10.

Gross Domestic Product. The limbs in Caravaggio’s paintings all have designated jobs. Working together, they exert themselves for a kind of Gross Domestic Product that appears to be self-aware. GDP is defined in two broad categories: the market value of all goods and services in a specified time, and the actual purchasing power of people in those markets. These categories might also be expressed in four terms: wealth, labor, necessity, and desire. The wealth and labor of limbs in Caravaggio’s paintings rise and contort from the canvas in startling intensity—the occupants of these limbs live in a world of muscular and agricultural abundance distorted by the promise of mercantile luxury. They work desperately but for what? As if to dramatize this question, Caravaggio’s limbs everywhere reach for empty spaces, palms outstretched to nothing as if to initiate viewers in some newfound sensibility of necessity and desire. The Italian states of Caravaggio’s time had experienced a century-long economic boom, sparked by the increased self-determination of merchants after the Black Death—merchants who hence bought land from the estates of the nobility and set prices (for goods and labor, much in demand) in ways that enabled their class dominance. Along with a third of Europe’s population, the plague killed the feudal system. Still this rise of the bourgeois class didn’t equate with an industrial or even technological revolution. Most goods were agricultural, and upwards of 85% of Europeans still lived in rural areas. Rather, the engine of change was the transformation of these agricultural goods into capital—goods designated primarily for trade, a phenomenon that in turn unlocked a runaway inflation by the late sixteenth century (cereal tripled, then quadrupled in price). This, combined with the financial shock of much silver and gold from the Americas—further raising the prices of simple commodities—only further depressed the possibility for people, even those that grew wheat, to buy sufficient bread. This GDP of high wealth and intensive labor, yet of widespread necessity and desperate desire, conditions the contortions of the painter’s limbs. This economic situation doesn’t define them, but you can certainly sense the market heroism hiding Caravaggio’s hunger in The Conversion on the Way to Damascus. Saul’s robes are fashioned from the high style in the Rome of Caravaggio’s time (his flowing cuirass is not an armor, as it would have been for the Roman soldier of biblical times; instead, it is a robe, flowing in red and orange like the doublets and jerkins you’d see today at a Renaissance fair). Much more poorly dressed, less marked by the spoils of early modern capital, is the hostler’s body—more akin to the exposed musculature of the horse than Saul’s feckless hands reaching from overly gorgeous robes up to the horse and its agronomic life as if it toward some newfound source of heavenly light and power. Are Saul’s outstretched limbs an allegory for the economic tendencies of sixteenth century Italy? Or is the primary subject here, in fact, the raised right leg of the two-tone horse—careful not to crush Saul while also apparently repulsed by its heaved rider, carrying on in its own direction, led by its peasant caretaker, at once participating in the religious mythology of Saul (the Bible, the early modern church, the post-pandemic capitalist economy, and the self-awareness of the Renaissance as a time of seeking light, knowledge, and indeed a political economy of knowledge as a discipline, a way of staying on the horse through the painting’s dark atmosphere) all the while sending a knowing glance—from the peasantry, the dispossessed, the colored and two-toned beings of the earth, even the Americas—directly at the viewer of the painting?

10b.

Genesis. If modernism is perspective becoming self-aware, per Foucault on Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656), then this—as has been said before of Caravaggio—is indeed the genesis of a modern mode.

10c.

GDP, II. Remember that Nietzsche (Foucault’s great teacher) was a philologist who aspired to be a philosopher, just as the literary mode of philosophy is a mode in the discipline of comparative literature that aspires to be a mode in philosophy itself. Aspiring to regimentation (either as simple literary studies or, worse still, philosophy) as an actual aim, one spells one’s failure in any possible direction. You’ll never satisfy the ghoul of Bertrand Russell—even Wittgenstein failed at that. Better to stay in the dynamic self-instancing of perspective becoming self-aware, if you have the creativity and fire to keep it going. If you do not better to stay away from the problems of perspective altogether. Rabinow, Foucault’s great translator to the US, calls this position of caution assemblage, pointing out how very nineteenth century everyone’s engagement with twentieth century critiques of the nineteenth century are (the lionization of Deleuze for instance); which Deleuze himself would not likely have advocated. Rather than reproduce the categories Rabinow proposes a revaluation of problems as a touchstone of intellection—a Dewey-inspired position—no breakthroughs without breakdowns, no insight without problematization, no creativity without crisis. Can a poet for instance think about the intersection of science and ethics, let alone that and a poetic impulse? Or the literary implications of the child tax credit? Does a poet’s support or non-support of it put them in hostile relation to the anti-generationalists and critics of the normative family structure? Let alone, what is a poet’s foreign policy? Where does that put their work in relation to China or Japan today, in a non-cultural integumention? Are they for national or international labor? And, deciding on that, what foreign or domestic policies do they support? And how do they scale back from that to consider the surprising interactions of culture and biology among grizzly bears and indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest? Must every poet aspire to look outward like a Protestant or, hence, to prefer the inwardness of piety?

