Caravaggio personality disorder
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The religious and transcendent content is minimal, the very least that Caravaggio can get away with, or consciously subvert, a fact that his non-compliant patrons grasped with consummate ease. Caravaggio was born in 1571, at a time when Italy was a collection of city-states. This is reproduced below, the picture is badly damaged.
Decapitation after the fact is also prevalent even in the most genteel circumstances, for example, the skull in the pictures of St Jerome Writing and in St Francis in Meditation.
Saul becomes Paul through a closed physiological process that is radically immanent – “it fits every type of mystical experience; mysticism perceives a body-own process as alien and originating ‘beyond’ one’s person, or beyond one’s earth” (Reich, 1945: 475).
Borromeo and Caravaggio’s friendship was fostered by sharing incredibly radical ideals—even judged by 17th-century standards.
Most of Caravaggio’s work points to a religious symbol, person, or message. While Caravaggio was not considered a High Renaissance painter himself, he too was hired to lend his hand to the beauty of the church. The conventional wisdom was that Caravaggio killed Tomassoni over a ten scudi bet on a tennis match. However, it is the nature and degree of violence in Caravggio’s own art that is perhaps most decisive in understanding the nature of his condition.
The relationship between untreated schizophrenia and violence is now well-established in the literature (Jayal et al, 2007; Schanda, 2004).
Caravaggio would inflict further serious injury before his death, from heat exhaustion chasing a boat along a shore in the heat of the Italian summer (itself indicative of a psychotic episode). The artist signs his name in John’s blood. The treatment of the eyes of both Matthew and Paul reflect Caravaggio’s alternating state between the socially withdrawn vacant stare of the schizophrenic and the intense and terrifying experience in the eyes described by Reich.
It is technically unappealing and unsuccessful in its use of perspective. And that, by and large, is all that his biographers can agree on as being anywhere definitive of his character. The court ruled in favor of Baglione, and Caravaggio served two weeks in jail.
The Problematic Life of Caravaggio
Feature image: Caravaggio, The Beheading of Saint John, 1608 via Sotheby's
The Problematic Life of Caravaggio
The term “tortured artist” derives from the romanticization of artists’ suffering--suffering that, to the consumer, exists merely for the sake of the artistic process.
It might be wondered if Caravaggio’s inspiration was his own physiological experience rather than a holy text and one might understand the disappointment of a proponent of the Counter-Reformation in relation to this work.
As Reich would have predicted, Caravaggio simultaneously turns his attention to the throat.
A schizophrenic patient recounting her illness stated “The sunlight was dazzling and blinding – prolonged exposure was dangerous. It is important to note that, in 17th-century Rome, pedophilia was less of a moral violation than homosexuality. That impulse to violence would be directed outward at least in his art until the very end and his most celebrated artistic effort of all.
The eyes of the severed head are those of a man who has seen too much, they speak of exhausted terror. However, Caravaggio’s art would predict a worsening of his behavior from 1599, sometimes held in check, but inexorably progressing to serious violence with substance abuse a strong contributing factor. But that this was his primary motivation is unlikely given his obsession with John, headed and beheaded.