Exhibit of the week: Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

Through Jan. 8

With his gritty painting style and “hot-tempered, bad-boy persona,” Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio took 16th-century Rome by storm, said Scott Cantrell in The Dallas Morning News. Four centuries after his death, he’s giving audiences in Texas a similar thrill. The 10 Caravaggios showing at the Kimbell for just a few more weeks are the most gathered anywhere in the U.S. since 1985, and there are “some stunners.” The painter’s earliest canvases, like the Kimbell’s own The Cardsharps, turned viewers into “accidental observers of criminal, or at least dubious, activity.” But Caravaggio soon found unlikely champions within the Catholic Church. Once he began painting religious scenes, he depicted saints “not as porcelain perfections but as people you might pass on the street.” He also zoomed in tight on moments of high visual drama—Saint Francis in ecstasy, Abraham with a knife at his son’s throat. The other artists included in this show mimicked his breakthrough. Canvas by canvas, “we see a new age of art coming to life” before our eyes.

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“The arrangement has problems,” said Willard Spiegelman in The Wall Street Journal. More than 80 percent of this exhibit is given to Caravaggio’s followers, and their paintings often “pale by comparison.” When Dutch artist Gerrit van Honthorst depicts a young man with grapes, the image is “almost a caricature of robustness.” Nearby, the figure clutching a bunch of grapes in Caravaggio’s earlier Sick Bacchus is “luridly sexy, unforgettably creepy.” Fortunately, the show’s 10 centerpieces offer reward enough. “The most beautiful picture of all” here is Sacrifice of Isaac (1603), distinguished by the bold geometry of its composition and Caravaggio’s revolutionary way of engaging the viewer. Isaac’s terrified eyes stare straight out, practically “begging us to intervene” as his father pins him down for the slaughter.

Such “bloody imagery” was “as popular then as it is now,” said Gaile Robinson in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Seeing how quickly other artists adopted Caravaggio’s whole approach, I couldn’t help wondering “where they would have borrowed their inspiration, lighting, and content from” if he hadn’t appeared. Still, the pairings do yield some amusements. The grouping of Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps and The Gypsy Fortune Teller with Georges de La Tour’s later The Cheat With the Ace of Clubs creates a “glowing troika of bad behavior.” Caravaggio had quite obviously changed image-making forever. His “cinematic staging” and his instinct to go for the jugular were as influential on “painters of his time” as on the “cinematographers of ours.”