Caravaggio and the Baroque Sacred: Light, Shadow, and the Divine
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) did not merely paint differently from his predecessors — he made a different theological claim. Where Renaissance sacred art placed the divine in idealized, luminous, transcendent figures remote from everyday human experience, Caravaggio placed it in darkness, in the specific, in the body of a peasant woman who might be found dead in the Tiber River. His St. Matthew was a rough-handed laborer. His Virgin was the corpse of a drowned woman, her feet bare, her body swollen. His apostles were old men with dirty feet. The scandalized reaction of his patrons (several paintings were refused by the churches that commissioned them) was the appropriate response to what he was doing: insisting that the sacred was not located above human experience but within it — in the darkest, most specific, most physical moments of human life. The Council of Trent (1545-1563), the Catholic Church's response to the Protestant Reformation, had demanded that sacre...