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The migration of art from museum to market: Consuming Caravaggio

Kent Drummond
Marketing Theory 2006; 6; 85
DOI: 10.1177/1470593106061264

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DOI: 10.1177/1470593106061264

articles

The migration of art from museum to

market: Consuming Caravaggio
Kent Drummond
University of Wyoming, USA

Abstract. This study examines the life and work of the Italian Baroque artist
Caravaggio, whose paintings dazzled and shocked the Church and patronage systems
400 years ago. By tracing the reception of his work from its inception in 1600 to its
commodification today, the study develops a five-phase model of the migration of art
from studio to museum to market. Consisting of Creation, Quotation, Interpretation,
Recontextualization, and Consumption, the model applies the work of Bourdieu,
McCracken, Schroeder, Baudrillard and Althusser to explain how traditional works
of western art are transformed into a system of objects available for contemporary
consumption. The model explains how the interaction of particular people, events,
and contexts disseminates the meaning of rarefied images into objects of possession
• •
and adornment. Key Words aesthetics commodification communication
• •
culture imagery visual museums
• •
He came into this world to destroy painting. (Nicholas Poussin on Caravaggio, 1660; Langdon,
2000)
Ribera, Vermeer, de la Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art
of Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet would have been utterly different. (Longhi, 1968)
US$414.85 (Price of Versace china teapot using Caravaggio imagery, 2004)
How does a painter whose contemporaries demonized him as a threat to his
medium come to provide the imagery for an expensive Versace teapot – a piece of
china that testifies to the wealth, taste, and artistic discernment of its owner – 400
years later? How does his aesthetic vision – reviled by contemporaries as dark,
vulgar and dangerous – inspire the aesthetic vision for The Passion of The Christ,
a film that grossed US$600 million in 2004? This article will trace the route the
Baroque-era painter, Caravaggio, has traveled from the rarefied world of the
patronage system, to a somewhat broader but still exclusive museum world, to a
broader cultural and commercial market in which the Caravaggio ‘experience’ has

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10:21 AM
Stage 1: Stage 2: Stage 3: Stage 4: Stage 5:
CREATION QUOTATION INTERPRETATION RECONSTRUCTUALIZATION CONSUMPTION
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Page 86
Frame 1:
repudiative Portal 1:
appropriation

Frame 2:
Artist’s redemptive
Other artist’s Portal 2: Purchase by
life and
re-presentations commercialization end user
work
Frame 3:
homoerotic
Portal 3:
commodification

Frame 4:
museum

Figure 1
The migration of Caravaggio’s art
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Kent Drummond

been made available to millions of consumers through a array of commodities and

entertainments. The article uses Caravaggio as a single-case exemplar, but it sug-
gests that this migration of art has been replicated in at least a dozen other cases
of traditional western artists, from Da Vinci and Michelangelo through Picasso
and Chagall. The five stages of the model – Creation, Quotation, Interpretation,
Recontextualization, and Consumption – explain how the interaction of particu-
lar people, events, and contexts transforms the meaning of rarefied images into
objects of possession and adornment. Similar to Becker’s Art Worlds (1982), it
describes a system of artistic production, but unlike Becker’s work, it extends that
description into broader spheres of commercial consumption.
The article moves reflexively, from a discussion of pertinent paintings and
interpretations in the reception of Caravaggio’s work, to an explanation of the
model the reception gives rise to (see Figure 1), and back again. As such, the
model makes use of several theoretical influences, including Goffman’s theory of
the frame (1974), Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital ((1985), Schroeder’s
theory of visual consumption (2002), Baudrillard’s system of objects (1996), and
Althusser’s hailing, interpolation, and ideology (1977). It also amplifies the
‘Culturally Constituted World’ segment of McCracken’s Movement of Meaning
model (1988) by tracing more precisely how images become objects of possession
and adornment.

Stage 1: creation

The Creation stage of an artist encompasses a fixed time span between the artist’s
birth and death – and most importantly, the period within that span during which
the artist creates works of art. Biographical details, insofar as they are known, are
relevant here, since they contextualize the artist within a cultural and social
milieu, and can be used to explain how an artist’s work was inspired and received.
While the start and end dates of the Creation stage are fixed – provided the birth
and death dates of the artist can be conclusively determined – the relevant
biographical details used to explain an artist’s work can be in a constant state of
revision and reassessment.
In the case of Caravaggio, the Creation stage lasted 39 years, from his birth in
1571 until his death in 1610 (Bonsanti, 1984). His artistic output consisted of
nearly 100 paintings, which he produced in only a 16-year span, between the ages
of 23 and 39. Born Michelangelo Merisi in the town of Caravaggio, east of Milan
in the Lombard region of Northern Italy, he lost his father to the plague in 1584.
Caravaggio, as he was soon to become known, moved to Milan, where he was
apprenticed to the painter Simone Peterzano (Pioch, 2002). Peterzano’s studio
reflected the Mannerist values of the late 16th Century, which utilized a highly
stylized, theatrical manner of painting emphasizing elongated figures in contrived
poses and expressions. But Peterzano’s studio also displayed a strong thread of
Lombard realism, which, following the precepts of Leonardo da Vinci, stressed
‘the primacy of nature, and the central role of light, color and expression in paint-

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© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (www.rijksmuseum.nl)

