Shakespeare, Caravaggio, and the Indistinct Regard

Rocco Coronato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351237918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This volume presents a contrastive study of the overlapping careers of Shakespeare and Caravaggio through the comparison of their strikingly similar conventional belief in symbol and the centrality of the subject, only to gradually open it up in an exaltation of multiplicity and the "indistinct regard" (Othello).

Utilizing a methodological premise on the notions of early modern indistinction and multiplicity, Shakespeare, Caravaggio, and the Indistinct Regard analyses the survival of English art after iconoclasm and the circulation of Italian art and motifs, methodologically reassessing the conventional comparison between painting and literature. The book examines Caravaggio's and Shakespeare's works in the perspective of the gradual waning of symbolism, the emergence of chiaroscuro and mirror imagery underneath their radically new concepts of representation, and the triumph of multiplicity and indistinction. Furthermore, this work assesses the validity of the twin concepts of multiplicity and indistinction as an interpretive tool in a dialectical interplay with much recent work on indeterminacy in literary criticism and the sciences.

1 Imagine

Shaking Spears

Discussing the three arguably most ubiquitous Latin words in literary criticism, ut pictura poesis, Shaftesbury puts them to short shrift and contends that “[c]omparisons and parallels” that “run between painting and poetry because of the pictoribus atque poesis etc. and the ut pictura poesis” are “almost ever absurd and at best constrained, lame, or defective”.¹ We can only wonder what Shaftesbury would have thought of a serendipitous instance where history itself nearly makes the case for simultaneity between the very best of painting and of literature: the near perfect overlap between the careers of Caravaggio and Shakespeare from c. 1592 to 1610 (the year Caravaggio died). Such a staggering synchronicity was not limited to chronology: Michael Fried noted a common trait in their sceptical doubt over the possibility of knowing the thoughts of another person’s mind.² Recent studies have further underlined Caravaggio’s dislocation of the sense of history and the salience of doubt in interpretation,³ to the beneficial detriment of the twentieth-century appropriation of Caravaggio as a transgressive codebreaker. I wish to prove that the comparison with Caravaggio casts, by contrast, new light (and shadow) on Shakespeare.

Obviously, I am not interested in influence but in confluence. Shakespeare and Caravaggio almost certainly knew nothing of each other. The earliest English allusion to Caravaggio only appeared in 1686 in William Aglionby’s Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues (unsurprisingly for neoclassical England, a scathing one). Unlike Titian, Caravaggio’s paintings were less routinely spread through prints outside Italy, and only then after Shakespeare’s death.⁴ The earliest reference to Caravaggio outside Italy occurs in Het Schilder-Boeck by the Dutch painter Carel Van Mander (1604; the manuscript probably dated back to the year before). Writing in Dutch, Mander alludes to a certain Michelangelo da Caravaggio, “who is doing extraordinary things in Rome”, having “climbed up from poverty through hard work and by taking on everything with foresight and courage”. Van Mander describes Caravaggio as a fauvish painter roaming about on the moonlit streets of Rome, a provincial shake-spear in search of fame: “he does not study his art constantly, so that after two weeks of work he will sally forth for two months together with his rapier at his side and his servant-boy after him, always ready to argue or fight”.⁵ On 28 May 1606, Caravaggio did use his weapon and wounded the painter Ranuccio Tomassoni with a fatal blow to his thigh. His 1610 death of a malignant fever at Porto Ercole for his contemporaries became the epitome of his eventful life: according to the rival Giovanni Baglione, Caravaggio suffered a death equally as bad as the life he had led (“morì malamente, come appunto male havea vivuto”).⁶

Yet my choice of Caravaggio does not rest on simultaneity alone. Despite their separation, in some moments, the two artists eerily seem to be working in the same studio, and not only in those frequent places where they adapt the same group of mythological figures, like Medusa or Narcissus. The similarity may stem from the same source (the episode of Caritas Romana in which Pero breastfeeds the father Cimon who had been sentenced to death by starvation, included by Caravaggio in The Seven Works of Mercy, 1607),⁷ and quoted in Timon of Athens (4.3.116–17); from the same symbolic place (the cave in the backdrop of The Burial of St Lucy, probably inspired by Dionysus’ Ear in Syracuse, which recalls the den of Titus Andronicus); or from the use of similar symbols, the “painted banquet” (SON 47.6) of the Basket of Fruit (c. 1596). Some coincidences really make one pause: the skull portrayed in Caravaggio’s St Francis in Meditation as held by the saint naturally recalls the gravedigger’s scene in Hamlet, a striking reminder of the two artists’ participation in a largely shared visual and symbolic culture.⁸

I suggest that both Caravaggio and Shakespeare adopt, in their own varied ways, “the indistinct regard”, to borrow the expression with which the Venetians on terra firma endeavour to decode the naval manoeuvres of the Turks in Othello (OTH 2.1.41), a gaze deliberately fixed on multiplicity, indeterminacy, and indistinction. To define it, I need to consider first of all the state of the art in Shakespeare’s England and the status of the image as a model for the definition of literature. I begin by saying what this regard is not: neither ambiguity nor indeterminacy.

