Caravaggio, The Last Act

The painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) was sentenced to death in 1606 in Rome for manslaughter and fled to Naples. Until his feverish death four years later on the beach near Porte Ercole, he continued to work in several places, but most of the religious work he did in Naples has a lasting dramatic power and shows a great desire to experiment with claire-obscure. The Neapolitan Mario Martone, theatre director and film maker, made Caravaggio, The Last Act on the occasion of a major Caravaggio exhibition in the Neapolitan Capodimonte Museum. Martone made his début 20 years ago with Nella città barocca (‘I tried to match fragmentary images of 17th-century Naples with the urban fabric of the contemporary city’) and had already made a film about Naples in the time of Luca Giordano (‘once again what came out was not a documentary but a parallel between the swirling details of the paintings of “Luca fa’ presto” (Luke Work-fast) and those of today’s Naples that still encompass the same reality that was observed by 17th-century painters’). Something similar, with even greater effect, is what Martone does with Caravaggio. Last year, Vincent Monnikendam showed in Souls of Naples how much of contemporary Naples can still be found in Caravaggio’s work. Martone does it the other way round. He starts with the life and work of Caravaggio and ends up in his own contemporary reality. (GT)