Caravaggio and 'King Lear'

It was painted in 1602. 

It compels you from the other end of the gallery floor, a dark vision partly-punctuated by bright light. As you walk through the other rooms, there is no chance of being sidetracked. Such drama: seven men jam-packed into a gold frame that seems too small for them. You get closer and closer until you stand right up to it, just the other side of a rope, the faces now the same size as yours. You’re right in it, in the crowded turmoil of the moment.

The painting is tight to the frame, as if cut out of a larger scene. The blackness acts as another frame on three sides (top, right, bottom). The movement is all right to left, and on the left side a figure (probably St John the Evangelist, the youngest disciple, unbearded and naive) is crying out in distress and panic, his left arm chopped off beyond the rich green folds - you half-expect the rest of it to appear in the neighbouring painting. That hand has gone, but in the top left corner is its remaining partner, splayed in high alarm, the wide gap between thumb and forefinger echoing the man’s open mouth as he desperately calls for assistance.

From the rest of the figures there is silence: Christ’s downcast resignation; Judas’s face uncomfortably, almost erotically, close, his forehead ridged with doubt; the two guards getting on with their job of arrest, and on the far right the face of the artist himself, perhaps on the tips of his toes, holding a lantern high (the position an echo of both ‘David with the Head of Goliath’ and ‘Salome with the Head of John the Baptist’), pushing his way past a third guard to witness this seminal event in history. The three faces on the right direct our gaze to the left with three pointing noses. And more hands: Judas’s fingers sinking into Christ’s cloak, Christ’s clasped ones at the bottom, holding himself together, and just below the two central faces the gauntlet of the central guard which features one of the most daring positionings in Western art: right at the centre of the painting is not an important person but the long streak of brilliant light in the reflection on the arm-armour (what emits that light?). Perhaps 10% of the whole painting is light, or at least not-darkness (I think of Milton’s famous ‘darkness visible’ in Paradise Lost, since the darkness in this work seems alive and active). In the right 20% of the painting the only brightness is the face of the artist himself. 

It is a painting of questions, obscurities, things hidden or cut off: the arm and hand at the left, most of the supposedly illuminating lamp, the third guard behind the pushy Caravaggio, almost all the face of his colleague who is first to the arrest. Arms and armour criss-cross confusingly. Who is John appealing to? Where does most of the light come from on this darkest of nights? As well as dark/light, it is also a painting of the contrast between hard and soft (all that armour, all those stunningly achieved folds of clothing, the hard-soft leather around the guard’s backside, that curl beyond the buckle).

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It was written in 1606.

That is just four years after Caravaggio was commissioned by Ciriaco Mattei in Rome. The great artists never met, never visited each other’s countries, but they were at work at the same time. In London, the plague was raging, and Shakespeare wrote the darkest of all tragedies. Like ‘The Taking of Christ’, King Lear is a work of extreme chiaroscuro, and it too is about shocking betrayal in a world suddenly gone mad:

Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father.

It opens in confusion, in the unacceptable uncertainties of the senior men of the kingdom about the sovereign who should be leading them, not preferring one Duke over another:

(Kent) I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

(Gloucester) It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most.

It is a play of dramatic moments flaring out at us suddenly: the love test at the start, Edmund’s ‘bastards’ soliloquy, the storm scenes, Gloucester’s blinding, the heroic nameless servant who mortally wounds Cornwall and, above all, Cordelia’s death at the end (more of which later). In a play which encompasses a society, a country and indeed the world itself, the most affecting scenes are close and intimate: an old man in an agonised tantrum about his two older daughters who is then cast out in the freezing storm accompanied by his Fool, another old man with bleeding eye-sockets being guided by his son to an imaginary cliff to act out the taking of his life. We are inserted right into these moments of pain: we have no choice but to witness and look at them.

Seeing is central: Lear and Gloucester are differently blind, but through the pain they start to see. In his madness, Lear sees through to the heart of profound truths about life and society. Gloucester’s eyes are plucked out, but he can then say  I stumbled when I saw. Eyes in ‘The Taking of Christ’: John’s youthful stunned shock, Caravaggio’s fascinated peeking, the guards’ variously-obscured gazes, Judas’s stunned realisation of what he has done, and above all Christ’s downcast resignation: I always knew this would happen; I know just what humanity is.

The whole of Shakespeare’s play leads up to one single moment in the final scene. The mechanics of Act V scene iii are precisely calibrated, a watch mechanism that manipulates the viewer excruciatingly. On these slides from a presentation on teaching the end of the play, I set out the key steps (green is positive, red negative). The power of the final scene, with its cataclysmic ending, depends on the ‘lighter’ moments in the mechanism, the moments when we are given hope, lulled by Shakespeare into comforting optimism. Those hopes might be raised by Albany’s resistance and decency and Edgar’s triumph over Edmund in their duel. Most cruel for us is the moment when a Gentlemen rushes in with a bloody knife and exclaims 

‘Tis hot, it smokes:

It came even from the heart of - O, she’s dead’.

We experience three seconds of utter horror, quickly relieved by

Your lady, sir, your lady: and her sister

By her is poisoned: she confesses it.

Our hearts lift: Cordelia is still alive! We let our guard down, emotionally. There are 35 more lines in which we still have this comfort, naively capped by Albany’s The gods defend us before the darkest, the worst sight imaginable: the old man staggering in with his dead daughter in his arms. Darkness visible. As Kent asks Is this the promised end? Professor Emma Smith points to a possible ‘metatheatrical’ double meaning: not just the end of humanity, but was this really what we were promised as an audience?

Act V scene iii of King Lear is pure Caravaggio: a horror of chiaroscuro, in which finally darkness extinguishes hope. In Kent’s words 

All’s cheerless, dark and deadly.

END

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• 'The Taking of Christ’ at the National Gallery of Ireland.

• The amazing story of its discovery is in this documentary and also Jonathan Harr’s book The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece.

• My essay on blindness and seeing in King Lear.

• My LitDrive presentation on teaching the end of King Lear, and the notes and links. Presentation slides.

• I didn’t quite spend three hours in one go in front of the Caravaggio, as Professor Jennifer Roberts prescribes for her Harvard students, but I did spend a lot of time recently looking at it, and have done so over the years.

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