April 23, 2022
At New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, one artist elicited carefully chosen praise among select security guards:
Caravaggio.
Today, I checked out the town where the mercurial north Italian nurtured a naughty character that would provoke him to pick fights, wound a cop, and flee buck naked to Rome, where he painted for pennies before raising eyebrows and catching eyes through his oils. He is a Renaissance star.
Caravaggio is fittingly from tiny Caravaggio, a short distance from Milan, what Portland is to my home town of Sandy, Ore. He was born in Milan.
Johnny Depp, you missed your chance, but somebody’s gotta play this wild-side artist who saw his fair share of courtrooms. Got any ideas?
An idea to get a steady job led me to a museum in 1995, back when you answered newspaper classified ads. You had to have a four-year degree to be a guard at The Met, and some of the hires were fresh out of art school: “Yeah, man, Caravaggio. Look at those exquisite brush strokes. He could juxtapose rebellion with conformity.”
Too easily distracted by livelier beauties, I stepped away from Caravaggio guard talk.
Talked to some Caravaggio locals today to get their exquisite pronunciation on the man’s name and whether he remains relevant in the place he called home. A verbal dust-up outside a café, where two seniors hassled me about not carrying a passport, sent me off to friendlier street corners.
Would town residents recall his turbulent life, expressed through depictions of Biblical beheadings and mythical slayings? And what about his playing with color?
My video interviews, done mostly in Italian with simultaneous English translation, reveal: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is well remembered.
Note: Three other town interviews to be posted ASAP: teens Ryan and Matteo; Roberto Aiolfi; Lilli and Tina
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