Almighty painter

Chapter 826 Self-portrait of Two People

Shortly before he painted the shepherd boy slaying Goliath on canvas, Caravaggio had just killed someone.

Oh.

That's right.

Caravaggio had just become a murderer and was sentenced to death by hanging by the Roman Catholic Church. The wanted warrant at the time was called "Bando Captail", which means death warrant.

Have you seen Quentin's movie "The Hateful Eight"? There's a sketch of a suspect hanging in a bar in a small town, and any law-abiding citizen who sees him can "bang" shoot him to death, "uh uh uh" strangle him with a rope, "ahhh" hack him to death with a machete, and then take his body to the local sheriff to collect the bounty.

The film's background was changed from a small town in the American West during the Civil War to Rome and Sicily in Italy during the Renaissance.

This was the situation Caravaggio had to face.

After he stabbed a young nobleman with a dagger, he offered a reward of 100 scudos to anyone who brought him back to Rome.

Well, if you find it troublesome, you can just bring back the body. If you still find it troublesome, you can just bring back the head.

Don't care about life or death.

Better dead.

……

Many people regard European painters as a group of crazy people, mentally ill people, bipolar patients and playboys.

no doubt.

This is a stereotype.

Stereotypes are never worth promoting, but look at what those great painters have done, the legendary old scumbag Picasso, Van Gogh who cut off his ear and gave it to a prostitute... Sometimes, you really feel that the lives of these oil painters are quite abnormal.

But the fact that a "shoot to kill without mercy" warrant was personally signed by Pope Paul V can be considered a very curious thing among the many strange life stories of those famous oil painters.

Even in a paradise of artists full of strange things, Caravaggio is considered a very strange eccentric.

Gambling, gang feuds, personal grudges, political differences...

Historians have given countless different explanations for the street fight between Caravaggio and a young Roman nobleman named Tomassoni on May 1606, 5, which was triggered by a tennis match. The story was full of love, hate, and grudges, and the details could be used to make a 29-episode crime drama.

But that's not the point.

Liu Ziming thought of Caravaggio when he saw Gu Weijing for only two simple reasons.

Caravaggio was a weird guy.

Light and darkness, violence and redemption, the violent turmoil in Italian society during the Renaissance and the various contradictions between human choices are one of the most important themes in Caravaggio's works.

The two paintings, David Carrying Goliath's Head and The Tumultuous World, look so similar.

The two painters' painting styles are completely different.

Caravaggio is a representative painter of the Baroque school, who pays great attention to realism and the true restoration of details.

His brushstrokes are delicate and smooth, with a certain degree of watercolor characteristics.

Gu Weijing adopts a standard impressionist painting style, with short and dense brushstrokes, and pays more attention to the artist's personal subjective emotional expression.

But these two paintings are very similar.

The resemblance of artistic temperament.

"David Carrying the Head of Goliath" is also a work of interweaving light and darkness. The whole picture is shrouded in dark fog. Warm yellow light shines from one side of the picture, illuminating the right half of the shepherd boy's face and the left half of the giant Goliath's head held in his hand.

Half of the face is peaceful, pious and solemn.

Half of the face was hideous, evil and carried the breath of death.

In the interweaving of light and darkness, the living good and the dead evil looked at each other. The same thing was that both faces were filled with incredible emotional tension.

Gu Weijing painted a dark-toned Impressionist work.

Caravaggio was a very rare master of dark tones among the famous artists of the Renaissance who loved to pay attention to the balanced use of light.

There are few intermediate transitional tones in his paintings, and the dark areas are almost completely integrated into the mist of the environment, with only a beam of strong light highlighting the key part in the center of the picture. "David Carrying Goliath's Head" is a representative work of this painting style.

"The Tumultuous World" meets "David Carrying Goliath's Head", just like a living person encountering twin ghosts from four hundred years ago walking out of the underworld.

"self-portrait?"

Liu Ziming gently covered his mouth with both hands and breathed slowly.