11.

Infernal Method. The same unvarying grossness of the domestic product shadows the works of Japanese painter and woodblock artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) and the films of Italian director and producer Sergio Leone (1929-1989). In Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo the most engrossing views are from the vantage of insects, small animals, animal hinds, wayward tree branches, and the other miniscule, often unnoticed living things of the world, halfway between its shadows and temporarily lit, otherwise empty spaces. The 86th woodblock in the series is a low-angle view of a new postal road in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) leading westward to today’s Nagano prefecture. Dominating the right foreground of the image is a horse’s ass, whose droppings can be seen at its hooves—foregrounded as if to remind viewers amidst the modern advancements of metropolis, post, and highway that the country still lived on farming and livestock (still the case even in WWII, when Japanese Zeros were carted out to airfields by municipal oxen). These frontier roads between towns were warrens of prostitution and gambling, pleasures permitted at a society’s edge—just as you see in Caravaggio’s models, the prostitutes, gamblers, and derelicts of Rome standing in dubiously for biblical figures, and just as you see in Leone’s films, the gritty westerns whose hardscrabble relations and situations blur indistinguishably the distinction between necessity and desire. Packs of heroes and deplorables not seeing anything past survival and honorable death, nothing more than a fistful of gold worth a shit. This is frontier realism, if you will, formed in the worn pride of former prostitute Jill McBain in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), as she packs her cart after finding her husband and family killed by local bandits, enmeshed in a convoluted plot of railroad men, indigenous displacement, coolie labor, newly freed blacks, Mexican deterritorialization, and post-Civil War appetized white gunslingers, looking back over her horse’s ass through the rafters of her barn at the harmonica-playing anti-hero of the tale. “Got here with their damn rail,” shouts her coachman over the horse’s ass, “HA HA HA!” Italian director and screenwriter Bernardo Bertolucci, lamenting the loss of a gritty perspective of the social reality in his time, of a realist mode lost in the limited economic boom of Italy in the 1960s, remembers that he “waited anxiously for every Sergio Leone movie”—and, when asked by Leone, “why do you like my movies?” Bertolucci, inclined to sober critique, answered, “I like the way you shoot horse’s asses. Directors always shoot horses in profile, where you have this wonderful line. Very few directors shoot the back, which is less rhetorical and romantic. One is John Ford. The other is you.”

12.

Another way to see Caravaggio’s horse is as different from English equine artist George Stubbs’ works. In his Anatomy of the Horse (1766), Stubbs presents the anatomy of the horse as a palatial architecture through which an ennobled class could move elegantly and free, knowledgeable but blind to the tramps, criminals, prostitutes, and poets outside the palace walls. To contrast: Bolognese horse enthusiast Carlo Ruini’s Anatomia del Cavallo (1598), whose woodcut images show no open spaces between the brains, muscle, and blood of the horse’s physical architecture. If exposed, its internal organs are held open by prying, visible hands (table 1, book 3). When seen from its back, in the distorted line of a missing profile (table 5, book 5), Ruini’s horses are stuck in a world of shit and mud. Only in muck does the horse’s anatomy show its necessity and desire, strength as a surprise to metrics of wealth and labor.

13.

Scientism or Realism. For British poet John Fuller’s short novel about a medieval abbey, Flying to Nowhere (1983), Ruini’s woodcut of the horse viewed from its posterior is used for the cover. Named Saviour, the horse’s broken body drowns when a bishop’s emissary tries to ferry the beast to a rocky island surrounded by choppy waters where pilgrims have too often gone missing. The island’s abbot is in an obsessive search for the physical seat of the soul, inspiring questionable anatomies of horse and human—those missing pilgrims. The book ends in a mysterious entwining of allegory and psychology as the abbot’s psyche collapses amidst the architectural dismemberment of his abbey by the inquisitive emissary, who first appears in the novel from the viewpoint of a drowning horse:

The hooves struggled to keep the body upright, but one leg was already broken from the jump and as the horse heaved, sank and scrambled among the slippery rocks other bones failed him. For a moment it seemed as if the glistening torso would try to move by itself in a series of wriggles and lunges, dragging with it the bunched and useless withers and fetlocks. One rear leg was flattened at an unusual angle from the knee; the other seemed caught between two rocks. The animal’s neighing and trumpeting echoed in the bay. (12)

Unfolding from the animal at that moment the emissary’s account, the story of the novel, starts with a horse’s end, its ritualistic sacrifice to the waters that have, thus far, hidden and enabled the abbot’s experiments. Proto-scientific, his dissections are motivated by those presumptions of the soul engrained like a trace of holy things in the worn husks of living beings. This is a world from which the Christian god has not fled. The trace of his divine effort might be found in his works—his horses and hostlers. Yet it is also a world in which the human wish to discover such clues of divine effort—to know and not only believe, to inquire and not only be—has prompted investigation, dissection, and interrogation. In this new world, scientism and criminology have situated themselves as viewpoints. But the path to those new vantages runs through the roiling waters of ritual, belief, passion, obsession, and sacrifice. Fuller tells us that we have scarcely left those water-girt paths, walkways to critical outlooks that emerge, protean horses in Neptune’s care, from the darkness of psychological, artistic, divinatory, animalistic, sexual, and revolutionary waters.

13b.

Their limbs are broken in the moisture of their skins, Caravaggio shows us.

14.

Like Pasolini, Caravaggio was found dead on a beach in Italy, likely killed.

15.

Caravaggio was 38 when that happened, his death, his killing or, as some speculate, his self-poisoning from poor sanitation habits with the lead in his paints (not to mention the cadmium, chrome, zinc, and other toxic elements). Saturnism, some say, like Van Gogh or Goya. The violences of color are comparable. Most of his artistic output took place in the decade before that, the fever leading up to the infinite fire. The chronology is short but the artist’s life is long. Basquiat is another example. Schiele. Seurat. Gericault. The mysterious Massaccio. Thompson. Hesse. Raphael only lived to 37 years, a decade less than Kahlo. But who among these was killed? Mendieta of course, a year younger than Caravaggio. But the murder of an artist remains an exception—a taboo—a mark of transgression so profound it changes the way that the art shapes itself in the eyes, and the way our words about it shape themselves in the mouth. You come, subtly but inescapably, to see the work from its artist’s end, and, grim as that is, it clears a space for what can be said, for a silencing that is the beginning of poetry, the origins of imagination in loss, a prologue in perpetuum.

16.

