Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama

Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema

John Champagne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137470041
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Offering queer analyses of paintings by Caravaggio and Puccini and films by Özpetek, Amelio, and Grimaldi, Champagne argues that Italian masculinity has often been articulated through melodrama. Wide in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, this much-needed study shows the vital role of affect for both Italian history and masculinity studies.

C H A P T E R 1

---

Caravaggio and the Melodramatic Sensibility

Introduction

There is perhaps no painter who has ignited as much passion as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610)—both during his lifetime and beyond. Following years of neglect, Caravaggio was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, when both his art and life seemed ready-made for a flourishing Romantic sensibility (Warwick “Introduction” 14).¹ With the destruction in World War II of a St. Matthew and the Angel and the 1969 theft of a Palermo Nativity, rediscovery of “lost” paintings like Dublin’s Taking of Christ, and controversies over the authenticity of others (the Genoa Ecce Homo, for example), the past century compounds our own melodramatic attachments to the painter.

Yet despite this hyperinvestment—David Stone calling him “a cult figure”—art historians have struggled to name Caravaggio’s aesthetic (36). As Creighton E. Gilbert argues, “Although there is broad agreement to reject the time-worn tag of simple naturalism . . . modern writers have not found a replacement easy” (79). He continues, “Yet one proposal assigns to the artist a synthesis of natural and classical.”² Another critic notes Caravaggio’s combining of the naturalistic and theatrical, his sensibility “halfway between the quotidian and the symbolic . . . the literal and moral” (Sgarbi 32).³ A third similarly finds in Caravaggio both “naturalistic modeling” and “the highly theatrical construction of pictorial narratives” (Schütze 26). Michael Fried reads the artist’s style as a naturalism that paradoxically thematizes “reflection as such” (Moment 50).

Contrary to Gilbert’s claims, however, many critics continue to name Caravaggio’s aesthetic as either realist or naturalist.⁴ A. D. Wright describes the painter’s work as “a simple exercise in realistic description” (215).⁵ Richard E. Spear notes Caravaggio’s “marvellous realism” (22); John Varriano refers to Caravaggio as a realist (21). Charles Dempsey outlines a seventeenth-century debate in European painting “not confined to an opposition of idealist to naturalist styles” but rather between two different “naturalistic” styles, Caravaggio’s, one of them (98).⁶ Perhaps setting the stage for these interpretations, in 1977, John Rupert Martin claimed that “Caravaggio’s unwavering dedication to naturalism was recognized by both artists and critics from the very start” (41).⁷

Limiting my analysis primarily to the paintings with religious subject matter—typically Caravaggio’s larger canvases, and those that do not obey Albertian perspectival conventions—I propose naming the artist’s sensibility melodramatic.⁸ Clearly, Caravaggio’s paintings were not understood in his own day as melodrama; rather, they employed certain conventions that came to define the sensibility. Given the consensus that the melodramatic sensibility emerges in the wake of the French Revolution and the growth of a genuinely popular theater, other critics might find my naming of Caravaggio’s aesthetic anachronistic (Brooks Melodramatic; Elsaesser; Gledhill Home; Rahill).⁹ I suggest, however, certain historical parallels between the Counter-Reformation and the French Revolution.¹⁰ As a riposte to Protestant iconoclasm, post-Tridentine religious art sought to reassert the role images might play in Catholic worship; my chief interest is thus in the commissions available for public contemplation. An analysis of Caravaggio’s paintings also requires a discussion of the Baroque, for, whatever disagreements art historians have concerning his work, the term Baroque is almost universally applied.¹¹ In the next chapter, I explore Caravaggio’s melodramatic representations of the male body. Here, I use his paintings to introduce melodrama’s chief characteristics.

Concerning direct evidence of Caravaggio’s influence on literary melodrama, admittedly, little exists. One critic, however, has suggested affinities between Victor Hugo, French Romantic painters such as Delacroix, and the influence of Caravaggio on such painters (Vaughan 333).¹² For Romanticism was a reaction against classicism, and, during the Romantic period, Caravaggio was understood as anticlassical. Interestingly, an unsigned 1834 British review of Hugo’s melodrama Notre Dame specifically compares the novel’s sensibility to the paintings of Caravaggio (and Guercino), arguing that all three were “not true to nature” and yet capable of producing “violent sympathies and affections” in the reader (Urban 81; italics in the original).

