Caravaggio on the screen: location and evocation - part two

ART AND LOCATION – Cinema in details

Caravaggio as evoked in Ghosts of Rome

Our exploration of the intersection of cinema and Caravaggio continues. After a first part dedicated to the relationship between scenic representations of the artist’s life and work and his paintings, with a special focus on the strong evocations of Caravaggio in the TV series Ripley, the anniversary of Michelangelo Merisi's death, which occurred 415 years ago on July 18, 1610, in Porto Ercole, offers the opportunity to recount a cinematic episode that is extraordinary in its own way.

Ticket-holders to the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition, closing on 20 July at Palazzo Barberini, were given the option to book a guided tour of the privately-owned Casino di Villa Ludovisi, to admire Caravaggio’sonly wall painting, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto (1597-99), oil on plaster, commissioned by one of his most famous patrons, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who also supported Galileo. TheCasino later passed into the hands of Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of Pope Gregory XV (1621-23), who comissioned Guercino to fresco the ground-floor with the Carro dell’Aurora (1621), as a response to the same subject previously painted by Guido Reni (1613-1614) for Scipione Borghese in the building known today as Villa Pallavicini Rospigliosi, and so Caravaggio’s painting was forgotten.

Open debate roared on even after an article by Giuliana Zandri in 1969 (Un probabile dipinto murale del Caravaggio per il Cardinale Del Monte - A probable wall painting by Caravaggio for Cardinal Del Monte) which today marks its official rediscovery.

After all, following its initial impact on the first half of the 17th century, Caravaggio's art and style or “Caravaggism” was obfuscated by Raphaelesque idealism, championed first by the Carracci family, then Domenichino, Guido Reni, and Carlo Maratti, to name just a few.
Low regard for Caravaggio's realism persisted for three centuries, right up to the mid-20th century. This becomes very clear on browsing tourist guides from the 18th to the early 20th century where pages dedicated to the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi prioritize the Chapel of Santa Cecilia frescoed by Domenichino over the Contarelli Chapel’s Stories of Saint Matthew, now considered one of the greatest masterpieces by Caravaggio and in global art history.

It was Roberto Longhi who restored prestige to Michelangelo Merisi's painting; the exhibition he curated at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 1951 was symbolically a watershed moment, as it opened a debate over Caravaggio's works that became increasingly heated, and the maestro’s catalogue grew ever richer, reaching its current magnificence.

Antonio Pietrangeli's stunning film Ghosts of Rome (1961) was released against this backdrop. It tells the story of ghosts who gravitate towards a large, dilapidated apartment in an ancient building in Piazza Santa Maria della Pace (the door is that of Palazzo Gambirasi) inhabited by Don Annibale di Roviano (Eduardo De Filippo) and later by his nephew Federico (Marcello Mastroianni) who wants to sell it. The ghosts band together to prevent its sale and call upon Giovan Battista Villari, known as Caparra (Vittorio Gassman), to paint a fresco whose discovery could spark restrictions and save the building.

The hilarious sequences that ensue, where Gassman uses the other ghosts as models, including beautiful Flora (Sandra Milo), and rails against the art historian Randoni (Mario Maresca), modeled on Roberto Longhi, who attributes the fresco not to him but to the "brush" of none other than... Caravaggio, appear to be a precise reference to the painting in the Casino Ludovisi!

This is borne out by the ceiling placement; the rush to attribute it - by a paid critic, which alludes to a certain type of expertise -; Caparra's outburst of rageas he reiterates that Caravaggio never painted a fresco; and, all things considered, even by the mythological subject, despite its comical title - "Jupiter transformed into a washerwoman seducing Venus" - rather than the three deities associated with Air (Jupiter), Water (Neptune), and Earth (Pluto) in Cardinal del Monte's alchemical distillery.

Caparra not only repeatedly offends Donna Flora (Sandra Milo), but also rails against everyone, including the Cavalier d'Arpino for his explanation of the fresco technique that ignores real life challenges, and, even more vehemently, the art historian, for whom he reserves a resounding final insult, for considering his art inferior to Caravaggio’s.

Caparra's temperament, modeled on the idea of the uninhibited artist, allows for a final contextual reflection that connects again with Merisi, too often portrayed in the collective imagination, from the 19th century to the present day, as a man intent on brawling and knives, uncultured, crude, a "cursed painter" who lived a "violent life."

It is undoubtedly true that during his time in Rome, Caravaggio attacked Mariano Pasqualoni to defend Lena (Maddalena Antognetti); threw stones at the window of Prudenzia Bruni, his landlady, in Vicolo S. Biagio (now Vicolo del Divino Amore); and killed Ranuccio Tomassoni on May 28, 1606, beginning a pilgrimage that took him to Malta, where he wasimprisoned for brawling. But the identification of his painting with his life has led to a distorted view of a man who was simply of his time.

Caravaggio's vast culture is evident in his paintings and the intellectual and religious circles he frequented. The violent nature of the time is evident: Agostino Tassi raped Artemisia Gentileschi, while they were both working with Orazio, her father, on the decoration of the Casino delle Muse in Villa Rospigliosi Pallavicini (then Borghese); Gian Lorenzo Bernini disfigured Costanza Piccolomini Bonarelli; Cavalier d'Arpino had his colleague Pomarancio attacked; Onorio Longhi, armed with a knife, chased people inside the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva...

So, when Caparra pushes Professor Randoni down the stairs, he pointedly blames someone else: "Was it you?" "No, it was Caravaggio." Gassman’s performance of Caparra who hates Caravaggio's success for detracting from his own is one of the most hilarious moments in an extraordinary film!

• Read the first part of the article
• Watch the cited film:
  Ghosts of Rome - Antonio Pietrangeli, 1967 (Raiplay) - 1h16'-1h27'