Figure 2
The Ecstasy of Saint Francis

ing’ (Puglisi, 1998: 10). It also allowed for the portrayal of scenes from everyday
life – a boy being bitten by a lizard, for example – and the expression of emotions
flowing naturally from them: surprise, joy, fear, horror (Lambert, 2000). Scholars
agree that these forces exerted a profound influence on Caravaggio, as did the
relatively new technique of chiaroscuro – the bold contrasting of light and dark
shades in order to create the illusion of depth, championed earlier by Leonardo
and much later by artists such as Rubens and Rembrandt.
Caravaggio moved to Rome by the time he was 22, where he found work for
eight months under the well-known Mannerist painter Cavaliere d’Arpino. Here
he produced his earliest known works, the ‘flowers and fruit’ paintings of Sick
Bacchus, Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Boy Bitten by a Lizard. These paintings both
dazzled and shocked contemporaries with their naturalistic portrayal of bare skin,
the play of light through glass, and the seductive expressions of their subjects.
They also captured the attention of Caravaggio’s first patron, the powerful
Cardinal Francesco del Monte (Puglisi, 1998).
Under subsequent patronages and through several important commissions,
Caravaggio achieved fame and some security in Rome for the next 12 years. In

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© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (www.rijksmuseum.nl)

Figure 3
Doubting Thomas

paintings such as The Ecstasy of Saint Francis (Figure 2), The Conversion of Saint
Paul, Head of Medusa, and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, he inspired awe and
controversy for his naturalistic technique, his dramatic interplay of light and
dark (chiaroscuro), and his unflattering poses of the saints, Jesus, and the Virgin
Mary. His Doubting Thomas (Figure 3) shows the skeptical saint aghast as Christ
guides his finger into his side while other apostles look on. His Flagellation of
Christ depicts with chilling realism the famous biblical scene in which Christ
is whipped. Representing as they did such a radical departure from the still-
influential Mannerist style, these paintings were nothing if not innovative,
delighting some viewers, while offending others. More than any other artist,
Caravaggio is said to have ushered in the era known as Baroque painting, if not all
of modern painting (Lambert, 2000).
Other relevant biographical information must include the fact that, even as he
was producing his greatest works, Caravaggio continually ran afoul of the law. He
was often arrested and imprisoned for disorderly conduct, assault, carrying a
sword, and libel (Lambert, 2000). Finally, in 1606, Caravaggio killed a young
man of noble birth, Ranuccio Tomassoni, reportedly over a foul call in a tennis

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match. Later reports suggest a prearranged duel, but in either case, Caravaggio was
imprisoned, whipped, and tortured. Awaiting trial, he escaped from prison and
fled to Naples.
Caravaggio spent the final four years of his life as a fugitive from the papacy,
moving from Naples to Malta to Sicily and back to Naples, still painting but
always avoiding legal authorities. Some of his most powerful works – Salome with
the Head of the Baptist, David with the Head of Goliath – stem from this period.
Sick with malaria, he died on a beach while waiting for a pardon from Rome,
which had already been signed but not delivered (Gash, 1980).

Stage 2: quotation

In most instances, once the artist’s life is over, the artist’s oeuvre is complete.
Barring the discovery of new works by that artist, the Creation stage is finished.
The Quotation stage, if it has not already begun, commences when subsequent
artists emulate images, styles and techniques of the artist, usually intentionally.
Quotation is a mimetic process that propels an artist’s work from his or her
own canvas to those of others. Quotation also involves choice, and by necessity,
fractionalization: what aspects of the artist’s style do other artists choose to re-
present, and how?
In the instance of Caravaggio, the Quotation stage began even before the
Creation stage had ended, for other artists were emulating Caravaggio’s style and
technique long before he died. One of his first’s biographers, Bellori, notes that at
the height of Caravaggio’s fame:
. . . the young ones particularly gathered around him,
praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles. They outdid
each other in imitating his works, undressing their models and raising their lanterns. (Bellori,
quoted in Friedlander, 1955: 252)
The snide tone of Bellori’s observation aside, Caravaggio’s influence was felt well
before his death, both among artists in Rome – such as Orazio Gentileschi and his
daughter, Artemisia – and among those from abroad, such as Georges de la Tour
and Ribera. A group of artists from Utrecht, the ‘Utrecht Caravaggisti’, traveled to
Rome to observe the artist at work. Masters such as Ter Brugghen and van
Honthorst returned home eager to emulate his gritty realism, his propensity to
draw exclusively from live models, and his dramatic use of lighting – a style at
once naturalistic and dramatic. Then subsequent generations, including Rubens,
Vermeer, Velasquez, Rembrandt, and later Courbet, imitated his style less
intensely but still recognizably.
The visual quotation of Caravaggio continues even today. Mieke Bal’s Quoting
Caravaggio (1999) details the ways in which contemporary artists such as Andres
Serrano and George Deem quote key elements in Caravaggio’s paintings. The way
fabric is draped over skin; the way color is heightened to theatrical hues; the
way light plays off surfaces and enriches texture; the way visually ‘impossible’

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perspectives are combined in a single work – these elements of Caravaggio’s style

are quoted by contemporary artists, and their quotations in turn inscribe the ways
in which contemporary viewers perceive the Baroque.
The Quotation stage is critical in prolonging the presence of an artist in the
museum world. Simply put, the more an artist is quoted, the more impact his or
her work is perceived to have. Advocates of Caravaggio are quick to point out his
influence upon subsequent important artists such as Rubens and Rembrandt. To
do so suggests that, in order to understand them, you must understand him.
In marketing terms, quotation is a measure of an artist’s reach, exposure, co-
branding, and even word-of-mouth. The more an artist is quoted by other artists,
the more he or she will get talked about by art historians, critics and scholars.

