Hands Down - It's Hard to Tell What's a True Caravaggio

Back from Boston and I've changed my mind about almost everythng I wrote before.

Of course, seeing the paintings in person makes a tremendous difference - who'd a thunk it?

Here's some pictures (courtesy of my sister and her excellent camera):

From Fortune Teller - look how beautiful the detail is.

More hands, also from the same painting - and in person or in enlargements of this painting, you can clearly see her pulling off his ring (beside her smallest finger).

Here's a hand detail from St Francis in Meditation. Don't you just want to get some nail clippers?! I'm still not convinced this was by Caravaggio, even though he often painted dirty fingernails.

Here's one from the Portrait of Maffaeo Barberini, the one with the vase of flowers I wrote about in a previous blog.

And this is the portrat sitter's other hand. Aren't they lovely? I hadn't thought this was Caravaggio from the photographs, but I'm more convinced now that it could be him. The light and shading on the hands in these last two pictures is just magnificent.

But then, there's this. It's from the Portrait of a Knight of Malta and it looks.....kinda ridiculous beside the other hands. Granted, the photo's not great because they had glass over this canvas, but Andrew Graham-Dixon's biography of Caravaggio was right about this one - care was not taken in painting this hand. In fact, I'm not sure if you can see it, but there's a kind of diagonal line leading away from the top of his thumb - perhaps he was originally holding a shield in this hand where the line goes? The hand is just...comically inflated for the hand of a 74 year old man. (It's almost as though someone as talentless as me painted this hand - it's like kids draw hands when they're learning - you know, just a circle, with lines for fingers.)

Here's the painting it's taken from. Because it's so dark, you might not be able to see it, but the foreshortening on the arm on the left side is wrong - his arm looks too short. The face is really, really well done though and the use of the lighting is classic Caravaggio - which is what makes me think the hand was done by someone else. (This was often done in Renaissance times - I've read that when he was being apprenticed as a painter, Caravaggio himself was thought to have done vases of flowers on other painters paintings.) Art historians who write about this painting say the sitter wanted to show he was both a distinguished war hero (as evidenced by his hand on his sword) and a devout religious man (because he's holding rosary beads). But maybe he didn't think to appear religious until much later, after the original painter of his portrait (Caravaggio) had been expelled disgracefully from the Knights of Malta - so he had to get some lesser painter to amend it. Who knows?

Boston was so fun - the exhibit was great (I bought four new Caravaggio books), went to a wicked Frank Turner concert with my sister right beside the Harvard University campus and danced the night away in the second row, drank lots of craft beer in gastropubs, and even got to see my brother during our layover in Toronto on the way home. Plus, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, one of the biggest museums in the US, retweeted out some of my Caravaggio scribblings to all of its thousands of followers. An expensive, epic weekend - but totally worth it.