Is This Your First Time?

The other day  I was nattering on about seeing my favorite Caravaggio "for the first time."  Count on Proust to remind me that "first time" is a far more complicated concept than it may seem at first blush.  Here he is talking about music, but I don't see why you couldn't carry it over to art in general or, for that matter, to life itself:

 Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. So the expression “hearing something for the first time” is not inaccurate. If one had distinguished nothing in it on the real first occasion, as one thought, then the second or the third would also be first times; and there would be no reason to understand it any better on the tenth occasion. What

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 1887-1891). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

He elaborates:

What is missing the first time is probably not understanding but memory. Our memory span, relative to the complexity of the impressions that assail it as we listen, is infinitesimal, as short-lived as the memory of a sleeping man who has a thousand thoughts which he instantly forgets, or the memory of a man in his dotage, who cannot retain for more than a minute anything he has been told. Our memory is incapable of supplying us with an instantaneous recollection of this multiplicity of impressions. Even so, a recollection does

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 1890-1894). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

And a bit later, he writes of the fictional composer, Vinteuil:

In the Vinteuil Sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheer power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one that comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it. This length of time that it takes someone to penetrate a work of some depth, as it took me with the Vinteuil sonata, is only a foreshortening, and as it were a symbol, of all the years, or even centuries perhaps, which must pass before the public can come to love a masterpiece that is really new.

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 1909-1916). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

That last, I suspect you might apply to Proust himself.  So what could I have possibly meant when I spoke of my shock at seeing the Caravaggio "for the first time"--?  My best guess is this:I do remember being bowled over when I first saw The Calling of Saint Matthew. If pressed, I'd still say it is "the best" Caravaggio (but why let myself be pressed?).  But it wasn't my first Caravaggio.  Earlier--some years earlier, in fact--I had seen the Crucifixion of Saint Peter  and The Conversion of Saint Paul.  I knew I was in the presence of something important--knew it, not least, because I had been told as much by my friend and guide.   Indeed, the same day that I saw the Saint Matthew, I had earlier seen the Madonna dei Pellegrini in the Chiesa San'Agostono just up the street.  So I was, as its were, primed.

Was it Vladimir Nabokov who said that one should never read a book for the first time?  Maybe.  He apparently did say:

When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.

Quoted here.  And come to think of it, I am remembering one person who said we should never read (a certain) novel for the first time.  It was Joseph Epstein. The novel he had in mind was À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Footnote:  I just pulled down my copy of Terence Kilmartin's fine Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust where, inter alia, he lists all the "persons" listed in the novel--i.e., authentic human beings, as distinct from "characters" (they get their own list).  There must be well over 500 such"persons." Caravaggio is not one of them

A Caravaggio Roundup

My friend Michael catches a typo in my latest Caravaggio post.  His prize is a set of curated links to Underbelly's best Caravaggio posts--a prize which I  now degrade by sharing them all with you:

Top Five. 

Top Two.

Shakespeare.

Stillness.

Still blows my mind that Shakespeare, Caravaggio and Cervantes would all have been flourishing around 1600.  Well: Cervantes was on his uppers but his pivotal moment--the completion of part I of Don Quixote--was just five years away.

Only Once

We were playing an amiable conversation game around the TG dinner table last night when I faced the question: is there something that you have done only once in your life that you would like to do again (I quote from memory)?

At first I said:  no, sorry, nothing, I don't think that way.  Might be an age thing. Lots of things I'm glad to have done, would enjoy doing some over, hope to do new things.  But no.

Then on second thought:  well, now, for example Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew, in the San Luigi die Francesi, just off the Piazza Navona in Rome.  I'd love to go see it again. Wait, but you've done it before more than once (half a dozen times, I would guess).  So you can't say you've seen it only once.   Yes, but I did it only once for the first time, and what I'd really like is to do it again for the first time.

You can see where I'm going here.  Good as it was, it will never get any better.  Now that I think of it, I suppose there are a thousand things in my life--maybe tens of thousands, to  which I would give the same treatment.

