This text refers to question.
Darkness and light
Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world of flashes of lightning.
Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkness of nights. He is a man who can never be known in full because almost all that he did, said and thought is lost in the irrecoverable past. He was one of the most electrifying original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting — the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was elicited from him when he was under interrogation for the capital crime of libel.
When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the past he does so, like the characters in his own paintings, as a man in extremis. He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and that is how he is preserved in history — a man on the run, heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows. But he is caught, now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight. Each glimpse is different. He appears in many guises and moods. Caravaggio throws stones at the house of his landlady and sings ribald songs outside her window. He has a fight with a waiter about the dressing on a plate of artichokes. His life is a series of intriguing and vivid tableaux — scenes that abruptly switch from low farce to high drama.
Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkness of nights. He is a man who can never be known in full because almost all that he did, said and thought is lost in the irrecoverable past. He was one of the most electrifying original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting — the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was elicited from him when he was under interrogation for the capital crime of libel.
When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the past he does so, like the characters in his own paintings, as a man in extremis. He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and that is how he is preserved in history — a man on the run, heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows. But he is caught, now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight. Each glimpse is different. He appears in many guises and moods. Caravaggio throws stones at the house of his landlady and sings ribald songs outside her window. He has a fight with a waiter about the dressing on a plate of artichokes. His life is a series of intriguing and vivid tableaux — scenes that abruptly switch from low farce to high drama.
Andrew Graham-Dixon. Caravaggio: a life sacred and profane. New York – London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 (adapted).
In lines 2-3, “at point-blank range” means
