CSI: Renaissance Italy

Who killed Caravaggio? Or what killed Caravaggio? Four hundred years later, who cares? To “celebrate” the 400th anniversary of the demise of the demented genius of the Renaissance, Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage looks to answer these questions once and for all. According to a report from Reuters, a team from the departments of Anthropology and Cultural Heritage Conservation at the universities of Ravenna and Bologna will play a different kind of tomb raiders in search of Caravaggio’s remains. The process, however, which sounds more convoluted than an episode of CSI, would challenge even Gus Grissom’s team. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "CSI: Renaissance Italy."

Playing the Part

What must life really have been like with Vincent Van Gogh? Born March 30, 1853, Van Gogh tried the patience of everyone from his father to his devoted brother Theo to his one-time friend Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh’s tragic life can be played for pathos or even for laughs, however unintended. The best biography of Van Gogh’s life and thoughts is found in the letters, but even they have been subject to “creative” misreading, most notably in the novelization of those letters by Irving Stone in Lust for Life. In 1955, Kirk Douglas (above) played Vincent in the movie version of Stone’s novel, which was also titled Lust for Life. The highly physical actor Douglas played Vincent as a highly physical artist, full of passionate intensity and a lively body. Douglas portrays Vincent with an almost preternatural belief in his own abilities, even when doubt seems a sensible course. I find it fascinating how different actors have tackled Van Gogh over the years. In many ways, Van Gogh the film character has become the Hamlet of art history acting, with different actors emphasizing different elements of the real-life artist’s persona. Douglas depicts Vincent brimming with self-confidence. Van Gogh certainly needed to armor himself against doubt to persevere, but I don’t get the sense from the letters that he never harbored any doubts about his choices.

In 1990, Tim Roth (above) played Vincent in Vincent & Theo, with Paul Rhys taking on the role of Theo. As obvious from the title of the film, Roth’s Vincent is seen primarily through his relationship with Theo. In contrast to Douglas’ rugged portrayal, the slightly built Roth plays a more needy and literally hungry Vincent. In Vincent & Theo we get more of a sense of the weaknesses of Vincent that Theo had to address, which ultimately led to Theo’s own death shortly after Vincent’s suicide. Douglas’ Vincent is the typical hero of 1950s American movies—the bold individual paddling mightily against the current of conventional wisdom. Roth’s Vincent is a more complex psychological character, reflecting the art house sensibilities of 1980s and 1990s movies. Of course, by the time Roth plays Vincent, the story of Van Gogh’s tribulations was well worn territory, so plumbing the psychological depths, indeed the doubts that Douglas glossed over, presented almost virgin territory.


Perhaps the most disturbing depiction of Vincent Van Gogh was that of Andy Serkis as part of Simon Schama’s in Power of Art series in 2006. Fresh from playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings movies, Serkis plays a more obsessed, more disturbed Vincent. If Douglas embodied power and Roth embodied frailty, Serkin beautifully embodies the fever pitch of all-consuming obsession. Just as Gollum loses his humanity in a single-minded quest for the ring, Serkin’s Vincent seemingly loses some of his humanity thanks to a similar kind of tunnel vision, in this case for a new vision in art. The scene in which Serkin eats paint straight from the tube (something the real Vincent actually did during his lowest points of mental illness) is simply harrowing and deeply illustrative of the anguish of the real Vincent. Each of these actors stressed a single facet of a multi-faceted personality. None of them could possibly capture Vincent whole, and even collectively they merely scratch the surface. What must life really have been like with Vincent Van Gogh? We can only guess—perhaps a little better thanks to these actors. But life with Vincent certainly must have been a constant parade of extremes. We can get a taste of those extremes through his art today, and maybe that’s all we’re meant to bear.

Imported Goods

I’ve always found it fascinating how the first quintessentially “American” school of thought—Transcendentalism—borrowed heavily from non-American sources. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and others drew heavily from Eastern mysticism, Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Of course, all things quintessentially American came from somewhere else, the “mutt” leader of the world. Even Thomas Cole, the lead member of Transcendentalist-tinged Hudson River School, the first American art movement, came from England. Born February 1, 1801 in Lancashire, England, Cole was 17 years old when he first came to America, moving about with his family until finally formally learning painting at the PAFA in 1825. Soon after, Cole set out on his career of painting spiritually moving landscapes of American scenes of New England and the Catskill Mountains of New York. Yet, Cole resists the label of a purely “American” painter. Cole always painted some version of paradise, sometimes literally as in The Garden of Eden (above, from 1828). Regardless of location, the perfect landscape always existed in a timeless, locationless place in his imagination.

Cole spent several years in the early 1830s and early 1840s living in England and Italy. In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that landscape painters are shaped in part by the landscape before them. In other words, the local growth of the American scene provides different materials than the forests of England or Europe, which then influence the work of the artist. Cole saw enough of these different landscapes that they eventually mingled into the “idea” of a landscape over time. A good Transcendentalist, Cole transcended the mundane facts of the landscape and struck at the spirit of the woods. Cole’s L'Allegro (Italian Sunset) (above, from 1845) borrows a title from the British poet John Milton and sets itself in Italy, but the idealized light and pastoral sensibility come entirely from the amalgamation in Cole’s head and heart. The liveliness of the upbeat figures in the foreground contrasts sharply with the deathly stillness of the classical ruins far in the distance. Cole painted series such as The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life as overt allegories, but for him every landscape was an allegory.

Cole also painted Milton’s pendant poem to L’Allegro, Il Penseroso (above, from 1845). The prone, pensive figure before the religious ruin in the foreground resembles one of the figures seen dancing in L’Allegro. Like Milton, Cole wants to offer both sides of the human emotional coin. The ancient-looking icon is pure Old World, but the abundance of greenery speaks more of the still-virginal American forests of Cole’s day. Cole perfectly combines the wisdom of the ages of Western Civilization with the fresh perspective of the rising American experiment. Again, this combination is, paradoxically, exactly what makes it so “American” in nature. Cole’s Europeanism resembles Milton’s classicism in that both take the lessons of yesterday to construct new meanings for their own age, and ours. Never a slave to realism, Cole painted more realistic landscapes by delving into his soul and the souls of other thinkers and artists and assembling a landscape more of meaning and memory than just trees and grass.