Mirrors.  To animate the metamorphosis of horse and hostler in Conversion on the Way to Damascus, Caravaggio distorts the depth of the hostler’s legs. They do not lessen in size, as you would expect them to do in proportional relation to their distance from the horse: the horse’s left leg should be the largest, while standing behind the horse, parallel to it, the hostler’s right leg should be smaller, and his left leg smaller still. No such naturalism of space applies here. The beholding eye forgives these improprieties in being seduced by the painting’s drama of lighting and musculature, the feverish delight in contrasts and refractions that is called chiaroscuro. In its more violent or intense instances, when it is also called tenebrism, this style of painting intoxicates the eye, dulling its perception of coordinates outside the dramatized contrasts. In an essay on Courbet’s “Burial at Ornans,” Michael Fried, drawing on British art historian (Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany) Rudolf Wittkower, rehearses a classic reading of Caravaggio’s distorted foreshortening: “Caravaggio is thus seen as the inventor of a heightened mode of illusionism, based on dramatic chiaroscuro and extreme foreshortening and crucially involving elements in the immediate vicinity of the picture plane, by which the painter aimed to call into question, one might say to dissolve, the boundary between the space or ‘world’ of the representation and that of the beholder, and by so doing to enforce the suggestion that both are equally actual, equally present to our astounded senses” (661). Their discussion is focused (like whispering priests around a sacred fire, a focus) on Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1601), in which the resurrected Christ appears in the visage of an unknown stranger to two apostles (Luke and Cleopas) and their groom en route to Emmaus. Wittkower thinks that the distorted perspective of the painting is “a psychological device… to draw the beholder into the orbit of the picture and to increase the emotional and dramatic impact of the event represented;” in other words to heighten the spiritual experience of the painting, “to increase the participation of the worshipper in the mystery rendered in the picture” (qtd. in Fried 661). One wonders why Wittkower, who knows the artist’s biography, would so distort it—Wittkower knows Caravaggio’s intensities lived elsewhere than church teachings. This was, after all, a man who nearly killed a waiter when the waiter could not tell him, Caravaggio, whether his asparagus had been cooked in butter or oil. That anecdote contextualizes the apparent mindlessness of the groom in the painting, as well as, perhaps, Christ’s hand raised halfway between grace and dismissiveness. Moreover, Wittkower doesn’t foreground what is really actually very strange in the painting: the right hand of the apostle on the painting’s left, Cleopas’s right hand, is freakishly large (bizarrely non-proportional to its distance from the apostle’s head, let alone his left hand). I woke up in the middle of the night last night profoundly disturbed by this. Not only should that right hand be smaller, the left hand (somewhat polypus-like) should also be larger. Considering the distorted perspective of these two hands, it is as if the foreshortening is flipped or reversed. The left hand should be the size of the right and the right hand should be the size of the left. This disturbed me into sleeplessness, and I stayed awake, reddened eyes invisibly open in the dark room, at length perturbed by the bizarre purposefulness of Caravaggio’s distorted foreshortening, as if perspective had been perversely reversed in such a way that you might never notice it amidst the painting’s masterful, even illusory tenebrism. Reading through the night on such Caravagist inversions, when the baroque is defined by something like reversals and mirrors, I came across the history of the iconography of the religious hero Santiago Matamoros in the Americas. Matamoros, of course, means Moor-killer. Predictably, Santiago Matamoros, i.e., St. James the Muslim-Killer, became St. James the Indian-Killer in the arrival of Catholicism to the Americas—depicted in icons of Santiago Mataindios on his horse trampling Mexica Eagle and Jaguar warriors. The Reconquista was orthogonally repositioned. But that tangent turned on itself: in the nineteenth century, amidst widespread indigenous and mestizo nationalist revolts against Spanish rule, revolting parties repurposed Santiago as a hero of American resistance—St. James the Moor-Indian Killer became Santiago Mataespañois, i.e., St. James the Spaniard Killer. Matamoros becomes Mataindios becomes Mataespañoles. Same saint, same iconography, new body trampled in his horse’s hooves. The question then, considering the icon’s final transformation—for me—is whether I am the one under the horse’s hooves or do I sit on the horse, heroically trampling, or, still more perplexedly yet likely more actually), somehow, both. Another definition for the baroque: when dialectic just becomes a mirror, or a mirroring process in which every beholder is forced to behold themselves beholding, indeed both as the beholder and beheld. 

16b.

Shadows, II. What’s bizarre about Rudolf Wittkower’s spiritualization of Caravaggio’s distorted perspective is that Wittkower knows exactly who Caravaggio was, spirited yet enslaved to passionate embodiment. In his classic work on the conduct of artists—Born Under Saturn—Wittkower puts Caravaggio among the rogues, villains, and incorrigible belligerents of the sixteenth century. He reminds readers of a special capacity in the art cognoscenti of the time to separate the body of the artist from their body of work, their legal liability from their artistic fame. This negation of “the prevailing Neoplatonic concept according to which a great artist cannot be a bad man” is itself an ideal to be negated in Caravaggio’s works. It is not just the case that Caravaggio was a bad man who made exquisite works, like the painter Jacques van Loo who murdered a wine merchant and went on to join Royal Academy, or the painter Pieter Mulier who after being imprisoned for killing his wife was released on orders of the aristocracy and governor of Milan, that he should paint out his penance in their care. Unlike these artists, who murdered yet painted skillfully if blithely, Caravaggio’s brush was as aggressive as his person. Thus does English critic John Ruskin see in his works “definite signs of evil desire ill repressed.” Caravaggio’s paintings invite forensic pathology. They are composed of that early trace of suspect traceability that Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg characterized as the breakthrough in criminology that was the idea of the clue—the clue, to wit, the sign that suggests a hiddenness of knowledge, that is, a conception of the semiotic fragment by which human action leaves a mark in space and time that like a snake’s path traced in sand leads an observer to a subterranean den. This is a nascent idea in Caravaggio’s time (jurisgenerativity by way of material evidence rather than confession, forced in torture or otherwise, let alone divine interference in lot, combat, or omen), emerging perhaps in the very strokes of his brush. American literary theorist Leo Bersani thus noted that Caravaggio is a painter who wants you to know that he has secrets. Enigma and intractability are key features of his visual style. It is unclear, however, whether or not a painting can hold a secret. It might also be the case that, like the gypsy girl in his painting The Fortune Teller (1594 and 1595), the painting seduces us with a sensual secrecy whose only aim is to trick and distract the viewer, some other ruse to rob us at play. Viewers of the painting in his time saw this instantly, as is shown in the words of contemporaneous Genovese poet Gaspare Murtola, whose many poems about Caravaggio’s paintings are a compendium of early Caravaggio criticism, this one about The Fortune Teller: “Non so qual sia più maga/O la donna, che fingi/O tu che la dipingi.” I don’t know which is the greater witch,/she whom you paint/or you who depict. Caravaggio’s hence first published critic, Murtola suggests to the ages that Caravaggio didn’t care if we knew his secrets—he never did, whether or not he had them—he just wants us to think that he has them. This shifting ground between a work of art that suggests hidden knowledge and at the same time flamboyantly displays its ruse is fertile soil for a paranoic mode in art criticism. Only in thus giving rise to so many readings and analyses haunted by self-skepticism can Caravaggio be possibly conceived to be spiritual or religious. He who coined the term “Renaissance,” Jacob Burckhardt informed readers that a sense of occlusion and obfuscation is inherent in the Italian imagining of the spirit, which is called by the ancient name of “ombra,” i.e., a shade (323). Not just a disembodied ghost or geist, an ombra is a reminder of a light source blocked by a lingering person or event. It is a clue that something is in the way of the visible light, some opaque circumstance or contingency, which we might look into to reveal a necessary appearance or the necessity of appearance itself. 