Stage 3: interpretation

Two terms are critical to understanding the Interpretation stage: frame and artist
anecdote. The term frame, borrowed from Erving Goffman’s pioneering work on
frame theory (1974), suggests that everyday interactants classify, organize, and
interpret life experiences, often in different ways, in order to make sense of them.
In their attempt to encompass some version of ‘reality’, frames are as important
for the information they exclude about a given object as for what they include. In
critical ways, each frame constructs its object. For example, a critic, scholar,
or museum curator who interprets Caravaggio’s life and work is actually re-
presenting it on his or her own terms to a viewing-reading public. That public
then receives the framed object as ‘real’ or ‘true’ – the essence of the work itself.
The artist anecdote is central to the theory of Sousloff’s The Absolute Artist
(1997), which addresses how the artist-as-text gets constructed and interpreted
over time.
‘Caravaggio’, her theory posits, is an operational system of texts and their
reception. Rather than searching for the ‘one uniquely correct understanding’
of Caravaggio (Carrier, 1991), this view asks: Who is allowed to talk about
Caravaggio at any given point in time? What streams of discourse, or frames, have
they constructed around him?
The artist anecdote – a small story involving the life of an artist and the creation
of his work – becomes the elementary particle in explaining the relationship
between an artist’s life and work. Arrange enough artist anecdotes in a particular
way and you’ll eventually construct a frame: a systematic, deterministic way of
‘seeing’ the artist, based on the way you explain the relationship between the
artist’s output and the events that produced them. A frame is an argument, with-
out proof but with much evidence. Thus, while the Quotation stage is a visual
enterprise, the Interpretation stage is a literary one. The domain of art historians,
critics and catalog writers, Interpretation encompasses how an artist gets talked
about in writing. Quotation assures the viewer that one artist sees another;
Interpretation persuades the reader how to think about the artist in question.
Since his death in 1610, Caravaggio’s work has been framed and interpreted for

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almost 400 years. Critical reaction is as diverse as each critic’s tastes, historical
conventions, and agendas. Yet a review of the critical reception of Caravaggio’s life
and work suggests that there are four dominant frames, or ways of thinking about
Caravaggio, that have evolved since he first began painting.

The repudiative frame

While most critics recognized Caravaggio’s genius as soon as it first displayed
itself, far fewer were comfortable with the innovation that accompanied it.
Caravaggio’s paintings violated the religious conventions mandated by the
Catholic Church of his day, so contemporary critics questioned his artistic merit,
in spite of his technical genius. They received his work as extraordinary – and
extraordinarily dangerous (Gash, 1980).
The Repudiative frame derives much of its power from the fact that
Caravaggio’s first biographers – Baglione, Bellori, and Mancini – were also some
of his chief rivals and critics, mixing personal and professional jealousies with
loosely objective accounts of his life. This passage is typical of Bellori’s short
biography of Caravaggio:
Caravaggio’s style corresponded to his physiognomy and appearance; he had a dark com-
plexion and dark eyes, and his eyebrows and hair were black; this coloring was naturally
reflected in his paintings. (Bellori in Friedlander, 1955: 251)
As Breazeale points out (2001), Caravaggio’s mastery of a natural technique was
initially praised by Bellori. But this strength turned to liability in Bellori’s later
assessments, in which Caravaggio became a ‘slave to the model’, incapable of
raising his eye for nature into an idealized, transcendent artistic creation in the
way Annibale Carracci could.
The murky details of Caravaggio’s personal life only added to the uneasiness
with which his work was received (Lambert, 2000). His obscure provenance,
precocious talent, propensity to violence, and lonely death prompted endless
speculation about his mysterious proclivities and supernatural abilities. In
Caravaggio’s life, the artist anecdotes are constantly shifting. Yet within 15 years
after his death, his reputation was irredeemable among Italian critics. Art his-
torian Beverly Louise Brown observes (2001):
Caravaggio’s more intensely naturalistic style remained almost entirely an affair for eccentrics,
connoisseurs and foreign artists, and by the early 1620s, had run its course – at least as far as
Rome was concerned. (Brown, 2001: 16)

The redemptive frame

To be sure, artists and collectors throughout Europe continued to appropriate
Caravaggio’s work and be influenced by it. As mentioned earlier, artists such as
Artemisia Gentileschi, Valentin de Boulogne, Georges de la Tour, and Ribera were
profoundly influenced by his work, as were the ‘Utrecht Caravaggisti’ and later
Rubens, Rembrandt, and Courbet. Yet following Bellori’s writing, and others

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like it, the merits of Caravaggio’s genius, at least according to influential Italian
critics, remained equivocal for over 300 years (Lambert, 2000).
Then in 1951, the noted art historian Roberto Longhi staged a major exhibition
of Caravaggio’s works in Milan. With that single event, critical reception of
Caravaggio changed dramatically. His show was what today’s museum adminis-
trators call a blockbuster: an exhibition on a grand scale, collecting as many works
as possible by a single artist – often works never before seen – for the purpose of
establishing and celebrating the impact of that artist’s work to the public at large.
Longhi also included paintings of the ‘Caravaggisti’ – painters who quoted
Caravaggio clearly and recognizably. Longhi’s agenda was clear: to introduce
Caravaggio to the world in a way that neither critics, nor art historians, nor the
general public would ever forget.
By all accounts, Longhi succeeded. ‘Mostra del Caravaggio’ was an enormous
critical and commercial success. Assessing the impact of that exhibition some 30
years later, Phillipe de Montebello, himself the organizer of another landmark
Caravaggio exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985, wrote:
Not surprisingly, public consciousness of Caravaggio’s artistic stature can be traced to this
single exhibition. But scarcely less important was the seminal effect of the exhibition on
Caravaggio scholarship. More has been published in the last three decades than during the
preceding 350 years. (1985: 8)
Longhi’s Caravaggio show became the first in a series of major exhibitions
devoted to the artist. Over the next 54 years, major museums in art capitals such
as Paris, New York, Boston, and London staged their own blockbuster shows
devoted solely to his work. Like Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and the Impression-
ists, Caravaggio remains good box office, with recently completed shows in
Sydney, Melbourne and New York, and another scheduled in 2005 for London.

