early-20s unknown from the provinces outside Milan, training in the factory-like workshop of Giuseppe Cesari. The painting was, in a way, about nothing and for no one. It was not a commission, as most works at that time were, nor did it depict a god or an allegory, like many contemporaneous artworks. It is just a painting of a boy, holding this basket bursting with almost overripe fruit, his shirt slipping off his shoulder, looking past but not through you, the subtlest modulation in those dark eyes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hyperallergic talked to curator John Marciari, who has been with the Morgan for 12 years, about the process of putting together a show on 400-year-old art, the surprisingly modern gallery system that Caravaggio frequented in Rome, and what this early painting can tell us about an Old Master.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hyperallergic: Why do you think Caravaggio continues to captivate us today?\u00a0<\/p>\n

John Marciari: He fits the post-Romantic paradigm of the bad boy artist: He\u2019s always in trouble with the law. He kills a man. He spends the last four years of his life on the run. He dies tragically early, but becomes this mythical figure whom everyone copies thereafter. That\u2019s like every movie about an artist that\u2019s ever been written. I think on that level, he remains popular because he\u2019s accessible \u2014\u00a0he falls into a familiar trope.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The same reasons that his paintings were so important in their time \u2014\u00a0their immediacy, their effectiveness, the way they connect to a viewer \u2014 make him interesting and appealing even to people who don\u2019t otherwise look at old paintings so much. That\u2019s not an accident. What he\u2019s trying to do is shatter that barrier between the world of the painting and the world of the viewer. He\u2019s not painting a boy posing with a basket of fruit. He\u2019s painting the fiction of the studio \u2014 the fiction of painting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Detail of Caravaggio, “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” (1595), oil on canvas<\/p>\n

H: Tell me about \u201cBoy with a Basket of Fruit.\u201d What draws you to it?\u00a0<\/p>\n

JM: I think you\u2019re meant to start with the basket of fruit \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s like right there in your face! And there\u2019s something overripe about the fruit \u2014\u00a0the figs are splitting \u2014\u00a0which is sort of the conceit of the whole painting. It\u2019s held by this boy who\u2019s got this expression \u2014\u00a0tilting his head, his lips parted. What\u2019s he saying? How are you meant to read that expression?\u00a0<\/p>\n

That ambiguity makes the picture come alive. And if you look closely, his ears are red and hot, his face slightly flushed. It\u2019s the equivalent of being overripe. He\u2019s tired of holding the damn fruit and he\u2019s been made to sit there for too long in a hot room, in late summer \u2014\u00a0you know this because of the kinds of fruit \u2014\u00a0and you can imagine it being 90 degrees in an airless studio. It calls attention to itself as a real act of a painter copying a thing in front of him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is the great joy of having a picture like that here. You know, I stick my head in that room and go look at it a few times a day. It\u2019s like living with the painting for three months.\u00a0<\/p>\n

H: It\u2019s amazing. You kind of get to have this masterpiece in your \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s not your house, exactly \u2014<\/p>\n

JM:\u00a0I think I spend more hours per day here than I do in my living room.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"John Marciari (undated) (\u00a9 The Morgan Library & Museum; photo by Graham Haber, courtesy the Morgan Library & Museum)<\/p>\n

H: Give us a peek behind the curtain. What are some things about the process of curating a show like this?\u00a0<\/p>\n

JM: One of the things about working on art that happened 400 years ago is you never have the whole story. You piece together evidence from the few documents and the few writers who give biographical accounts. But the people who write about artists\u2019 lives at the time are also telling tales. What can you know \u2014\u00a0or what can you think \u2014\u00a0if you don\u2019t have the smoking gun of a document that says it?<\/p>\n

Well, you\u2019ve got the pictures as evidence. Pictures and drawings where you see the artists working out problems. Some of [this process] is speculative, but it\u2019s not pure imagination. It\u2019s proposing likely scenarios based on the fragmentary evidence we have.\u00a0<\/p>\n

H: How did this particular show come to be?<\/p>\n

JM: This project begins with our partnership with the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture, whose mission is to bring great works of Italian art to American museums. We arrived at the possibility of borrowing \u201cBoy With a Basket of Fruit.\u201d For me and many others, it is a sort of signal work. It’s the moment when Caravaggio becomes Caravaggio. It\u2019s one of those epochal, revolutionary works where an artist comes into something new.<\/p>\n

I could have put the painting with three benches in a room, and people would\u2019ve been delighted. But it offered the possibility of doing something more interesting. He\u2019s a painter people don\u2019t think about in relation to much else because he\u2019s such a complete figure in himself. But there\u2019s more to the story \u2014\u00a0he doesn\u2019t spring out of nowhere. He builds on a significant legacy of painting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What we like to do at the Morgan is tell stories. So I thought, rather than just celebrating Caravaggio, it\u2019d be interesting to put this picture in context \u2014\u00a0where he comes from, how immediate and powerful his influence is on other artists in Rome.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Giuseppe Arcimboldo, “Four Seasons in One Head” (c. 1590), oil on panel<\/p>\n

