Tea at Trianon: Pasolini on Caravaggio’s Artificial Light

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Pasolini on Caravaggio’s Artificial Light

From The Paris Review:

I may love, in a critical sense, Caravaggio’s realistic choice to trace the paintable world through characters and objects. Even more critically, I may love the invention of a new light that gives room to immobile events. Yet a great deal of historicism is necessary to grasp Caravaggio’s realism in all its majesty. As I am not an art critic, and see things from a false and flattened historical perspective, Caravaggio’s realism seems rather normal to me, superseded as it was throughout the centuries by other, newer forms of realism. As far as light is concerned, I may appreciate Caravaggio’s invention in its stupendous drama. Yet because of my own aesthetic penchants—determined by who knows what stirrings in my subconscious—I don’t like inventions of light. I much prefer the invention of forms. A new way to perceive light excites me far less than a new way to perceive, say, the knee of a Madonna under her mantle, or the close-up perspective of some saint. I love the invention and the abolition of geometries, compositions, chiaroscuro. In front of Caravaggio’s illuminated chaos, I remain admiring but also, if one sought my strictly personal opinion here, a tad detached. What excites me is his third invention: the luminous membrane that renders his figures separate, artificial, as though reflected in a cosmic mirror. Here, the realist and abject traits of faces appear smoothed into a mortuary characterology; and thus light, though dripping with the precise time of day from which it was plucked, becomes fixed in a prodigiously crystallized machine. The young Bacchus is ill, but so is his fruit. And not only the young Bacchus; all of Caravaggio’s characters are ill. Though they should be vital and healthy as a matter of consequence, their skin is steeped in the dusky pallor of death. (Read more.)