The homoerotic frame

Within that time period, however, another frame evolved in the critical reception
of Caravaggio’s work that greatly facilitated his entry into mainstream culture.
In 1971, the art critic Donald Posner wrote an essay entitled, ‘Caravaggio’s
Homo-Erotic Early Works’, in which he meticulously argued that at least five of
Caravaggio’s works, painted in the early part of his career, ‘are redolent of homo-
erotic content’ (Posner, 1971: 302). Focusing on the compositions of boys
holding baskets of fruit playing musical instruments (see The Musicians), and
drinking a glass of wine (see Bacchus), Posner argued that the boys in these paint-
ings were offering more than fruit, music and wine; they were deliberately con-
structed by Caravaggio as an integral part of his homoerotic aesthetic, recognized
and appreciated by patrons and collectors even in his day.
For example, when discussing Boy with a Basket of Fruit (Figure 4), in which a
young boy gazes out at the viewer while holding a basket of fruit, Posner notes
that:

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© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (www.rijksmuseum.nl)

Figure 4
Boy with a Basket of Fruit

a moment’s reflection is enough to convince one that the subject of the picture is no everyday
green-grocer’s boy. His tousled hair and warm, impassioned gaze can hardly be meant to
advertise vegetables. Nor can his shirt have slipped down by chance to reveal his smooth flesh
and rounded shoulder. (1971: 304)
Perhaps unwittingly, Posner’s homoerotic frame taps into a centuries-old obses-
sion – both attractive and repugnant to the public-at-large – with a certain kind
of Italian wealth and power, and all the decadent pleasures and violent deaths that
accompany it. Whether it be the orgies of Caligula, the villas of the Medicis, or the
film sets of Paolo Pasolini, the recurring theme of wealthy older men, dangerous
younger men, excitement, sex and death continues to fascinate. Posner’s portrayal
of Caravaggio played into this deep-seated cultural obsession, to great effect. Thus
it is that any advocate of Caravaggio’s work today must answer the ‘gay question’
(Carrier, 1991).
Yet the effect the Homoerotic frame served only to hasten, rather than impede,

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Caravaggio’s entry into popular culture. By the time the Met’s Caravaggio block-
buster opened in 1985, Posner’s article had been out for almost 15 years; the Gay
Liberation movement, begun by the Stonewall riots in 1969, had been underway
for 17. That was plenty of time for Posner’s article to reverberate across critical
journals, books, and college classrooms, and plenty of time for many aspects of
gay culture – from leather clothing to disco dancing to dissing – to be co-opted by
mainstream popular culture. If, for some visitors to the New York exhibit,
Caravaggio was the “gay painter” (Seward, 1998), then that epithet was far from a
liability. It may even have attracted them to the show, either because they them-
selves were gay, or because gay culture was the source of so much that was ‘cool’
in music, fashion and language in the 1970s and 1980s.

The museum frame

While the preceding three frames are energized by critical activity, a fourth frame,
the Museum frame, monitors findings and debates within those frames, then
showcases them in a larger, well-publicized and well-trafficked forum in order to
capture consumers’ attention and money. As Joy notes:
Museums frame the past and present it as a preface to the present in a teleological sense. They
use the space available to create and recount history – especially the history of art. (1998: 263)
Ever since the Longhi show of 1951, Caravaggio has been a fixture on the museum
circuit. The shows devoted to his work are significant and plentiful enough to
constitute a frame themselves: a way of seeing Caravaggio as framed by the
Museum.
More than any other, the Museum frame showcases a conversation of prior
frames. A new frame about an artist can occasion a new exhibition of an artist. For
example, if researchers discovered a new painting by Caravaggio – as New
York ‘rediscovered’ The Lute Player in 1990 – a new interpretive frame can be
developed, asking viewers to see Caravaggio in a new light. Or, if new influences
of Caravaggio can be observed on subsequent artists in ways never before
attributable to him, a new frame may be developed which argues this point.
Novelty is the key here. Caravaggio is clearly bankable, but he has been bankable
long enough that prior shows may have exposed him – and overexposed him – to
a sizable portion of the museum-going public. Like a handful of other ‘block-
buster’ artists such as Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Picasso, and
Chagall, Caravaggio continues to be exhibited in new frames so that old and new
audiences may be persuaded to see him.

Stage 4: recontextualization
However, the Museum frame is not the only way in which the public-at-large has
come to know Caravaggio. In fact, it could be argued that some portion of the
public may attend a Caravaggio show because it has experienced the Caravaggio

