The Caravaggesque: New York

Miraculous and highly unorthodox, the paintings of Caravaggio stunned the young painters from northern Europe arriving in Rome in the seventeenth century. These encounters generated a revolution in painting across the continent, as painters from Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands embraced and reinterpreted Caravaggio’s signature innovations, namely his merciless realism, his theatrical approach to narrative and his dramatic lighting effects. The Caravaggesque gathers together a group of exceptional paintings by these artists, in whose work the Lombard master’s extraordinary creativity reverberated for decades beyond his death.

The exhibition features a selection of works by artists who took up key subjects made famous by Caravaggio, rendering them often in the highly naturalistic and distinctively tenebrist style he pioneered. Andrea Vaccaro’s Judith with the Head of Holofernesand Giuseppe Vermiglio’s David with the Head of Goliathreference the master’s brutal decapitation scenes derived from the Bible, while Jan Janssens’ Apollo and Marsyasexplores a similarly violent theme, in this instance drawn from classical mythology. Nicolas Tournier’s Roman Charityreprises a theme made famous by Caravaggio in his Seven Acts of Mercyaltarpiece for the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples, just as Nicolas Régnier’s Saint Matthew and the Angelrecalls Caravaggio’s famously rejected altarpiece for the Contarelli chapel in Rome. The Basket of Fruitby Bartolomeo Cavarozzi from the Barberini collection amplifies to monumental scale the master’s iconic still life now in the Ambrosiana, while Caravaggio’s musicians, laughing youths, and bravos find echoes in another intimately scaled canvas by Régnier, a self-portrait by David de Haen, and an image of a soldier by Theodoor Rombouts.