Lecture 1: Approaches to European Art
of the angel and his elegant hand. But the angel, too, is solidly physical and
literally down-to-earth. The patrons whose family chapel this painting was
intended for rejected it as improper and indecorous. They failed to understand
Caravaggio’s intention, which was to make the evangelist a recognizable
Italian of his day, with whom an average visitor to the church could readily
identify and through whom that visitor could feel the importance of the life
of Jesus being so laboriously recorded.Because the patron disliked the ¿ rst painting, Caravaggio painted a second
version: St. Matthew and the Angel (c. 1602). Now the evangelist is dressed
in À owing robes, suggesting an ancient philosopher, and the angel stays in the
air. He is still dictating, but there is no physical contact between the ¿ gures.
St. Matthew is serious, intelligent, and completely literate. Notice also that
St. Matthew is set further back in space, at a greater distance from us than he
is in either the 9th-century book painting or Caravaggio’s ¿ rst version. It is a
¿ ne painting but without the profound originality of the ¿ rst rendering.In looking at contrasting interpretations of St. Matthew, we have also dealt
explicitly with style. We couldn’t do otherwise because style is the means of
the artist’s interpretation. The history of art is rich in styles, and every style
holds its particular expressive potential. It was once popular to judge art
with a Darwinian assumption of progress, and this is still implicit in many
people’s response to art. Earlier styles whose language is remote from us are
sometimes considered as lesser artistic expressions.For purposes of comparison, we see two paintings of the same subject, made
two centuries apart, in contrasting styles: a Deposition (c. 1435) by Rogier
van der Weyden and a painting with the same title made about 1612–
by Peter Paul Rubens. Both paintings depict the lowering of the dead body
of Christ from the cross. Van der Weyden cares nothing for space except the
shallow box in which the ¿ gures are gathered—a space that is not part of
“real” space, not a landscape setting, but it suggests a container for painted
sculpture. Yet the gold background of that box heightens the already extreme
pathos of the grieving ¿ gures. Rubens places his ¿ gures outside at night, but
the darkness obscures the landscape setting, isolating the ¿ gures from the
rest of the world as much as van der Weyden’s box did. And Rubens’s black
background is as much an ampli¿ er of feeling as van der Weyden’s gold.