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brand outside the Museum frame. And they would have had numerous opportu-
nities to do so. As Puglisi recounts:
. . . the fact that several of his secular pictures have turned up routinely in Italian advertising
for commercial products like wine or as decoration on luxury goods, such as a recent Trussardi
shawl reproducing Caravaggio’s Musicians, is further proof that he has attained canonical
status. For the Anglo-American public, Caravaggio’s appeal rests not only on his often shock-
ing imagery but also on his romantic persona . . . Margaret Truman’s Murder at the National
Gallery features Caravaggio’s horrific Medusa on the dust jacket and . . . Caravaggio’s life and
art resonate in a novel of a different class, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, winner of the
Booker Prize in 1992. (1998: 7)
In other words, Caravaggio has ‘jumped the tracks’ of the Museum frame and
careened out onto a broader cultural and commercial landscape, passing through
movie theatres, dining room tables, wallets and bedrooms before coming to rest
on live flesh. After 50 years of touring the major museums of the world, that he
has done so is not surprising.
How he has done so is a complex and subtle process of recontextualization,
which takes a variety of forms, from the discernibly artistic to the overtly com-
mercial. In terms of intent or consequence, not all entryways into broader cultural
and commercial spheres are created equal. Hence they are referred to here as
portals, ranging from the high-art discrimination of appropriation, to the mass
appeal, souvenir-effect of commercialization, to the system-of-object’s siren call of
commodification.
Caravaggio’s continuing presence in the Museum frame constitutes a collectiv-
ity of symbolic resources available to those with the knowledge and inclination to
use them to their advantage. Both Bourdieu (1985) and Schroeder (2002) have
written extensively on this topic: Bourdieu from a modified Marxist perspective;
Schroeder from the standpoint of visual consumption.
For Bourdieu, the Creation, Quotation and Interpretation stages of Caravaggio’s
art – all that has been produced by him, said about him, and shown of him –
represent a storehouse of symbolic capital: goods of restricted production whose
distribution and value vary across time and social class. The value of symbolic
goods is not only determined by their scarcity, but by the amount of cultural capi-
tal – such as education – needed to discern them. One can ‘see’ a Caravaggio in a
book or on a t-shirt, but one can only more fully ‘get Caravaggio’ by taking a
college course in Baroque art, or by visiting one of the great museums of the world
in which his paintings hang. And these activities, as Holt’s research has shown
(1997), presuppose access to a number of restricted cultural resources and institu-
tions. Since the recontextualizations in which Caravaggio’s work appears have
different levels of access, it makes sense to distinguish among them, as the appro-
priation, commercialization, and commodification portals do.
Schroeder’s theory of visual consumption (2002) dovetails nicely with
Bourdieu’s writing, in that the image becomes the coin of the realm in the sym-
bolic capitalist system. As understood and utilized by symbolic capitalists working
in advertising, graphics and fashion, the image travels easily from the museum to
the marketplace. An everyday scene from golden age Dutch art might display

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china, books and art within its frame, instructing the viewer what ‘the good life’
looked like in 16th-century Europe. Schroeder’s work informs the present study
by suggesting that the way to track the influence of an artist’s work in commercial
spheres is to track his or her images from the museum to the marketplace.
Manet’s Olympia, for example, has been parodied hundreds of times, and often serves as a
theme for advertisements. In general, art is a sign of affluence, it belongs to the good life.
Artistic references also suggest a cultural authority, superior to crass material interests. Thus,
by referring to art, advertising can denote both wealth and spirituality; luxury and transcendent
cultural value. (Schroeder, 2000: 40)

Schroeder’s work is also useful in that is specifies the contexts in which these
images will appear: luxury goods, travel, fashion, and other art forms whose
exclusivity parallels that of the museum world – anything suggesting luxury,
exclusivity, cutting-edge sophistication, and discriminating taste. The three
portals described below possess all of these attributes, each in differing degrees.

Portal 1: appropriation
The appropriation portal refers to artistic works in other media that make sophis-
ticated and nuanced use of Caravaggio’s life and work, but whose aim is not
primarily commercial. Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient is a good example, as
is Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio. Both show a rich understanding of the
interpretive frames that surround the artist, yet neither wishes to make that
understanding more broadly accessible to a general public. Rather, they strive to
re-present the complexity of the artist in a new medium.
In his development of the character David Caravaggio, Michael Ondaatje’s The
English Patient (1992) displays a profound and poetic understanding of the artist
Caravaggio. On the surface, Ondaatje’s Caravaggio would appear to have little in
common with the Baroque artist: this new Caravaggio is a spy and a thief, trapped
in a villa in the Italian countryside with several other outcasts near the end of the
Second World War. But as the novel unfolds, the attributes critics have come to
associate with the painter resonate with Ondaatje’s character: the fugitive instinct,
the avoidance of intimacy, the inclination to stand in the shadows and observe.
The character, hands bandaged and in a constant state of pain, has become a
morphine addict. Readers later learn that Caravaggio’s thumbs had been cut off
by the Nazis; he is a thief who cannot grasp. Yet it is Caravaggio who, near the
novel’s end, figures out the true identity of the English patient. Like the artist
Caravaggio, the character Caravaggio has the uncanny ability to reveal the truth
inherent in a scene, and to reveal it theatrically. But like the painter, the character
goes largely unrecognized in his own time. Ondaatje describes his character as one
who ‘would never leave his name where his skill had been. He was one of those
who have a fury or sadness of being described by someone else’ (1992: 199).
Ondaatje’s rich rendering of this character is haunting, and startling: Caravaggio
did only sign one painting, but that piece of information is relatively esoteric
(Gash, 1980).

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In a similar vein, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986) brings a nuanced,