16b2.

Cunning of Light. How different Hegel’s account of the interactive dynamic between the personal mind and the world’s unfolding self-awareness would be if it were a phenomenology of ombra, rather than geist. It would not be the cunning of reason working its way through the shadows of history but rather the cunning of light. Paving the way to Hegel, Rembrandt’s spirit of history has not light exactly—is it more purely spirit, just spirit even. A shadow is an absence of light, and a reminder that we do not see by looking at the light-source directly. Caravaggio provokes a viewer in that notion: the body itself is a light-source in his works—perhaps not directly as you see in medieval painting, but interactively, in relation to other bodies. Ombra is the relation of light to other bodies, other light sources, that unfold by way of the dynamics of luminism. 

16c.

The paranoiac style in art criticism culminates with iconologist Aby Warburg’s visual atlas of connections and clues, all leading to origins in pagan antiquity that have never left modernity alone. An admirer of Warburg, image theorist W.J.T. Mitchell nonetheless satirizes the mode of the Atlas Mnemosyne by comparing it to the “crazy wall” of police procedural television programs and films—the board on the wall on which detectives pin pictures and clues interconnected by strings and drawn lines, in a maddened attempt to find the connections that will crack the case. Mitchell digs up a New Yorker cartoon (2015) in which two detectives stare at such a board full of clues, interconnected by string, and about which one says “they all lead back to this ball of yarn.” In Caravaggio’s works the ball of yarn obtains in the sense of ombra not geist. You can see such manifest clueing staring at itself in his painting of Narcissus (1599), one of Caravaggio’s very few paintings of a subject from pagan antiquity. 

16c2.

Góngora. “Flattery, facially anthropomorphic,/mounted on a mortal beast,/has Narcissus/trade his reflection for an echo.” Caravaggio who refused the trade—is this his greatest work then?

16d.

Other paintings in which Caravaggio depicted themes of pagan antiquity are his Bacchus (1596) and Medusa (1597). Bacchus invites the viewer and Medusa repels. Of Caravaggio’s Medusa painted on a shield, Murtola (after whom one version of Caravaggio’s Medusa-shields was named) wrote, “Fuggi, che se stupere a gli occhi impetra,/Ti cangerà anco in pietra” (226). Flee, for if your eyes she astonish/you’ll be transformed to stone-flesh. In the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, there is another stone monster, a Mexica Earth god Tlaltecuhtli, who is carved into the erstwhile invisible base of a colonial Spanish stone column. There is no hint on the upper-side of the column that at its hidden base abides a Mexica god of earth from which other Mexica gods made and molded reality as we have it (its discovery was accidental, and prompted new digs of old Spanish columns). The stone god silently abides at the pathway between life and death, earth and light, transit and intransigence, silence and creativity. This hidden carving, made in Caravaggio’s time (ca. 1600), is like that bit of history that goes into the earth, abides there, until it is disclosed in the sporadic, which is to say spore-like, mushroom openings of a dream several centuries interrupted. It is neither repressed nor evil; rather, like a mirror in an abandoned room, it just waits. 

Edgar Garcia is the Neubauer Family Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu, and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis.