Caravaggio’s reputation continued to grow steadily, and so many painters tried to copy his style that art historians speak of “Caravaggists.” It was only to be expected that his pictures found a place in the collections of Charles I of England and Louis XIV of France. In 1750, Pope Clement XIV presented a St. John to the new Capitoline Museum at Rome. In 1780, during the dissolution of the Flemish monasteries, Emperor Joseph II confiscated the Madonna of the Rosary from the Dominicans and added it to the imperial collection in Vienna.
Many people have always been of two minds about Caravaggio. Berenson may seem eccentric in arguing that he was not a Baroque artist, yet at the height of the Baroque there were reservations about Caravaggio. Mancini criticized his “school” for a frequent “lack of movement, expression and elegance.” Baglione admitted that his style was beautiful, but thought he had “poor judgement in selecting what was good and leaving out what was bad.” Bellori admired many of his pictures, particularly those in his early style, but was horrified by what he regarded as his coarse naturalism, his concentration on “common, vulgar things.” Poussin went even further, saying that Caravaggio “had come into the world to destroy painting.” However, for many years hostile critics like this were in a minority, and he remained among Europe’s acknowledged great masters.
In 1764, in an Essay on Painting, the Venetian savant Francesco Algarotti could still call Caravaggio “The Rembrandt of Italy,” alluding to “the magic of his chiaroscuro.” But, in the age of the rococo and then of the neoclassical, he was going out of favor. At about the time Algarotti wrote, the German artist Anton Rafael Mengs claimed, “Caravaggio possessed neither variety nor moderation, so that in consequence his draftmanship was very inferior.” It was an amazing statement, but the fact that Mengs, the king of Spain’s court painter, was able to make it shows just how much popular taste had turned against Caravaggio. In 1789 a highly respected historian of Italian art, Luigi Lanzi, sneered that Caravaggio’s men and women were “memorable only for their vulgarity … and lived in dungeons.”
Writing during the 1850s, the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt could refer dismissively to “the crude style of Caravaggio.” In England, the Victorians were especially hostile. John Ruskin, for example, found Caravaggio neither great nor sincere, solemnly placing him “among worshippers of the depraved.” John Addington Symonds compared Caravaggio’s paintings with the novels of Zola, blaming him not only for “vulgarity” but for “a crude realism,” grumbling, “it seems difficult for realism, either in literature or art, not to fasten upon ugliness, vice, pain and disease, as though these imperfections of our nature were more real than beauty, goodness, pleasure and health.”
By the early years of the twentieth century, however, the cultivated were once more beginning to appreciate Caravaggio. In 1905, Roger Fry declared that he was “in many senses the first modern artist… the first to rely entirely on his own temperamental aptitude and to defy tradition and authority.” Dedicated scholars, notably Roberto Longhi, started looking for his paintings and, in consequence, the number of works attributed to him has more than doubled, even if several attributions may not be universally accepted. Some have been tracked down after disappearing during the long years of disfavor, while others previously thought to be copies have been recognized as originals. The Bacchino Malato and even the Judith and Holofernes were found only during the late 1940s. Since then, Mina Gregori has discovered the portrait of a Knight of Malta, recently identified as Fra’ Antonio Martelli. More exciting still has been the finding of The Cardsharps and The Taking of Christ. It is far from impossible that other paintings still await rediscovery. One reason for their disappearance may be that, when his white or cream tones go yellow with age, all the light leaves his canvases, though this returns miraculously with modern techniques of restoration.
There have also been some tragic losses, such as the pictures that perished during the Russian army’s capture of Berlin in 1945, the portrait of The Courtesan Fillide, and the first version of the Inspiration of St. Matthew. The Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, stolen in 1969, may never be recovered. In 1984, the St. Jerome was stolen from St. John’s church at Valletta. Thanks, however, to the patient negotiations of the Maltese Director of Museums, Marius Zerafa, and his advice to the police, it was recovered in 1987. Some suspect that, as in the case of the Palermo Nativity, the Mafia were involved in the theft.
So much attention is devoted by scholars to Caravaggio’s art and to his mysterious life that it has been called the Caravaggio industry. It is, undeniably, a very productive industry. If it is not quite true to say that new discoveries are made every year, we certainly know more about him than we did two decades ago. For example, during the 1970s Mia Cinotti published the Roman police reports with the details of his nightlife, while during the 1980s other historians revealed the Marchesa di Caravaggio’s unsuspected role, the unsavory reputation of Captain Ranuccio Tommasoni, and the papal dispensation that enabled Caravaggio to become a Knight of Malta. One day they may even be able to tell us the identity of his enemy, the unknown knight, and the real reason he was put in the Birdcage.
Caravaggio fascinates, and not only because of his wonderful pictures. It is thirty years since Kenneth Clark described him as “like the hero of a modern play,” meaning, of course, an antihero. He had all the qualities needed for the part. A portrait drawing of him by Ottavio Leoni looks very like the face of a certain type of modern antihero, sulky and resentful, with puzzled, unreliable eyes and a sneering mouth. However anachronistic, this resemblance to an antihero may perhaps explain why he casts so powerful a spell at the end of the twentieth century.