Caravaggio's painting style and personal predilections have always been intriguing to me. I have written on his life in this blog and have posted many detailed analyses on individual paintings on my Facebook page. I had done one such analysis on his 1601 painting titled Supper at Emmaus and was slightly taken aback to see another version of that painting at the exhibition titled Caravaggio which was recently held at Rome's Palazzo Barberini. I explore the differences between the two representations in this post.
The backstory remains the same. Two of Jesus' disciples were walking to Emmaus and are joined by a third traveler. This traveler is Jesus but he remains unrecognized until he reveals himself to the disciples while they are having dinner at an Inn in the town of Emmaus. Both paintings attempt to capture this moment in time.
According to the National Gallery, the 1601 effort was "painted at the height of Caravaggio's fame," was recorded at the Villa Borghese (Rome) in 1650 (likely having been in the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who died in 1633), and listed in a Borghese inventory of 1693.
The museum sees the painting as "among his most impressive domestic religious pictures." The symbolism associated with the painting is illustrated below.
The 1606 rendition was painted after Caravaggio's flight from Rome to Naples to escape the consequences of murdering Ranuccio Tomassoni. The painting appears in the inventory of Palazzo Patrizi in 1624 (valued at 300 scudi). It was acquired by Pinocoteca Brera in 1939 and resides there to this day.
The technique, approach, representations, light, and color have all been toned down, according to godwhospeaks.uk, because of:
- The ascetic influence of his patron Cardinal Mattei
- A now-precarious existence (and the mental weight that came along with that)
- Having to paint without a studio or sufficient material.
One source sees the Milan (1606) Emmaus as a "sad picture, drained of the dynamism of the earlier version." The London Emmaus is seen as bold, with powerful protagonists and a deliberately forceful impact. The Milan Emmaus, on the other hand, was viewed as more withdrawn, with figures no longer bursting out of the canvas.
In my view, the 1606 version is a clear reflection of where Caravaggio was in his life. The worry lines on the forheads of the Innkeeper and his wife(?) are pretty telling and that sense of worry and doom and gloom pervades the face of Jesus and the overall environment. If the 1601 version was painted at the peak of Caravaggio's career (as per the National Gallery), then the Milan version was painted at the low mental point of his life.
