Heritage Malta is to be congratulated for what it has done and proposes to do in order to honour Caravaggio's name and consequently promote Valletta as an absolutely outstanding Citta d'Arte, which it certainly is.
It must, however, be said sadly that a Caravaggio exhibition can hardly be a success if it is advertised by an outdated and consequently completely unacceptable exhibition title which is expressive of ideas on Caravaggio's art now outdated by about 50 years.
The coming Caravaggio exhibition bears as its title a reference to chiaroscuro as if it were the most outstanding characteristic of Caravaggio's art. This is by no means the case, as can be seen from last year's epoch making Caravaggio-Rembrant exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This exhibition which attracted more than a million tourists, made no bones about what were Caravaggio's chief artistic characteristics into which we cannot here go into any detail. It explained Caravaggio's power of psychological analysis, and made do, once and for ever, with the labelling of his art as a childish exercise in chiaroscuro such as we find in Eric Newton's 1950s book on European painting.
Mr Newton's ideas on Caravaggio's position in the history of art was by no means idiosyncratic. He reflected the ideas of his time. Heritage Malta's coming exhibition will not even be remotely able to compete with that of last year in the Van Gogh, but it will be an extremely important one. Chiaroscuro is far from being the main characteristic of the greatest caravaggist painting of all of Europe - the Beheading of Holefernes by Valentin in our National Museum of Fine Arts.
Caravaggio did not achieve his tremendous physiological penetration simply by the technique of chiaroscuro, which Mr Newton ridiculed as superficial. This outlook confirmed Caravaggio's paintings to the cellars of museums like the Uffizi in Florence for hundreds of years. Caravaggio is now being acclaimed, with blaring trumpets, as the founder of modern art. His work is the seminal inspiration which is to be found behind Velasquez Rembrant, Goya, Gericault and straight on and in a most emphatic way to Manet. I saw Manet's Olympia a few days ago in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, while holding Kenneth Clark's book The Nude in my hands. The Olympia is definitely the most popular painting at the d'Orsay.
Mr Clark says that it is painted in the style of the early Caravaggio, when he was psychologically interpreting among other things that curious fixity of expression in the face of Roman boys suggesting a kind of inaccessible inward dreaminess. This Caravaggio psychological technique reaches its culmination in the splendid St Jerome painting in St John's Co-Cathedral, where the inward dreaminess becomes mental torture.