You only see it from someone who’s endeavoring to capture humanness, which I don’t think a lot of Italian painters of this time were trying to do. There’s also something of this pain in Caravaggio’s paintings The Conversion of Saint Paul and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter (both 1601) in the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. I feel this is closer to what you’d read in the New Testament, where Christ isn’t purely radiant and flowing. He’s walked into this tavern and he’s pointing to Saint Matthew, but you can barely see him. In Caravaggio’s painting The Calling of Saint Matthew (1600), Christ is completely in shadow. Sometimes when you look at these paintings in churches you forget that electricity hadn’t been discovered and wouldn’t be understood for another 200 years, so there’s this fabrication of lighting conditions in paintings that you see everywhere in Rome, as if everywhere is flushed with an ever-present light. He’s able to use Michelangelo and make it nasty. He was able to synthesize all the information and images from artists who seemed to be real believers. Caravaggio’s work was so much truer than any other images that I’d seen it felt human. Even if you go to the Sistine Chapel and see Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536-41), people are literally going to hell and it doesn’t look so bad. Suffering isn’t depicted as painful, like in works by Ribera or Mexican religious painting. If you go from church to church you see incessant glorification. There’s this break between the entropy you feel in the city and the beauty of the images presented. I felt connected to his deep, dark representation that seemed almost blasphemous and also seemed to contradict all the other optimistic images that were in the church and in the city. Caravaggio made me understand what a painting could do. Jennifer Packer: It was seeing Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew series (1599– 1602) in the Contarelli Chapel at San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome that I recognize as the moment I became a painter. Hans Ulrich Obrist: How did you come to art? Did you have an epiphany or a sudden awakening? Jennifer Packer in her temporary studio in Rome, where she spent the year after winning the American Academy’s coveted Rome Prize.
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