meticulously-researched, and politically charged understanding of Caravaggio to
the film medium. Not only the film, but the book of Jarman’s notes on its con-
struction, are considered classics by those working across a variety of media (Bal,
1999). Like Ondaatje’s Caravaggio, Jarman’s film about the life of the painter is
not a quick view or an easy read; rather, it enacts the reflexive relationship of the
hermeneutic circle, moving from the ‘text’ of the paintings to a ‘reading’ of the life
that produced them, and back again.
Jarman’s characters are motivated by select Caravaggio paintings that depict
key moments in Caravaggio’s life, including Boy with a Basket of Fruit, The
Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, Doubting Thomas, Death of the Virgin, and
Entombment. Characters emerge from one painting, morph around a series of plot
twists, then re-appear in new paintings created later in Caravaggio’s life. The
characters explain the paintings, but in equal measure, the paintings explain the
characters. Caravaggio begins the film as the Boy with a Basket of Fruit – a hustler
who also sells his paintings to wealthy tourists. Having been wounded by
Ranuccio, his model and love interest, and note that he poses as the executioner
in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, but stabs Caravaggio after a quarrel)
Caravaggio becomes the Christ in Doubting Thomas. He later murders Ranuccio
and, having been stricken with fever in Porto Ecole, dies as the Christ of the
Entombment.
Jarman’s Caravaggio derives its power from a close reading of the repudiative
and homoerotic frames with which Jarman could so closely identify. An openly
gay man and auteur director whose films received critical acclaim but limited
commercial success, Jarman stopped short, in life and in art, of the redemptive
frame by which we know both Caravaggio and Jarman today. By the time the film
had finished shooting, Jarman felt that he had become Caravaggio (1986).
Predictably, Jarman’s film and notes take pains to excoriate the hypocrisy of the
Church, as well as the consumerism of Thatcher-era England. He finds bitter
irony in the fact that Channel Four, which failed to fund Caravaggio, aired a
commercial for Hitachi television sets during its showing of an earlier Jarman
film, Jubilee. The commercial used Caravaggio’s painting The Calling of Saint
Matthew as its plot, but replaced Christ with Hitachi’s latest television.
In sum, the distinguishing characteristic of the appropriation portal is artistic
intent. It is clear from the way Ondaatje and Jarman re-present Caravaggio that
both have immersed themselves in the interpretive frames surrounding him, yet
neither is inclined to reduce their take on him to an image, a sound byte, or a
caricature to in order to satisfy commercial demands. Such an affinity for com-
plexity guarantees a limited audience. While The English Patient and Caravaggio
are of course available for consumption by anyone who wishes to read a book or
watch a film, neither could be called light entertainment. And marketers treated
them as such. They were both promoted and distributed to small audiences rela-
tive to other genres in their media, and it was not until The English Patient became
an Oscar-winning movie that it became a (relatively) mainstream hit.

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Portal 2: commercialization
The commercialization portal displays a more superficial understanding of
Caravaggio’s life and works, with as much of an eye towards commerce as toward
artistic integrity. The use of Caravaggio makes sense not so much for artistic
affinity as for marketing strategy, a chance to piggyback sales by co-branding with
him. Into this category would fall the wine labels bearing his name, the Trussardi
shawl bearing his painting, and the 100,000-lire banknote bearing his likeness.
They represent the ‘Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt’ genre of brand
recognition, and in so doing, deliberately avoid a more profound understanding
of the artist. Margaret Truman’s Murder at the National Gallery is a literary
example, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) is a cinematic one.
Truman’s novel (1996), is itself part of a franchised brand. Each of her murder
mysteries takes place at a Washington, DC landmark: the CIA, the Kennedy
Center, the Watergate Apartments, the White House. The dust jacket of Murder
at the National Gallery assures readers that, as the daughter of Harry Truman (co-
branding of a sort), Margaret Truman has the ability to ‘let us into the corridors
of power and privilege, poverty and pageantry in the nation’s capital’ (1996).
Readers are immediately beckoned by the front cover, which features Caravaggio’s
horrific Medusa. Within, the plot revolves around the theft of Grotesca, a painting
by the Renaissance master Caravaggio. Caravaggio himself is recounted to readers
as a psychopath and serial killer, an insane artist who painted scenes of incest and
rape, in addition to murder.
Truman’s book has no pretensions to great art, so it should not be judged by
those standards. However, the ways in which it selects and distorts elements of
Caravaggio’s life and work are telling: the artist murdered one man, but was not a
serial killer; he painted biblical scenes of martyrdom and murder, but not rape or
incest; it is highly unlikely that any of his paintings would bear the fanciful title
Grotesca (in fact, there are no Caravaggio paintings in Washington, DC). But
Truman artfully takes whatever details well-educated readers may have heard,
seen, or remembered about Caravaggio, heightens and sensationalizes them, then
weaves them into a formulaic murder mystery that becomes a bestseller. (As
part of a more accessible promotional message, Caravaggio is reclassified as a
Renaissance, not a Baroque, painter.) This is the stuff of mainstream fiction.
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is another commercialization artifact,
but ironically so: not only does Caravaggio’s aesthetic vision, reviled by the
Catholic church 400 years ago, get recontextualized by one of contemporary
culture’s most conservative Catholics, but several Caravaggio frames get co-opted
and distorted by the director as part of the film’s marketing effort.
That Caravaggio was used as an inspiration for the ‘look’ of The Passion is evi-
dent from numerous press releases and interviews surrounding the film. Principal
cinematographer Caleb Deschabel admits what an influence Caravaggio had
on the lighting and composition of the film (Bailey, 2004). In Gibson’s hands,
however, the use of Caravaggio becomes an engaging narrative with a punch line,
particularly in the context of a promotional interview for the film (McClure, 2003):

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I think his work is beautiful. It’s violent, it’s dark, it’s spiritual, and it also has an odd whimsy
or strangeness to it. And it’s so real-looking. I told Caleb I wanted my movie to look like that,
and he said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ Just like that . . . Gibson was surprised when he saw the dailies. ‘I said,
‘Oh my God, it’s a moving Caravaggio!’ and Caleb went, ‘Well, that’s what you asked for, isn’t
it?’ (McClure, 2003)

Gibson’s snappy, good-natured account of Caravaggio turns the painter into a

‘wild man’ – Gibson later confesses in the interview that he himself was ‘a pretty
wild young man’ – and, for someone who spent two weeks poring over books
about the artist, makes no reference to the Repudiative, Homoerotic or
Redemptive frames he would surely have encountered during his research. Gibson
may relate to Caravaggio, but not through the Repudiative or Homoerotic frames
Jarman did.
The commercialization portal differs from the appropriation portal in two
important ways: commercialization artifacts have lower symbolic capital than
appropriation artifacts because they require less cultural capital to apprehend
them; and the marketing activities surrounding commercialization artifacts –
particularly promotion and distribution – operate on considerably larger scales
than they do for appropriation artifacts.

