Caravaggio, an antihero created for today's tabloids

Rome - The half-millennia of Michelangelo's dominance over the art world has come to an end. He has been toppled from the top spot by an antihero who painted when he wasn't fighting someone, scandalizing the powerful, chasing after women and men, plunging a dagger into the groin of tennis opponents, fleeing from murderers, or letting one of his enemies disfigure his face. Namely, Caravaggio, who did not populate his paintings with perfect figures like Michelangelo Buonarotti, but with street people who look like they just got out of bed, yet are all the more relatable to us. Art historian from Toronto Philip Sohm claims that Caravaggio-mania has erupted and that he can prove it, as reported by the International Herald Tribune.
    Sohm, who has read all materials about both of these giants of art over the past 50 years, has come to the conclusion that Caravaggio has surpassed Michelangelo since the 1980s. He doesn’t measure it by the lines of people still standing outside the Sistine Chapel or the Florence Academy, where they want to see the famous David. It's not just that art doctoral candidates are increasingly having difficulty finding anything new about Michelangelo, but also that the classical forms familiar from Michelangelo's frescoes, canvases, and sculptures are appealing to fewer cultured people.
    Caravaggio is the embodiment of the modern antihero, a relatable realist for everyone. From his paintings gaze disheveled boys with doe eyes and full lips and buttocks, who have not descended from heaven, but have obviously just woken up. Earthly, emerging from dark shadows thanks to mysterious light, models from the street. Caravaggio's Cupid is a scruffy street urchin to whom the painter has added a couple of wings. The angel in the Annunciation painting hovers like Chaplin’s tramp in a circus on a rope wrapped around his waist.
    Mannerism scorned Caravaggio for bringing barefoot pilgrims to Mary's doorstep. He immortalized in them tired and ordinary people who came to Rome without shoes, and fortunately for him, this also pleased wealthy patrons. Immediately after his death in 1610, when he was only 39 years old, his work was condemned. For hundreds of years, historians, colleagues, and collectors ignored him.
    Even a hundred years ago, when the likes of Lionello Venturi, Roger Fry, or Roberto Longhi already spoke of him as a modernist artist, not even a connoisseur like Bernard Berenson acknowledged him.
    In his recent lecture in Chicago, Sohm did not prove Caravaggio's great comeback through ticket revenues to galleries or the attendance of exhibitions, but rather through new publications, newly discovered paintings, and also "Caravaggio among us." Anyone who ever wanted to buy a scarf at one of the Italian airports could not help but come across the motif of Caravaggio's Bacchus or Goliath, just as anyone buying a tray inevitably encounters Michelangelo's David or Adam from the Sistine Chapel. Caravaggio's works are utilized on the covers of the medical journal Emerging Infectious Diseases and in advertisements for a London sex shop. Venturi said in 1925 that "old art can only be understood by incorporating it into our own artistic world."
    Caravaggio left no will, manuscripts, or property, making him a perfect object for projecting ourselves, similar to the Rorschach test. Although there is no evidence of his homosexuality, scholars concerned with gender studies began discussing him in the 1970s. Caravaggio was appropriated by novelists and filmmakers, and gallery owners realized that Caravaggio could be monetized by them.
    In the French village of Loches, two unknown paintings by Caravaggio were discovered behind the organ in the local church, and in Porto Ercole, where the painter died on its beach, his remains were allegedly found in an underground ossuary, identified through DNA testing by descendants of Caravaggio’s brother, who live near Milan. Caravaggio's bones are on their way to becoming a relic for which art lovers will pilgrimage.
    At the Quirinale Palace in Rome, several dozen Caravaggio canvases will be on display until June 13. A carefully installed security system will protect them, and there is great interest.
    Coincidentally, an exhibition of beautiful Michelangelo drawings created for the Roman nobleman Tommaso de Cavalieri, who wanted to learn to draw from them, is taking place until May at the Courtauld Gallery in London. These are exquisite and refined lines of otherworldly beauty.
    However, Caravaggio offers earthly struggles, scenes as if torn from a theatrical stage or film reel. Unlike Michelangelo's figures, often life-sized or on distant ceilings, they are in human dimensions, engaged in their activities, and the visitor can stand face to face before them.