A plague on art / The tasteless torus
Today: John Saward, a writer based in Chicago; and Hamilton Nolan, author of the newsletter How Things Work, and the book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.
Issue No. 434
Caravaggio, Sam Altman, and Me
John Saward
Apple Cider Donuts = BS
Hamilton Nolan
HYDRANYM No. 23
The Editors
Caravaggio, Sam Altman, and Me
by John Saward
I was wandering around a humid church in Rome, vibrating on no sleep, and there was a murder going down on the wall. It can feel sometimes in these kind of places like you are hallucinating, the smell of candles hanging in the air, new wet wax, old smoke, old wood, the tourists in strange shoes, the modesty shawls for sale for 2 euros up the hill from shops selling Jesus magnets, and then those pillars of ancient splattered black marble and the great gilded domes above the altar, the darkness and the glass and the beams of light that hit you, you would have to say, half-crazy from the heat, bloodshot eyes begging for mercy, as maybe even a different kind of light, a light from an almighty dimension, and it’s enough almost to break you down.
This was way in the back of the Chiesa di San Luigi dei Francesi, standing there before Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. Ten feet tall, 10 feet across, a half-naked swordsman has crashed a baptism; he has come to kill the preacher. It is written that there was once a king in Ethiopia who promised Matthew half of his kingdom, if Matthew could convince a woman to marry him. The woman was a princess who had become a nun. And so Matthew invites the king to a Mass, there is a grand sermon, and then Matthew tells the king that the princess is already taken, she is the bride of Christ. The king storms out. Caravaggio’s painting shows what happens some days later.
It is a blockbuster. It feels like something holy and cataclysmic is happening on that wall but also a little like walking in on a mob hit. There is dread, seething rage, chaos, shock and bodies bent in horror, passion, vulgarity, cowards fleeing, a mess of limbs, violence and desperation, pure panic barfing up out of the face of a young girl, all of it all at once. The crumpled Saint Matthew looks up as an innocent, heavenly cherub reaches the palm of martyrdom down for him.
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