Caravaggio: The man who saw art in a different light
In 1593, Caravaggio painted his earliest known work, Boy Peeling a Fruit. The painting consists of little more than what its name suggests, but you find yourself instantly drawn to his use of light and shadow. There’s no visible background - extremely unusual during the baroque era - and around half of the painting is obscured by darkness. No one else at the time was doing what Caravaggio was doing, and people viewed his work in awe. It was groundbreaking.
The technical term for this dramatic contrast of colour in art is ‘chiaroscuro’, a literal Italian translation for ‘light-dark’. It became something of a trademark throughout all of Caravaggio’s work, whether in his masterpiece The Calling of St. Matthew or the harrowing Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, and it wasn’t long before painters across Europe were citing him as a direct influence on their own work.
Hundreds of years later and Caravaggio is just as influential among cinematographers, photographers, movie directors and other creative types outside of the fine art world.
In an article for The Guardian, Martin Scorcese speaks of how Caravaggio’s influence “pervaded the entirety of the bar sequences in Mean Streets”. The fluorescent red light gives the bar an immediately seedy feel, while the contrasting darkness lets your imagination run wild with what might be hidden beyond the shadows. It evokes mystery and danger before a single word is even spoken.
You couldn’t talk about Caravaggio’s influence on film without talking about Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’. The atmosphere, lighting and colour of almost every scene - particularly the home office scene - is a direct reference to his work. Pause the film at any point and the still could probably be a painting in its own right.
There are thousands of other movies that make effective use of chiaroscuro lighting - the film-noir stylings of Sin City, the night-time scenes in Taxi Driver, even the Wicked Witch of the West scenes from The Wizard of Oz. The heavy contrast between light and dark conjures up an instantly mysterious atmosphere and unsettles the audience by leaving them guessing as to what’s beyond the shadows - ideal for thrillers and dramas.
In the same article for The Guardian, photographer David LaChapelle talks of how “Caravaggio used light like a photographer”, and how “his pictures are cropped like photographs”.
This is no coincidence. Caravaggio was rumoured to have turned his entire studio into a giant camera obscura, punching a hole into the ceiling so that the light would shine through and project images from outside onto the walls inside. New research also alleges that he used chemicals to burn images onto his canvases, experimenting like no artist before him.
Techniques like these are fairly commonplace among photographers today, but Caravaggio was doing these things over 500 years ago. To call him a pioneer is to put it lightly.
Even after half a century, Caravaggio’s influence still shines as bright as ever (pun definitely intended). There’s a long list of directors taking inspiration from his work up to this present day - most notably the likes of Scorcese and Christopher Nolan (take a look at this still from Nolan’s Interstellar, for example). Next time you watch a film be sure to keep an eye out for the use of chiaroscuro lighting, and why not try using it in your photos or video footage?