As for traffic between Italy, France, Germany, and Britain: about a visit to Rome’s Doria Pamphili palace, German melodramatist August von Kotzebue mentions “a Neapolitan Lazzarone who sells melons, by Michelangelo Caravaggio” (Souvenirs 414–415).¹³ Pixérécourt was born in Nancy, whose Musée des Beaux-Arts houses a Caravaggio Annunciation, which the dramatist might have seen (the painting belonged to the Cathedral from 1742 to the year he left Nancy for Koblenz, 1793).¹⁴ The Death of the Virgin was ultimately bought by Louis XIV in 1671 and ended up at the Louvre, where Pixérécourt could conceivably have seen it; the Louvre itself opened as a museum in 1793.

Melodramatic texts do not simply allegorize strong emotional states; they generate profound affective responses in their audience (Landy “Introduction” 15). Caravaggio’s paintings similarly seek to move their viewers. Many art historians have argued that his works engage issues of spectatorship in ways that were, in their historical moment, absolutely unique to Western painting, and it is an understatement to say that Caravaggio’s paintings move many spectators profoundly (and were intended to do so). Caravaggio’s influence on the history of modern European painting is definitive (Schűtze 26). While never organizing a proper “school” or large workshop, Caravaggio was (and is) known for the sheer number of public commissions in Rome, including those still in situ in churches, as well as his influence on subsequent painters—a theme explored in a number of recent exhibitions, including the 2011–2012 Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome. Despite certain controversies, even in his life time, many of the paintings were successful; the commission for San Luigi dei Francesi, for example, met with public acclaim (Puglisi 27). Following the Jubilee of 1600, Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Pilgrims was placed in the church of Sant’Agostino, where it was highly popular (Wright 215).¹⁵ The Deposition from the Cross, painted for the Chiesa Nuova but subsequently moved to the Vatican’s Pinacoteca, was universally lauded (Langdon 277).

And any investigation of Caravaggio and melodrama would have to mention the artist’s own life. From the time it was first recorded, in 1617–21, by Giulio Mancini, then, in 1642, by Caravaggio’s enemy and rival Giovanni Baglione, and then later, in 1645, by Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Caravaggio’s biography has been portrayed as a melodramatic narrative, characterized by “a constant struggle for gratification and equally constant blockages to its attainment” (Landy “Introduction” 14), including street brawls, sex, scenes in restaurants, wealthy patrons, libel trials, manslaughter, rejected commissions later bought up by dukes and cardinals, and knighthood and its rescinding, all ending with death in Tuscany.¹⁶ It is no wonder his life has inspired so many books and films.

Louis Bayman has suggested one of the problems of locating in Caravaggio’s art the melodramatic sensibility. According to Bayman,

The question of transcendence is the main sticking point theoretically separating the Baroque from melodrama—that unlike the Baroque, melodrama does not offer transcendence for its fatally bounded characters. In Brooks’ analysis the “other realms” of the “ineffable” to which melodrama gestures are immanent to rather than beyond the world of the action. (Personal correspondence)

He also reminds us, however, that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between Brooks’s “ineffable that is an elevated realm within the everyday and one that is beyond it,” since in either case—melodrama as defined by Brooks; Caravaggio’s paintings—“those realms are suggested rather than actualised.”¹⁷ Additionally, throughout its history, melodrama has offered some of its characters if not transcendence then at least alleviation of their suffering—via marriage to the “good guy,” for example. For given that melodrama is a sensibility, it can traverse genres.

History as Melodrama

As a historical event, the Counter-Reformation is itself melodramatic. According to Brooks, melodrama “is centrally about repeated obfuscations and refusals of the message and about the need for repeated clarifications and acknowledgments of the message” (Melodramatic 28). Writings by figures like Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, on the one hand, and Andreas Karlstadt, on the other, are evidence of this struggle toward recognition of the true Christian faith and the proper relationship between painted images and religious devotion. That this struggle was conceived of by both sides as Manichean is self-evident.

Critics have noted the way in which melodrama typically voices a protest of the weak against the powerful. As a historical event, the Counter-Reformation is also melodramatic in that all the various players—laity, secular rulers, papacy—were able to cast themselves in the role of victim. Early modern Catholicism was not simply a rearguard riposte to the Reformation, for example; it was in part a response to protests, dating from the period of pre-Lutheran reformers, of a beleaguered laity (Wright 30).¹⁸ Several of Boccaccio’s well-known tales, for example, satirize the hypocrisy of mendicant orders (see, for example, “First Day, Fourth Story” 45–49 and “Third Day, Tenth Story” 276–81).

