Follow Up to our Meeting

Our group enjoyed sitting around a laptop looking at images of Caravaggio's work while we discussed this book. We all agreed that it was a fascinating selection.

For those of you who could not attend but who read the book, I shared with the group some interesting news about one of the versions of "The Taking of Christ." The Ukraine (Odessa) version was stolen from the Odessa Museum of Art in April of this year. The painting was cut from its frame and as of now has not been recovered by international authorities.

The Lost Painting

Born in 1948, Jonathan Harr has worked as a journalist, a writer, and an instructor at Smith College. He is best known for his first book, A Civil Action, which was later made into a popular-release film. Published in 1995, A Civil Action garnered several book awards including the National Book Critics' Circle Award for nonfiction.

The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, published in 2005, is his second book. Like A Civil Action, it is engrossing narrative nonfiction at its best. Harr's The Lost Painting traces the actual search for a missing Baroque painting and turns it into an exciting narrative on art detection and intrigue in the art world. The true-life characters and the storyline of this book will take you through the dusty archives of an Italian villa, across the sea to a Jesuit residence in Ireland, and into the art restoration laboratories of the British National Gallery as the hunt for a long-lost Caravaggio treasure becomes a thrilling story in itself.

About Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) lived a short, violent, but exceedingly fruitful life as an innovative Italian Baroque painter whose distinctive style influenced such noted painters as Rubens, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Honthorst, and Georges de la Tour. His oil paintings are known for their use of everyday characters (as if taken from the streets of Rome) placed in historical, allegorical or religious settings.

Bacchus

He hired locals as his models, and some of them can be seen repeatedly in his works. Rather than depicting the subjects of his paintings in heroic or historical garb, he often painted them in the dress of his time. As a consequence, his paintings have a sense of immediacy about them. All his works are bathed in deep, obscuring shadows and bright, defining patches of light.

Supper at Emmaus

Arranging his subjects in a dramatic fashion, such as in the moment of Peter’s martyrdom when he is about to be crucified upside down, Caravaggio employed the techniques of foreshortening, theatrical use of gesture, and a concentrated or a narrowed subject field (where your eye is drawn directly to the action/subject) in order to add drama and interest to his works.

The Martyrdom of St. Peter

Caravaggio painted primarily in Milan, Rome and Naples and enjoyed a degree of patronage; however, his personal life worked against his career as he outspent his income, brawled, gambled and even committed murder. He is said to have died on a malaria-ridden Italian coastline after escaping from prison.

The subject of Jonathan Harr's book, The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, can be seen below.

The Taking of Christ