Indistinction goes beyond the innately literary phenomenon of ambiguity so present in interpretation from Aristotle to Empson, often also studied as semantic indeterminacy⁹ or as rhetorical ambiguity.¹⁰ From classical ambiguity, indistinction draws the possibility of simultaneous, multiple meanings that make literature possible, yet it is rather focused on what apparently denies and defies speech and thought, the fleeting moments of change, conversion and self-knowledge captured by Caravaggio and Shakespeare in their use of symbolism, light, darkness, and contemplation. My usage of indistinction also decidedly steers clear of the deconstructionist belief that literary works are not only indeterminate, but also “commentaries on their own indeterminacy”:¹¹ on the contrary, the indistinct regard constitutes interpretation in exceptional moments of negation.

Scientific notions of indeterminacy are not deliberately used, either. This book does not mean to offer yet another literary, liberal appropriation of Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy.¹² It is true that the conditions of interpretation, as scientists say, may make it indeterminate or utterly impossible: what resists determinacy may thus be in itself or in observation,¹³ unintentional and linked with the glitches in historical reconstruction (past conditions now lost to us, or the influence of present intellectual concerns).¹⁴ Indeterminacy may also derive from overdetermination (having more than one determining factor) and underdetermination (falling short of having features by which to be determined).¹⁵ It is a sobering thought to posit that, alongside semantic and epistemic indeterminacy, there might be a deep metaphysical indeterminacy residing in the act itself of formulating a hypothesis itself, when “reality itself is poised between alternatives”.¹⁶ The indistinction I try to reconstruct here, however, is not based on the conditions of observation: by way of centring the analysis on elements of indistinction in Caravaggio and Shakespeare, it argues that both artists make observation possible even in those extreme situations of negation.

Caravaggio and Shakespeare offer a fruitful interpretation in divergence. Such an effort acknowledges the caveats usually placed before dangerous crossings. In the next section, I will consider a crucial objection: the paucity of early modern English publications on art and architecture, and the reduced artistic output in post-Reformation England, would seem to attest to an antivisual culture – so, why use Italian art to analyse Shakespeare? I will list the many reasons for believing that art was heavily present in Shakespeare’s imagination, though probably not thanks to specific paintings (many sins this book may have committed, but not the hardly unprecedented one of positing Shakespeare’s knowledge of a determinate painting). First, however, a brief note on method is warranted.

Shaftesbury was right. Many comparisons between art and literature typically rest on an extended generalization over space and time that magnifies the apparent similarities and attenuates the differences. Once Mannerism, for instance, is enlarged by way of ever-extending metaphors, similarities do explode, even though a feature might be literally present in one art and only figuratively in another.¹⁷ Mannerism as the alleged artistic template and counterpart to Shakespeare had, indeed, its own mannerisms in recent critical fashion, yet it is in good company with other generalizations under the aegis of the unity of the arts, sanctioned by use but often rendered threadbare past their utility.¹⁸ Actually, the term maniera boasted a belaboured history and admitted of contradictory, negative applications.¹⁹ Is Mannerism (or the Baroque) really unique in sundering the link between art and truth and exposing the illusory nature of art in a moment of crisis and precariousness?²⁰

Those scholars who are fond of interacting between different media, Ulrich Weisstein warned, ought to reject the notion of influence and reason instead by way of analogy, carefully underlining the similarities between things otherwise unrelated.²¹ The warning against the “forced equations between specific features”, that led Svetlana and Paul Alpers to find faults in those attempts, like Mario Praz’s Mnemosyne, who traced a similar closing effect in both a cupola and the couplets of a Shakespearean sonnet, ought to be kept firmly in mind²². Yet, Caravaggio and Shakespeare nicely dovetail with the last patterning listed by Thomas McFarland in order of ascending irrelation and diffusion among the arts, that is, “[w]hen the inner logic of an intellectual emphasis leads to a similar disposition of metaphorical materials even when no influence is present”.²³ Instead of the application of universal notions (Mannerism or the Baroque) to the particular, I will stick to what Leonard Barkan admirably says about the statuesque reawakening of Hermione: “it would be rash to argue that Shakespeare invented [it] with a copy of Vasari at his side; rather let us say that we can shed light on Winter’s Tale by a close look at the common ground here”.²⁴

The State of the Art

Apropos the common ground between painting and poetry, were there enough artistic images in Shakespeare’s England to give him a model for the ut pictura poesis? Iconoclasts hyperbolically claimed that millions of souls had been damned by images used in place of religion, and not one soul “was won to Christ by having of images”²⁵. For the Puritan William Perkins, even “a thing feigned in the mind by imagination is an idol”.²⁶ As early as in September 1538, the English priests were instructed to remove images against the detestable sin of idolatry in application of the Biblical caveat against image-making (Exodus 20.4–6);²⁷ the 1559 Royal Injunctions, substantially repeating those issued by Edward VI in 1547, forbade, in churches an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations Used
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Imagine
• 2 Still, Life
• 3 Dark Mirrors
• 4 The Indistinct Regard
• Bibliography
• Index