[Arcimboldo\u2019s \u201cFour Seasons in One Head\u201d c. 1590] from Washington is done precisely at the moment when Caravaggio is a student artist in Milan, and everyone in Milan is talking about the painting \u2014 it\u2019s in all the commentary of the time, so it\u2019s impossible he didn\u2019t know it. So I asked myself: What does Caravaggio take away from it? It\u2019s the question of: How do you push the limits of what a painting is? It doesn\u2019t have to be the same old set of gods, goddesses, allegories. You can have a painting that\u2019s, in a way, of nothing. I think those are all questions that are fundamentally a part of Caravaggio\u2019s makeup as he goes to Rome and paints \u201cThe Boy with a Basket of Fruit\u201d on spec.\u00a0<\/p>\n

H: Wait, \u201con spec\u201d? What do you mean by that?<\/p>\n

JM: So that\u2019s another interesting part of the story. Up to that time, the overwhelming majority of art was made as a commission. Young artists come to Rome and put themselves in the workshop of someone else. In the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari, Caravaggio paints the “Boy with a Basket of Fruit.\u201d He\u2019s this 23-year-old kid from the provinces that no one\u2019s heard of. <\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a shift that\u2019s happening in Rome just at this moment \u2014\u00a0the 1580s, \u201990s, and then on into the new century.\u00a0Just in that generation, in Rome, for the first time, there\u2019s a pretty active art market where painters make paintings, and they put them on sale with dealers, and people can walk into a shop and buy them.<\/p>\n

Think about a young artist in a new city trying to do something that\u2019s going to attract attention and help him find patrons and clients and commissions. It\u2019s an environment that leads to experimentation as a way of distinguishing yourself \u2014\u00a0especially for someone with Caravaggio\u2019s temperament.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The painting does not sell.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of Caravaggio’s “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” in Focus (photo Janny Chiu, courtesy the Morgan Library & Museum)<\/p>\n

H: I\u2019m picturing being in Chelsea and just walking into all of these galleries. Was it like that? Would I have walked into a gallery in Rome and seen a Caravaggio?<\/p>\n

JM: Sort of, yeah. I think you have to think about Rome in 1595. Everyone was going to Rome, because that\u2019s where the new stuff was happening \u2014\u00a0all the new fountains and all the new palaces. It was unlike any other city in the world. But it\u2019s more like New York in 1960 or \u201965 than now. Most of the galleries in Chelsea are sort of empires compared to the picture dealers of 17th-century Rome. It\u2019s all very local.\u00a0<\/p>\n

H: I\u2019m fascinated by this idea of this work being an Old Master\u2019s first masterpiece. Are there elements of it that mark his developing style? Or anything he\u2019s trying out and then abandons?\u00a0<\/p>\n

JM: Oh, absolutely. Again, on the one hand, this is a picture of nothing \u2014\u00a0not a god, not an allegory. No one knew what to make of that in Rome at the time. The next painting he makes is this self-portrait of Bacchus, where he\u2019s sick<\/a>. It\u2019s like you can hear Caravaggio saying, \u201cWhat? You can\u2019t complain that the picture isn\u2019t of a god. Here, I\u2019ll give you a god. I\u2019ll put an ivy crown on and call myself Bacchus.\u201d But it\u2019s obviously Caravaggio \u2014 and Caravaggio at his least godlike, after spending weeks in the hospital sick with an infection in his leg.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then he goes on and does \u201cThe Boy Bitten by a Lizard<\/a>\u201d [1594\u201396], because another one of the criticisms would be that he just paints what\u2019s in front of him. And it all comes together with the \u201cBacchus\u201d from the Uffizi<\/a> [c. 1595\u201397], where it\u2019s a god, but not a god:\u00a0It\u2019s a boy posing as a god, reclining on a dirty bed, holding a glass of wine with ripples in it \u2014 so you get motion, but in a very subtle way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now here, [in “Boy with a Basket of Fruit,”] the foreshortening of the arm is a little bit fudged, the musculature of where his shoulder connects to his clavicle connects to his neck. He\u2019s not a perfect artist, yet. We can track a sequence \u2014\u00a0one that begins with the \u201cBoy with a Basket of the Fruit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Editor’s note 1\/30\/26 4:19pm EST: A previous version of the article dated Caravaggio’s “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” to circa 1593. More recent scholarship dates the painting to 1595. The interview has been updated to reflect this fact. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Caravaggio, “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” (1595), oil on canvas (all photos Lisa Yin Zhang\/Hyperallergic) Certain artists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-266862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}