Portal 3: commodification
The final sub-category of recontextualization involves neither artistic appropria-
tion nor mainstream commercialism, but the high-end commodification of a
Caravaggio ‘look’ that consumers can at once display and embody. As construed
by designers such as Gianni Versace, commodification amounts to the creation
and consumption of a system of objects by which the consumer can define
him/herself at a profoundly superficial level. Here, one doesn’t buy the t-shirt; one
lives the lifestyle.
Commodification takes its cue from postmodern theorists such as Frederic
Jameson (1984) and Jean Baudrillard (1983, 1996). Jameson uses Plato’s concept
of the simulacrum – the identical copy for which no original has ever existed – to
describe the ‘pseudo events’ of our time, which amount to nothing more than a
‘consumer’s appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself’ (1984:
66). Baudrillard (1983) posits that we live in a world in which signs are no longer
required to have any traceable reference to the world they purportedly represent.
His ‘Precession of Simulacra’ develops a four-stage theory of pure simulation. In
the first stage, the sign ‘is the reflection of a basic reality’; in the second stage, the
sign ‘masks and perverts a basic reality’; in the third stage, the sign ‘masks the
absence of a basic reality’; and in the fourth stage, the sign ‘bears no relation to any
reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ (1983: 10). The resultant ‘hyper-
reality’ of contemporary culture is a regime of simulation, producing an incessant
flow of images without referents. Disney World ethnographer Stephen Fjellman
illustrates the point in this way:

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A day spent looking at the fake oysters attached to the torii at the Japanese showcase, counting
the vinyl leaves at the Swiss Family Island Treehouse, talking to people at Pleasure Island’s
adventurer’s Club who turn out to be Disney characters, and wondering whether the bird
sounds throughout are real or Memorex brings a ‘strange compensatory decorative exhilara-
tion’ indeed. (1992: 401)

While the Disney Empire, the city of Las Vegas, and the Biosphere Project are
favorite targets of postmodern analysis, the constellation of clothing and design
objects created by the late fashion designer Gianni Versace should be another. In
collaborations with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Bruce Weber,
rock stars such as Elton John and Jon Bon Jovi, models such as Kate Moss and
Claudia Schiffer, and actors such as Rene Russo and Sylvester Stallone, Versace
created a world in which fashion, art, image, and performance collide in a surreal
flow of commodification. In one series of photographs, models swathed in
Versace’s latest fashion designs of rich-velvety jewel tones swoon back on each
other in luxurious ecstasy. In another, Sylvester Stallone and Claudia Schiffer
stand side by side in a send-up of Adam and Eve, naked except for strategically-
placed pieces of Versace china. And in another, Jon Bon Jovi, a Superman tattoo
emblazoned on his shoulder, stares defiantly at the camera with only a Versace-
designed pair of briefs held tight against his loins. This pastiche of images and
artifacts is at once shocking, disorienting, and impossible to ignore (Versace and
Avedon, 1998). And although the images seem nonsensical, they were inspired by
a complex of influences, one of which, most probably, was the art and life of
Caravaggio.
Admittedly, such a referent cannot be proved conclusively – that’s the point of
the hyperreality in which today’s consumers live. But the connection can be
argued strongly, on the basis of both the images used and the lifestyle embraced
by Versace.
For example, all three of the photographic sequences mentioned above bear
the markings of Caravaggio paintings and imagery. The swooning models are
reminiscent of The Ecstasy of Saint Francis, in which the monk, blissfully receiving
the stigmata, swoons back into the arms of an angel. Jon Bon Jovi’s pose recalls
Caravaggio’s torso in The Flagellation of Christ, with Versace trading humility and
humiliation for super-human invulnerability and self-absorption. Actor Sylvester
Stallone and model Claudia Schiffer are made decent by pieces of china featuring
a modified version of Caravaggio’s Head of Medusa, originally painted on a
wooden shield. (Versace calls the image La Meduse, and it becomes, like Izod’s
alligator and Lauren’s polo pony, his logo). The recurring theme is nudity – and
its suggested sexuality, however shocking or ambiguous it may be – accompanied
by a single Versace accessory.
Beyond these imagistic resonances, the link is also compelling for Versace’s
own experience and lifestyle. Having moved to Milan at the age of 25 to work as
a fashion designer, Versace would have had the opportunity – and the occasion –
to visit museums in Milan containing, among other Caravaggio paintings, Basket
of Fruit. He also traveled frequently to Rome (Orth, 1999) where a great con-
centration of Caravaggio’s paintings reside. The intertextuality of art museum,

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fashion runway and opera stage would have allowed and encouraged Versace to
act as an expert translator between these venues.
Like Jarman, Versace was also gay. The Homoerotic frame of Caravaggio’s early
works would not have been lost on him. In fact, it seems to have inspired him,
judging from his 1995 Home Signature catalogue. There, the ambiance of the
photo shoot suggests a faded Italian villa, replete with chipped marble bathrooms,
tarnished candelabras, and cracked mirrors. Featured in these decadent sets are a
series of attractive young men, well-built, clean-shaven and wearing only the rich
swags of Versace-designed material slung low about their hips. Heads tilted,
mouths half-open, they beckon the viewer into their love-among-the-ruins world
in the same way Caravaggio’s boys did 400 years earlier, or the way Jarman’s
Caravaggio had done only nine years before. The reference was noted by art
historian Randall Rhodes, who observed that:
the model, framed by luxurious fabrics and folds, struts a physique which attracts the specta-
tor’s gaze and functions as the transfer point between the commodity and utopian mindscapes.
(1996: 5)
Even Versace’s murder at the hands of gay serial killer Andrew Cunanan two years
later (Orth, 1999) echoed the violence suggested by Jarman’s hustler scenes.
The commodification portal displays a world in which image is all, and the
search for meaning futile and endless. The backlash to designers such as Versace
are based on this position. Baudrillard writes in his final passage to System of
Objects,
In their ideality, sign-objects are all equivalent and may multiply infinitely; indeed, they must
multiply in order at every moment to make up for a reality that is absent. Consumption is
irrepressible, in the last reckoning, because it is founded upon a lack. (1996: 205)

