Sicilian Odyssey Read Online Free PDF

does not, is a sense of a theatrical performance being staged for the viewer, played out with the audience in mind.
    By contrast, there is nothing that includes you, or invites you, into Caravaggio’s rendering; indeed, the gravediggers are doing everything possible to keep you at a distance, to conceal the tragic scene from view—just as, in life, the participants in something sorrowful, violent, and shameful might try to keep it secret, hidden. What’s even more striking is all that earth, all that brown, all that darkness taking up all that room in the painting. There are no clouds here, no starry firmament, no heaven, no promise of ascension, no vision of an afterlife surrounded by plump, pink-cheeked cherubs and choirs of angels. There is only earth, only darkness, only the fierce and brutal energies of the living. That, Caravaggio seems to be saying, is all there is.
    It is perhaps the darkest and certainly among the most hopeless and least consoling of religious paintings. Yet there is something profoundly comforting about its honesty, its bravery, its conviction—and, above all, in the depth and beauty that Caravaggio has managed to wrest from this scene of mourning and almost unmediated pain.
    The danger and seduction of retrospect lie in how much we try to read back into the events that preceded what would ultimately reveal itself as the future. Looking at “The Burial of St. Lucy,” we not only find ourselves assuming that its dark vision must have been influenced by the misfortune and violence that Caravaggio had already experienced, but we may also be tempted to find some ominous presentiment of how little time the painter had left and of the misery that lay before him.
    Leaving Syracuse, Caravaggio continued on to Messina, and then to Palermo, all the while painting furiously, taking on local commissions and smaller paintings that he hoped to bring to his patrons in Rome, partly in the hopes that his new works would move them to intercede for him and obtain a pardon that would allow him to return safely home. When this began to seem probable, he left Sicily for a brief sojourn in Naples, where he was gravely wounded and disfigured in another fight. Then, bringing along several paintings, he set sail for Rome.
    His boat stopped at Porto Ercole, and, possibly mistaken for someone else, he was detained and imprisoned. While he was being questioned by the authorities, the tides shifted, and it was necessary for the boat to leave.
    Impatient, enraged to find himself stranded in the port, Caravaggio set off for the capital on foot, a dangerous hike through swamps infested with malaria, which (or so it is thought) the painter contracted, and from which he is believed to have died, en route to Rome. Like so much about his life, his death remains shrouded in uncertainty. All that we know is that his last great paintings continued on their sea journey and arrived safely in Rome, without him.

CHAPTER THREE

Building and Rebuilding: the Glories of the Baroque
    For many years, when we lived in rural upstate New York, one of our neighbors was a carpenter-contractor who had a placard in his front yard advertising his business: BUILDING AND REBUILDING. We used to think the sign was funny, sort of, as if it described an ongoing process, a series of events that amounted to a confession of incompetence. First he would build and later, by necessity, rebuild what he’d screwed up the first time.
    Here in Sicily, I keep thinking of him and of his sign, which, oddly, has begun to seem like a terse summary of the energies, the aims, the history of the Sicilian baroque—so much of which involved a series of reconstructions and revisions, powered by disturbing memories of the destructive powers of time and nature, and by a brighter notion of a future in which the forces of devastation and ruin could be overcome, or at least temporarily subdued.
    Throughout Sicily, especially in Palermo and in the southeast, the baroque seems