Art review: Beyond Caravaggio at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

It's fascinating to see work by those inspired by Caravaggio, but none of them surpass the master

Supper at Emmaus, 1601, by Caravaggio is one of the stars of Beyond Caravaggio at the Scottish National Gallery. © The National Gallery, London

Beyond Caravaggio Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh ****

Caravaggio was like Picasso, a genius who seemed to come from nowhere, but changed art forever. He painted directly from life, bringing ordinary people into his art and thence into stories from the Bible and the lives of the saints. He gave this even greater immediacy by bringing the action close to the spectator, sometimes literally in-your-face, and by his dramatic use of lighting, observed rather than invented. He arrived in Rome, a young man, around 1590 and his astonishing way of painting was a rapid success. However, he was constantly in trouble with the law and in 1607 killed a man in a fight. Fleeing a charge of murder, he went first to Naples, then Malta, then Sicily, painting with ever greater originality wherever he went. In 1610, he died while trying to return to Rome. Under the Renaissance popes the city had become the centre of European art. There Caravaggio found imitators immediately and very quickly much further afield, too.

This explosion of new ideas gives the exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery its title. It sketches – it can do no more, so vast was its impact – the spread of Caravaggio’s influence far beyond Italy, and the uses that diverse artists made of it. It could hardly do that without the presence of the man himself, however, and indeed he is represented by two major compositions from the high point of his success and two smaller pictures from his early career, when his work reflected his own immediate circle and lifestyle. The most striking of these latter two is Boy Bitten by a Lizard. The boy, apparently the artist himself, reacts to the sudden shock of his nipped finger, the offending lizard still hanging on. Making the instant permanent, this interest in momentary drama and fleeting expression was quite new. New too was the artist’s use of himself as model, not as a self-portrait, but in some drama. It locates his painting in his own immediate experience, something that was much later to become definitive of modernity.

But the two major pictures, the Supper at Emmaus and the Kiss of Judas, are altogether grander. Each has a wall to itself at the National Gallery. Seeing them like that, you really do understand the impact of his art. Indeed, from the National Gallery in London, the Supper at Emmaus is very familiar, but I have never seen it look so grand. The subject is the moment after the Resurrection when Christ revealed himself to two disciples by breaking bread. Light from the front casts strong shadows and brings everything forward, so the action doesn’t recede obediently behind the picture plane as in a well behaved picture it should. Indeed, a basket of fruit perched on the edge of the table threatens to fall out of the painting altogether. The nearest thing to us is the ragged elbow of the disciple on the left starting from his chair. The other disciple spreads his arms and his left hand seems to reach out beyond the picture plane. Christ himself is young and clean shaven. He is not set apart, but just another person in this very human scene.

At the other end of the room the Kiss of Judas is an equally extraordinary painting, but it also has a sad story attached to it. Offered to the National Gallery from a Scottish collection nearly a century ago, shamefully it was refused and is now in the National Gallery of Ireland. It is a rather poignant homecoming, but what a painting it is. Eight figures are crowded into the turbulent composition. Off-centre, a bearded Judas kisses Christ. Nervous and making sure there is no mistake, his kiss is over-emphatic. At the same moment two armoured soldiers grab Christ. The foremost soldier’s steel-clad arm is the most prominent thing in the whole composition. Christ flinches from this treacherous and unsavoury embrace, but his hands are clasped in resignation. Caravaggio himself appears on the right reaching over the crowd holding a lantern, but its light is obscured by a soldier’s helmet. Thus masked, it can only illuminate the artist’s own face and hand. The main light is from the left: is the light his art can throw on the scene as nothing to the light of Christian truth?

It must be said that not many of Caravaggio’s followers can come close to such dramatic storytelling, but they certainly try. The show is organised by subject matter so these two pictures are surrounded by other painters’ New Testament subjects. Sometimes I fear it is no contest, but there are one or two startlingly good pictures which do also illustrate the point of the title. They are by artists who took Caravaggio’s inspiration, but more than simply imitators, they ran with it. Dutch painter Honthorst is one of them. In Christ Before Pilate, Pilate is a civil servant wearily wagging his finger at a troublesome individual with whom reluctantly he must deal, a Shakespearean insight. Very different is Orazio Gentileschi’s beautiful and unorthodox The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Gentileschi was closely associated with Caravaggio, but his is not a drama of light and shadow, but rather of cool daylight. The force of Caravaggio’s example is in the ordinariness of the scene as Joseph lies collapsed in exhaustion, Mary tenderly feeds her child and their donkey dumbly waits.

One of the most striking paintings here is by an artist known only as Saraceni’s Lodger (Pensionato de Saraceni.) Saraceni, who was also close to Caravaggio, is represented elsewhere in the show, but this composition by his “lodger” of the Denial of St Peter is strikingly original. Caravaggio painted the subject, but this unknown painter takes his own approach to create an electrifying confrontation. Peter, seated, is in partial shadow. As his young accuser stands over him, her face and hands catch the light. Her profile is startlingly abbreviated as the artist observes how light can disrupt the accepted way things look. This points forward to Vermeer, beyond Caravaggio indeed, but not unconnected all the same. There is similar treatment of the profile of Tobias in Tobias and the Angel, by another unknown painter, but the artist also makes a visual pun with the profile of the fish Tobias is carrying. The Concert by Hendrik Terbruggen, one of many paintings following Caravaggio’s early scenes of music making, card playing and the like, shows the same willingness to accept the evidence of what he sees, not what he knows is there. Georges de la Tour’s investigation of light is even more striking. Eerily simplified by the light of a single candle, his Dice Players seem strangely modern.

There is much else to intrigue here. There may be something very pointed in the painting of Susanna and the Elders by Orazio Gentileschi’s gifted daughter, Artemisia, for instance. She, like Susanna, had experienced the vagaries of justice, or rather of injustice. She was raped by the artist Agostino Tassi. He was tried, but acquitted. In Cymon and Pero, the story of an old man kept alive in prison by his daughter feeding him from her breast, Dirk van Baburen’s graphic realism is really quite uncomfortable. The old man’s very dirty feet are a special study with an impeccable pedigree in Caravaggio’s own work, however. Jusepe de Ribera’s depiction of old age in his paintings of Saint Onufrius and also of poor old St Bartholomew being flayed alive is equally unflinching. It suggests Rembrandt and you do feel that perhaps he and Velazquez too, both as close to Caravaggio in time and as much influenced by him as are many here, represent a stage beyond Caravaggio that the show might also have visited.

Until 24 September