La verità di Caravaggio

Giuseppe Fornari\’s essay on Caravaggio aims to dispel the commonplaces and mythographic stratifications that have accumulated over the artist and the character, misinterpreting or trivializing the cognitive and spiritual intentions that guided its production. Caravaggio is not an \’easy\’ painter, just as he was not an \’easy\’ man. This is why the cliché of \’realism\’, commonly adopted to describe the characteristic trait of his work, confuses its true scope under a generic and equivocal label: the artist has pursued \’reality\’, but the dramatic and metaphysical one of man\’s search for God, a search whose crowning achievement comes at the moment when human action becomes drama, irrevocable choice, openness to the inconceivable. This is Caravaggio\’s \’truth\’ and everything in him is subordinated to his achievement in representation. The misfortunes that afflict the life of Michelangelo Merisi, and that he actively procures, deepen and make even more agonizing this truth that manifests itself as Truth, feeding a feverish crescendo of masterpieces that has few comparisons in Western art. Along the thread of the contrasting readings and critical interpretations to which the painter has been subjected – not excluding the myth of the \’cursed artist\’ stimulated and gradually sedimented because of his personality – the study analyzes a large part of his production and dwells on the final works: extreme testimony of the last, agitated years of his life, marked by events of blood and daring escapes, up to the enigma of a premature death, to explain the thesis of the State crime. Fornari demonstrates the unsustainability of this hypothesis and brings Caravaggio\’s destiny back to the most recognizable, humanly bitter but also spiritually exalting figure of an artistic victory achieved at the price of investing – and finally losing – his entire existence.