Update:  but then, one of my co-conversationalists asked: you've been to Rome more than once?  Oh yes, I love Rome.  When you went the second time, did it seem like the first?  Actually no, it was quite different.  So even though not the first time, it was the first second time, not so?  And we wandered off happily arm and in arm into the vale of infinite regress.

Anniversary: Caravaggio

Four hundred years ago today, or maybe tomorrow: the death of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, perhaps in or around Porto Ercole, near Grosseto in Tuscany. He disappeared on his way back to Rome, hoping to be pardoned for a murder he had committed half a dozen years before. The circumstances are murky although he apparently was not (as one might readily have assumed) killed by an enemy (of whom he had many) or in an affair de passion (of which he also had many. Just lately investigators in Italy declared they had the problem nailed--it was the lead, from the paints--but explanation looks just a tad tendentious to me, and I think I'll wait for a more considered judgment.

Caravaggio is odd in so many ways. I think his best work is riveting, about a lot of the second-tier seems to me to be--well, just that. Considering what we see in the Northern European Baroque, he might be the most influential painter of his generation, perhaps even of all time. Yet until the 20th Century, nobody paid much attention to him. Rembrandt, for example: everything about the mature Rembrandt cries out "Caravaggio!" Yet there is no evidence that Rembrandt ever heard of him.

I read the Peter Robb biography a while back: it was informtive, but a bit showy for my taste. There's a new one that is getting a good press--though how anyone could write a dull book about so flamboyant a career is beyond my guessing. Google offers a gratifying menu of Caravaggios here. Meanwhile, if I had to name just one "greatest painting ever," I'd still go for Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew.

Shakespeare, Caravaggio, and Four Other Guys

I can remember the first time that ever I saw a Caravaggio.

It was the summer of 1985. I was staying at a pension in Rome, out near the Milvian Bridge. On my first day, my friend Dick Lee—I guess you could say he was my boss—walked me down to the Piazza del Popolo, and into the church of Santa Maria Del Popolo, and up to the Cerasi Chapel, where are displayed the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, two of the defining moments in the career of the painter, and indeed, in the history of Westeren Art.

I’d like to say I was stunned and bowled over by the spectacle; I can’t, really. I think I knew I was in the presence of something important (Dick told me). But it was all too new and unfamiliar. And anyway, jet lag.

I’ve had the great good fortune to go back there several more times since, and now I think I get it. Indeed, if you had to push almost everything else off a cliff, I'd say today that these (along with the Calling of St. Matthew, in the Church of San Luigi di Francesi, just a few blocks away) are on the short list of stuff I would try to save.

I’ve been thinking of all three of these paintings lately as I’ve been reading M: The Man who Became Caravaggio (1998) Peter Robb’s eccentric but appreciative biography of the artist. There seem to be a lot of biographies of Caravaggio and no wonder: with all the whoring and the swordplay, he offers more than enough to keep the biographer busy. Robb’s is perhaps the most informal of the lot, and it’s full of irritating stylistic tics (I think he may have spent too much time in the company of Robert Hughes). But he’s an enthusiast: when he turns his attention to a Caravaggio painting, he gives it his complete engagement and response.

Reading Robb, I did stumble on one insight, I’d never thought of before. That is: how close Caravaggio’s career tracks Shakespeare’s. For each of them, the flourit is the last decade of the 16^th Century and the first of the 17^th. The three great religious works that I mentioned above—they must date from just about exactly the time of Shakespeare’s great tragedies.

Of course, there isn’t the slightest reason to suppose they ever heard of each other (I forget who it was who said that Shakespeare must have been Italian). But it is hard to imagine how we would understand the world without them.

Afterthought: a propos of not much, one of the oddest pieces of Caravaggio arcanae must be this, which one of the teenagers in the family keeps on her bedroom wall. It is, indeed, the Calling of St. Matthew and it is, indeed, the Beatles, also known as “Renaissance Minstrels.” I have no idea whose idea it was or why, and it seems to be pretty obscure; fact is, I couldn’t even find on the web without help. I wonder if it is a bootleg, or simply a record so bad that no one wants to remember it.

Update: Thanks to Ken for an improved picture of the Beatles album--which, he assures me, is indeed a bootleg.