Art exhibition:
Works by one of the ‘bad boys’ of 17th century art feature in a ground-breaking display in Scotland.
The revolution in painting sparked by one of the world’s most celebrated and notorious artists is the subject of the major summer exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.
Beyond Caravaggio brings a group of four important paintings by the Italian artist to Scotland for the first time and explores the extraordinary impact of his work across Europe, both during his lifetime and in the decades following his premature death.
Organised in partnership with the National Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, this is the first exhibition devoted to this theme ever to be mounted in Britain and is part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2017.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) is one of very few ‘Old Master’ painters to enjoy genuine, broad popular appeal today, remembered not only for his brilliance, but also his challenging, argumentative and violent nature.
He led a tumultuous life. Following his murder of a man in a quarrel over a game of tennis in 1606, he spent the last four years of his life as a fugitive and yet produced some of his most profound and moving works during this time.
The unveiling of Caravaggio’s first public works in Rome in 1600 had an immediate and widespread effect.
The artist’s strikingly original, emotionally charged paintings, with their dramatic lighting and compositions, and his radical new approach to subject matter, exerted a huge influence on a host of contemporary artists from in Italy and beyond, many of them painters of the very highest calibre, such as Orazio Gentileschi, Jusepe de Ribera, Valentin de Boulogne and Hedrick ter Brugghen.
Beyond Caravaggio brings together some 40 works by these followers known collectively as ‘Caravaggesque’ or ‘Caravaggisti’ from collections across the UK and Ireland to illustrate the staggering extent of his reach.
Curator Aidan Weston-Lewis says: “Paintings by Caravaggio and his followers were avidly sought after by collectors in the decades following his death, but by the middle of the seventeenth century the enthusiasm for this kind of naturalistic painting had largely fallen away.
“Although it would take almost 300 years for Caravaggio’s reputation to be restored, this exhibition amply demonstrates how his astonishing legacy is one of the most enduring in the history of art.’
Beyond Caravaggio, Scottish National Gallery, 17 June-24 September 2017
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