CARAVAGGIO: The Palette and the Sword, by Milo Manara
Just in time for his 80th birthday, the Italian sex comics genius Milo Manara has finished a two-volume graphic biography of another famously libidinous artist: “Caravaggio: The Palette and the Sword.”
The books are, in many ways, Manara’s theory of his own work, and Caravaggio is his stand-in: “Ecstasy is ecstasy, regardless of where it comes from,” the great painter declares to one of his models on one page. The girl is teasing him for portraying her as his “Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy” from a sketch he made while she was masturbating, but Caravaggio and Manara are both adamant: It is the passion itself that matters, not whether it happens to be carnal or devotional.
Manara defies easy categorization; or rather, he invites conflicting characterizations. He has worked on both DC and Marvel Comics characters and drawn dream-logic comics with the film director Federico Fellini, all using the same virtuosic line.
But he’s best known as an especially unrestrained pornographer, one whose smut often ranges into literary territory. There’s a gender-swapped version of Jonathan Swift’s satire “Gulliver’s Travels” and an adaptation of the ancient Roman writer Apuleius’ bawdy novel “The Golden Ass” in his bibliography. (The word “ass” refers to a donkey here, for what it’s worth.)
In Caravaggio, Manara has an especially appropriate subject for his attentions: a horny scoundrel who painted some of the most transcendently beautiful images of Christian faith ever made. (He often tried to use them as bribes to stay out of prison.)
Ecstasy is a theme throughout the Baroque art that Caravaggio’s work prefigured; saints including Teresa, Catherine and Francis are regularly depicted as blissed out. The artist’s unprecedented realism required certain references — anatomy, architecture, and the arched backs and parted lips of plain old physical pleasure, which his work doesn’t distinguish visually from spiritual euphoria.
That sensibility, Manara contends, is what made Caravaggio so important. In his book, the cartoonist invents some details, such as when his subject meets the artist Artemisia Gentileschi as a young child attending an execution on her father’s shoulders. But others are simply a matter of record: Caravaggio killed a young man who worked as a pimp for his favorite model, whom he had painted as Judith beheading Holofernes. For the killing, he was sentenced to a beheading of his own. (Manara changes the relationships slightly, though all the main characters are here.)
While Caravaggio’s bando capitale — both a lifetime banishment and a death sentence — was never carried out, the terms meant that anyone able to detach the artist’s head would have been paid a handsome reward for it, and scholars have suggested a link between the sentence and Caravaggio’s understandable preoccupation with this mode of execution in his subsequent work.
But Manara’s biography is still a comic book, which is a form with a very different history than painting, particularly in regard to orgasms and decapitations. For most of the 20th century, comics occupied a place in the art-world pecking order somewhere slightly above advertising. With that disrepute came the freedom to experiment and provoke mostly unnoticed, but when the medium did attract attention, its low status also brought derision and censorship on the grounds that the work had no purpose higher than titillation or escapism.
William M. Gaines, the publisher of horror and crime comics, famously told a Senate committee that he thought a comic-book cover with a severed head on it was “in good taste” because the artist Johnny Craig had cropped it to obscure the actual ax wound. (“You have blood coming out of her mouth,” observed Senator Estes Kefauver. “A little,” Gaines admitted.)
Today, if you care about visual art at all, you probably recognize that comics are as interesting a medium as any. The painter and sculptor Roy Lichtenstein may have ironized images for his canvases that he had appropriated from jobbing cartoonists (who responded with understandable bitterness), but even he acknowledged that the subjects of his paintings were part of an artistic lineage.
The cartoonist Tony Abruzzo drew waves that look remarkably like the Japanese artist Hokusai’s famous woodblock print of a tsunami into a panel of a weeping girl neck-deep in water. Lichtenstein adapted that panel for one of his most significant works, the 1963 canvas “Drowning Girl,” telling the artist and curator John Coplans in a 1967 interview that he had recognized Abruzzo’s homage and been inspired. “The original wasn’t very clear in this regard — why should it be?” Lichtenstein said. “I saw it and then pushed at it a little further until it was a reference that most people will get.”
In the decades since Lichtenstein’s comic-strip paintings, the boundary between high and low art has more or less collapsed. Cartoonists now claim artistic legitimacy more loudly than Abruzzo did, and they often do so by doing the reverse of Lichtenstein and importing great works into their pages.
Robert Crumb paid homage to Hieronymus Bosch’s “Christ Carrying the Cross” on the cover of “Weirdo,” as Dan Nadel notes in his new biography of the cartoonist; the feminist underground cartoonist Mary Fleener drew confessional sex comics in the eccentric Cubist styles of Braque and Picasso; Emil Ferris recreated dozens of masterpieces with colored ballpoints in her celebrated multivolume debut, “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters,” where they sit alongside covers of imaginary Gaines-style horror comics.
It’s not just arty comics, either: Graphic novels that get adapted into fists-flying action movies like Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy” and Alan Moore and the late Kevin O’Neill’s “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” elegantly reference artists like Francisco Goya and Richard Dadd, adding layers of interest and complexity to their work.
Comics are well suited to the task of tracing these lines of influence; the quality of image duplication has improved by leaps and bounds since Lichtenstein, and it’s the only expressive mass medium I can think of where the hand of the artist remains visible down to the brushstroke.
The last few years have seen a rapid diminishment of anything that relies on being displayed in a large venue, and the default now tends to be whatever procrustean version will fit on our stupid smartphones. Printed comics are thus a form of preservation: Manara can show the scale of Caravaggio’s 12-foot-tall “Death of the Virgin” by drawing the artist next to his re-creation of it, and he can know exactly the level of detail he will need in the drawing to make the effect work. You can’t pinch to zoom.
Manara can also incorporate other parts of the canon, and announce his place in it. In one memorable passage, he draws Caravaggio in prison — but it’s a Piranesi prison, clearly designed by Manara after the famous engraver’s series “Imaginary Prisons.” See? the cartoonist seems to say. Here I am with my peers. It’s an audacious claim, but Caravaggio is the right proxy — he and Manara share a certain priapic swagger.
Wherever Manara belongs in the canon, “The Palette and the Sword” is a demand for respect, and a convincing one. It’s not just ecstasy that interests him; it’s also history, and the contrast between the ecstatic production of art and the people who claim it — and sometimes neuter it — once it is finished. There’s no accounting for posterity, but between the covers of his own books, the artist reigns supreme.
CARAVAGGIO: The Palette and the Sword, Books 1 and 2 | By Milo Manara | Fantagraphics | 128 pp. | $19.99 each
The post The Passion of the Cartoonist appeared first on New York Times.
