October 14, 2012 |
9) St Matthew, c.1629, Matthias Stomer, shown by Adam Williams Fine Art
The 17th-century painter Matthias Stromer was a disciple of the style of the legendary baroque bad boy, Caravaggio. Before getting himself killed on the orders of the Knights of Malta, that hugely influential artist had shaken things up by introducing sexual tension and a mood of violence into paintings with exaggerated lighting – the blaze of candles against dark, unknowable shadows – that pre-empted photography and film. Caravaggio liked to hurl his audience straight into the thick of it, freeze-framing the action, mid-tumult. In place of idealised divinities, he worked with a cast of everyday folk, beautiful street boys or intriguingly grizzled men.
Stromer was wed to Caravaggio’s dramatic staging and muddy-soled realism long after it fell from fashion. Not an innovator perhaps, but an exceptionally accomplished hand. For 30 years he travelled around the Italian princedoms, from Naples to Rome and Palermo in Sicily, creating religious works, such as his Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist, which is now in London’s National Gallery. This painting, St Matthew, is dated to his later period, and depicts a classic religious scene: an angel dictating the gospel to Matthew. The duo are spotlit à la Caravaggio, and the saint is no well-groomed looker, but a believable everyday grey beard. What Stromer captures so brilliantly here is the quiet but absolute authority of the childlike angel dominating the old man. There’s a tacit power play that’s almost kinky.
Matthias Stomer
Amersfoort c1600–Sicily after 1652
St Matthew
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of Adam Williams Fine Art, New York
by Skye Sherwin