Secular rulers saw the Counter-Reformation as an attempt by the papacy both to stake out whatever remained of papal temporal power and to protect church wealth. This was the perspective of both Protestant rulers and their Catholic counterparts. The Council of Trent was characterized by behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Roman Emperors Charles V and Ferdinand I, France’s Kings Francis I and Henry II, and Philip II of Spain, some of whom threatened to hold their own local reform councils (O’Malley, Trent, What Happened). Catholic reservations about papal power, which continued into the eighteenth century, ultimately led to the suppression of the Society of Jesus by the papacy itself (Wright 25). As Wright argues, in the wake of the Council, secular rulers, “intent on defending traditional control over the Church in their territories,” attempted to thwart the reassertion of episcopal authority (12).¹⁹ But this is only half the story, for, as O’Malley reminds us, the Holy Roman Emperor was “traditionally recognized as the Protector of the Church” and the two Emperors who ruled during the various meetings of the Council had a stake in using Trent to establish “political stability and peace in the Empire” (Trent, What Happened 13).

As for the papacy, thanks to the efforts of secular rulers to circumscribe church power, Rome was also able to cast itself in the role of victim. The Council was a constant tug of war between, on the one hand, the various popes who ruled during its eighteen years and, on the other, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (and, later, Ferdinand) in particular. The Church did in fact attempt to use Tridentine reform, however unsuccessfully, as an opportunity to reassert its prerogatives, as in “the long, post-Conciliar attempts by the papacy to enforce application of the revised bull, In Coena Domini, which threatened automatic excommunication against all who obstructed ecclesiastical rights or jurisdiction in any way” (Wright 25). Catholic historian Gregory argues that “much of post-Tridentine Catholicism would for centuries be characterized by an intellectually defensive style, extremely sensitive to any deviations from orthodoxy and obedience” (46).

Melodrama, The Counter-Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution

The relationship between the Reformation, the Catholic response, and the scientific revolution is a complicated one, as the continuing controversy around Robert K. Merton’s Science, Technology and Society in 17th-Century England, with its positing of a historical correlation between Protestantism and the rise of modern science, suggests (Cohen). And just as the precise relationship between Caravaggio’s aesthetic and Counter-Reformation theology is debated, so is the relationship between the scientific revolution and the post-Tridentine church.

Published in 1543 and dedicated to Pope Paul III, initially, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium caused little controversy (Tarnas 251).²⁰ Copernican ideas may even have influenced Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgement (Shrimplin), commissioned in 1534 but completed under Paul in 1541 (Geczy 118). Given his theory’s contradicting of certain Scriptural passages, initial opposition to Copernicus actually came from Protestants (Tarnas 252), and it was not until 1616—six years after Caravaggio’s death, and the year of Galileo’s first trial—that the Roman Inquisition placed Copernicus’s work on the Index of Forbidden Books.

As for Galileo, Caravaggio’s patron Del Monte “personally knew Galileo and was familiar with all the details of his lenses and with one of the few telescopes” (Saggio 30). Del Monte and his brother, scientist Guidubaldo, helped Galileo find a position at the University of Pisa (Valleriani 17), and the Cardinal was also instrumental in securing Medici patronage for him (Gilbert 124). Sybille Ebert-Schifferer suggests that Caravaggio’s tenebrism, which starts to become prominent with the Saint Catherine painted while living with Del Monte, “succeeds in reconciling theology and science, in a genial fusion of the interests of the two Del Monte brothers” (92) and is specifically the result of the brothers’ interest in optics (91; on Caravaggio and Galileo, see also Prodi 3; Mascherpa 21–26; Saggio 28; Varriano 137).²¹ And more than one critic has suggested a relationship between Galileo’s telescope and Caravaggio’s empiricism, an empiricism that conflicts with Renaissance religious paintings’ focus on types and classical improvements on nature (Spike Caravaggio 123).

Even if Caravaggio’s canvases responded to the scientific revolution, then, in light of Del Monte’s patronage, we cannot assume that there was something overtly anti-Tridentine in his work. Additionally, the trials of Galileo occurred after Caravaggio’s death, in 1616, when the scientist was “warned [by the Roman Inquisition] that he should abandon his position with regard to Copernicanism” (Feldhay 15), and 1633, when he was found “vehemently suspect of heresy” (Shea and Artigas 193) and sentenced to house arrest.

Melodrama, Painting, and the Catholic Response to the Reformation

As a theorist of aesthetic modernism, Jonathan Flatley locates in art-making “a response to the losses generated by the experience of modernity” (9). Melodrama has similarly been defined as a response to a loss, specifically, the loss of religious faith. It comes into being “in a world where the traditional imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Italian Masculinity and Melodrama
• 1  Caravaggio and the Melodramatic Sensibility
• 2  Caravaggio’s Melodramatic Male Bodies
• 3  Tosca and Social Melodrama
• 4  Puccini’s Sparrow: Longing and La Rondine
• 5  “Normality . . . What an Ugly Word!” Contemporary Queer Melodrama
• 6  Özpetek’s Queer Cinema
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index