Warm air flowed out from the gaps between his fingers, leaving a little white mist in the center of his low-power glasses.

A professional is a professional.

Even though they are both wealthy, Mr. Liu's ability to appreciate art is obviously not comparable to that of Brother Hao, who paints fake paintings and practices wild fox Zen.

The middle-aged man immediately realized that what he saw might be a self-portrait.

Self-portraits are the most common works that painters paint when they want to test the improvement of their techniques or the change of their artistic style.

By placing the painter's self-portraits when he was a boy, young adult, middle-aged and old together, one can intuitively observe the changes in all aspects of the painter's painting throughout his life.

There are two kinds of self-portraits.

A pursuit of capturing objective details, the painter should depict his facial features on the canvas stroke by stroke as if looking in the mirror.

This kind of self-portrait tests the painter's technique and proficiency in brushwork.

in contrast.

There are also painters who pursue the capture of subjective emotions.

It doesn't matter whether the painting looks like yourself or even like a person.

The painter can depict his delicate inner world on the canvas as if looking in a mirror, no matter whether the things in the picture look like an angel or a devil, a person, a goat, a tree or a ball of steam.

In a broad sense, it can also be classified as a self-portrait.

Picasso's self-portrait when he was 15 years old showed a handsome young man with a thin chin. His later self-portraits became more and more bizarre. When he was 90 years old, all the facial features in his self-portraits were misplaced. It was obviously not because he was abducted by a UFO and secretly underwent alien plastic surgery.

"David with the Head of Goliath", although classified as a religious historical painting, is perhaps one of the most famous paintings.

Reality.

It is also a self-portrait of Caravaggio, and even a double self-portrait which is extremely rare in the entire history of Western art.

That is to say,

The shepherd boy David in the picture has a solemn and peaceful face like a saint, calmly looking at the head in his hand. It is Caravaggio.

The head of a dead giant and a bloody monster held in the hands of the shepherd David was also painted by Caravaggio.

He is both David and Goliath, whose head David cut off.

Both had Caravaggio's face.

One is Caravaggio, who was surrounded and admired by the dignitaries and bishops of Rome, was a guest of honor of the Grand Duke of Medici, changed the entire Italian art style, and lived in the magnificent Palazzo Madama at the age of 25.

He is the shepherd David in the work.

It represents the combination of heroism and beauty.

The other is the present Caravaggio, the exiled murderer, the hideous villain, the fugitive hunted by the Roman Catholic Church.

Liu Ziming has no intention of glorifying Caravaggio's personal character simply because he is a famous figure in art history and an outstanding master of art.

Caravaggio can hardly be categorized as a good guy in the traditional sense.

If the documentary records handed down from the Renaissance period are credible, it would be hard for him to believe that Caravaggio, who was obviously a painter and whose luggage contained various weapons from daggers to knives, besides a mirror for dressing himself, could be a good man (this is also why Caravaggio could always pull out a knife from somewhere when he went out to play tennis or exercise).

He was dissolute, drunk, and ostentatious. He roamed the streets of Rome, from the taverns in the slums to the palaces of cardinals and Medici dukes.

He is a beast with an elegant appearance, a thug wrapped in art.

He also obviously had some strange underground gang background in Rome. Later, he killed someone and could no longer stay in Rome, so he fled to Sicily. Maybe ordinary brothers would shout "Oh, God father." when they saw him.

Caravaggio was just deeply contradictory.

His later works often have a strong sense of self-accusation.

Judge yourself.

Accuse yourself.

Caravaggio as David kills Caravaggio as Goliath.

The painting seemed to carry a strong desire to return to the past, a disgust of the past self towards the present self, and a confession from the soul.

Forgive me.

Forgive me.

How many wrong things have I done?

If I were still the young me I once was, I would draw my sword and chop off my head.

In his later years, Caravaggio heard that the Pope was considering pardoning his sins. This painting may have been the product of such a background.

My younger self cut off the head of the criminal Caravaggio and held it high in the air.