Stage 5: consumption

In the fifth and final stage of Consumption, individuals exchange currency for
some form of the Caravaggio experience, be it a film about him, a book fictional-
izing him, or a look inspired by him. This exchange transcends the classroom
answer, ‘target marketing’, for the process of consuming Caravaggio is both
simpler and more complicated than that. Caravaggio has inspired more than one
system of objects; so why do different consumers choose different Caravaggio
systems to consume?
Althusser (1977) might respond that different consumers are hailed by differ-
ent Caravaggio experiences, and that they answer the particular salutation that
calls to them the most pointedly. For Althusser, hailing amounts to calling some-
one’s name – ‘Hey YOU!’ – in a symbolic way. A consumer answers that call
because she recognizes that call as being for her. This requires that she always-
already constitutes herself as a subject of that call. Wife, Episcopalian, teacher,
tennis player – competing ideologies interpellate us (Althusser, 1977), or ask us to
locate ourselves within a particular ideology. We consent to answer one call,

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having constructed ourselves as free-willed subjects who could ignore that call if
we wish (even though, given the power of ideologies, we probably couldn’t).
Having submitted to that call, we then ‘willingly’ submit to a set of material
practices, or rituals, required by that ideology.
For example, a reader of the Condé Nast publication Vanity Fair will, each
month, be interpellated or hailed by a number of upscale designers whose
fashions are loudly splashed across its pages. Ralph Lauren, Prada, Versace – each
designer calls out to her in a very different voice. But which one does she answer?
It depends on what kind of subject she recognizes herself as. If the subject is
‘English Aristocrat’, she answers Lauren’s hailing; if it’s ‘PoMo Misfit’, she answers
Prada’s; and if it’s ‘Outrageous Model/Rock Star’, she answers Versace’s. And
having done so, she submits to the ritualistic consumption demanded by him. In
photo after photo of naked bodies adorned by a single Versace accessory, the
subject communes with its material practice in the most intimate – and at the
same time, literally superficial – way. The ideology gets inscribed on the body.
When applied to Caravaggio, the consumer may heed any number of inter-
pellations that bear the direct or indirect influence of the painter, his life, and the
interpretive frames that flow from them. To be hailed by Derek Jarman is very
different from being hailed by Mel Gibson. Each calls for a different subject; each
requires a different set of material practices. But in either case, some vestige
of Caravaggio is consumed by the subject. The number of material practices
occasioning the consumption of Caravaggio within western culture may be one
measure of his influence upon it. If that is the case, Caravaggio has been very
influential indeed.

Model observations

If individuals wish to consume Caravaggio in contemporary culture, they have

numerous opportunities to do so. The five-stage model illustrated in Figure 1
explains how this has occurred by tracing the migration of Caravaggio’s art from
studio to museum to market. Analytically induced by a single-case exemplar, the
model also fits other established artists of the western canon such as Da Vinci,
Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso. As such, it may explain a few cases rather well. It
may also help explain how artists associated with a single painting, such as James
Whistler or Edvard Munch, may have a more limited cultural impact due to more
limited consumption opportunities. But the model may be less effective in
explaining how more recent artists, such as Warhol or Lichtenstein, migrated
from studio to marketplace, as their works were self-consciously, ironically,
always-already in the marketplace.
One can also apply the model to other art forms, such as dance, theatre, or
music. For example, The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, and the Messiah inscribe
three sets of consumption practices across three art forms performed during a
particular time of the year. They too have moved from the dance stage, the library,
and the concert hall to toys, toy houses, and sound bytes; yet in their original con-

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texts, they continue to attract audiences and revenues. This model can also explain
such phenomena by going back to the Creation stage of each event, then tracing
the migration of each event through to contemporary consumption arenas. The
model can even explain the migration of images, products and logos that began in
overtly commercial spheres, such as the Nike ‘swoosh’, a Luis Vuitton handbag, or
a cup of Starbuck’s coffee.
If, as Schroeder (2002) submits, the image is the real currency of contemporary
culture, then the images created by Caravaggio – sacred yet profane, intimate yet
brazen, realistic yet contrived – will continue to inspire quotation, interpretation,
recontextualization, and consumption for years to come. As Roberto Longhi
recalled of his 1951 exhibit:
When the show opened, you could see reactions flaring up again, just as they did in the days of
the painter. Immediately among the viewers, there were contemplative reflections in one
place, epiphanies in another, and arguments in still another. These reactions offer the most
convincing sign that a painter is still alive. (1968: 37)

Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Susan Aronstein, John Haggart, Dan Jacobs, Peter Parolin,
and anonymous reviewers for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this
article.

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Kent Drummond is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management and

Marketing at the University of Wyoming. His research focuses on arts marketing,
symbolic capital, and cultural consumption. He has published widely on the cultural
industries – including theater, publishing, film and art – and their connections to con-
sumer culture. He received his BA from Stanford University; MBA from Northwestern
University; and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. Address: The University of
Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071, USA. [email: drummond@uwyo.edu]

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