Caravaggio

There is currently a lovely Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery in London. While looking into it, I came across Berger's essay about the painter online. It begins:

Once I was asked to name my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer.

I wonder, though, whether searching for the least knowing answer isn't itself a kind of knowingness. The very process of selecting a non-knowing response sounds close to a rhetorical ploy, as if one is going for the effect of naivety; as if one wants to appear boldly innocent of the socially defined canon.

But maybe not. Maybe he's onto something about the spontaneous/ 'knowing' distinction. Look, in the above passage the knowing answer presumably comes first. It's as if the 'naive, spontaneous' response has to be won through reflection, while the thought-at-the-front-of-our-mind, ready to pick, is, by contrast, already contaminated with social knowledge and/ or calculation. What's ready to hand is not the very pulse of intuition but a hardened and socially-astute response. Reflection does not dilute the spontaneous / 'least knowing' part of ourselves, it breaks through to finally access it. Well, what Berger accesses is this:

'Caravaggio'. There are nobler painters and painters of greater breadth of vision. There are painters I admire more and who are more admirable. But there is none, so it seems - for the answer came unpremeditated - to whom I feel closer.



The few canvases from my own incomparably modest life as a painter, which I would like to see again, are those I painted in the late 40s of the streets of Livorno. This city was then war-scarred and poor, and it was there that I first began to learn something about the ingenuity of the dispossessed. It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a life-long aversion.