"The murderer Goliath has confessed his guilt!"

The painter shouted loudly in his work.

Liu Ziming always felt that the painting carried a strong sense of sadness.

In Western religious legends.

The young David is the embodiment of a certain kind of holiness and power. He is the embodiment of intelligence, and he used his strategy to cut off Goliath's head.

But can people really go back to their youth? Can the young Caravaggio really cut off the head of the old Caravaggio? Even if he could, wouldn’t he become old again?

If he had not died of illness on the way back to Rome, and had really won a new life, could he have really cut off the past?

“So, this is also a work about self-confession?”

Liu Ziming concentrated on thinking.

He stared at the face of the young man sitting on the sofa in the picture, hidden between the light and shadow.

a long time.

Liu Ziming shook his head slowly.

No.

The first moment he saw the painting, he couldn't help but think of Caravaggio, the shepherd David painted by the young and famous painter. After Liu Ziming looked at it carefully alone, he felt that they were two completely different paintings and two completely different people.

David defeated Goliath.

One of the most heroic stories ever depicted in a Christian context, but depicted by Caravaggio with a sense of fatalistic tragedy.

in contrast.

The subject matter of this painting looks mediocre and more vicissitudes of life. It shows a young man sitting on a sofa. He is shrouded in fog, and his head and body form a strange angle.

As if asleep, and as if dead.

Such a tragic scene is portrayed as full of heroic spirit.

Caravaggio's works say in my ears:

"David killed Goliath, David killed Goliath, the younger me killed the older me, I was wrong, I regret it, can I win a new life? Please forgive me. I want to be a teenager again."

The work before me seems to say:

"I can't kill Goliath, and I can't be King David. I don't have the courage and strength to do that. But if that means I will become Goliath, then don't wait 20 years to regret it. Take my head now."

"I have absolutely no regrets."

"I can also choose to bravely walk towards death."

……

twenty minutes.

Liu Ziming pushed open the door and walked out silently.

"Mr. Liu? Mr. Liu?"

Director Tonks was browsing on her phone at the door. When she heard the noise coming from here, she raised her head and looked over here.

Liu Ziming was immersed in his own thoughts.

He seemed to have heard it but was unwilling to answer, or he seemed not to have heard it at all. He just turned his head slightly, then slowly paced down the corridor, like a middle-aged ghost wandering on the third floor of the Esplanade at night.

Tonks wasn't surprised.

Instead, he looked very experienced. He glanced at the art warehouse over there, and then looked at the back of the middle-aged man wandering away.

"Ah."

The British uncle raised his chin and grinned.

What was he talking about?

This - this is called professionalism.
-
Singapore Port at night.

The SUV stopped at the dock, Liu Ziming opened the door and got out.

When people are immersed in their own thoughts, their perception of the outside world will weaken. Liu Ziming came out of the Esplanade and drove along the coastal road. Before he knew it, he saw the port.

Yeah.

Pinned to his car window was an insider pass for the Port of Singapore.

Liu Ziming simply turned into the port, parked the car, and walked slowly along the port.

The moonlight is very good tonight. It is impossible to have no wind at the seaside. He strolled in the moonlight and sea breeze, thinking about the painting that Gu Weijing had just painted.

“A frozen moment.”

Gu Weijing's portrait captures all the excitement of light and darkness, all the choices about fate, and all the most powerful expressions, all frozen in that moment on the picture.

Liu Ziming hates to give ordinary scenes complex symbols or overly abstract meanings.

He was extremely disdainful of Tang Ning's behavior of talking about Duchamp's urinal even when eating a durian.

Gu Weijing's painting is different.

All the meanings and symbols were not instilled into Liu Ziming's ears by an authoritative loudspeaker, but were felt by the middle-aged man himself.

A pouring cup.

Some painters choose to put a label on it, writing: "The tipping cup will fall to the ground in three seconds."

Some painters will place it on the table at an angle, with the liquid in the cup half spilled, giving the impression that it will slide to the side at any moment.

(End of this chapter)