Florida’s St. Pete Goes All Caravaggio

Boy Bitten by a Lizard and other Baroque treasures shine at St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts.

L ast month I did a coast-to-coast swing in Florida from Palm Beach to Sarasota and St. Petersburg. I’d never covered the arts in the state, though I’ve watched its arts scene evolve from rudimentary — early on, a project mostly for elderly, rich retirees from the Midwest — to refined and distinctive. I didn’t get to Miami, with high culture springing from a unique, polyglot population, but I found ample treasures in Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, and on the Gulf Coast. In between? The highway from West Palm Beach to Sarasota is long and straight, very flat, with cattle ranches and roadkill aplenty but not much else.

Today’s story focuses on the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg (MFA), a stately museum in a choice location on the downtown’s waterfront. I’d never been there. It bears repeating that among my NR missions is to cover art in all 50 states, a first for an American art critic. With my Florida pieces, I’m at 31. I hope to hit Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland, Ore., next year, three cities with very good art museums but otherwise in extremis. Call it my Art for the Distressed and Disturbed Tour. More crazies per capita than Bedlam.

At St. Petersburg’s MFA, I was very curious to see In Caravaggio’s Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi, highlighting the Florence-based collection of Italy’s great art critic, connoisseur, curator, and collector. Longhi (1890–1970) fathered the study of the radical and renegade Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) and the Caravaggisti, the artist’s acolytes, especially those in the Netherlands, France, and Spain. Until Longhi, Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro — passages of both intense spotlighting and smoky darks — and his choice of raw, working-class models were known to Italians but never put in context. Caravaggio himself was mysterious and also notorious. Longhi once described him as “the night porter of the Renaissance” and “the sunrise of modern art.” The religiosity of his work is intense and didactic, but his figures, drawn from Rome’s alleys, give Catholicism its original, Everyman look.

In Caravaggio’s Light delivers around 35 paintings otherwise displayed in Longhi’s villa and not, as a rule, for the public to see. Like the Leiden collection now showing at the Norton in West Palm Beach, St. Pete got itself quite a coup. I couldn’t wait to see it and the museum. Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard, from around 1595, is the marquee painting, but with good things by Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1566) and Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), two favorites, it’s a destination event. We’ve already had nearly a foot of snow in ye olde Arlington in Vermont, the polar vortex, and our annual Christmas tractor pageant. Memories of St. Petersburg, which claims to be the sunniest place in the Sunshine State, and so much Roman and Neapolitan art warm my icebox of a heart and cold hands and feet.

We don’t know what inspired Boy Bitten by a Lizard. In the court of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Caravaggio’s patron in the late 1590s, the lizard might have symbolized resilience and rebirth — they shed their skins — but Monte was probably gay, as was Caravaggio. I suspect the picture’s theme was disconnected from Christian doctrine, to put it decorously. It’s a hammy picture, for starters. There’s no accounting for titles, and the boy is past his Little League days. He’s effeminate, and look at that hairdo! Lizards, salamanders, and newts would have symbolized fire, and he’s playing with fire in poking around a sampling of fruit and paying the price in convulsed hands and shoulder and, I assume, a loud shriek in the triple-digit-hertz range. The fruit is cherries, figs, and grapes. The flowers in the surreal, somber vase are sweet-smelling jasmine and a pink rose. He’s got a pink rose behind his ear. I assume he’d adore Judy Garland. It’s a decadent picture, but, in the late 1590s, Caravaggio painted lots of young men courting trouble.

Caravaggio had already painted still lifes of fruit and flowers, but still life, as genres went, was well done by the hierarchy. His invention here is the amalgam of still life, portraiture, vanitas, morality play, and inside joke. Does it quote the Bible? Leviticus lumps lizards with cloven animals — unclean — and in Proverbs lizards live in palaces and are tiny but powerful, slithering in spaces too small and secret for we humans. Not that Caravaggio’s manboy is a strapping hunk, but he’s young and full of himself and ambushed by a cold-blooded, ugly little thing with sharp teeth. Not felled but shocked and shattered. He might be late to whatever was Rome’s Studio 54, but he’ll get there. Is the picture about rebuking hubris? Is it just very gay? Betty Grable sported her famous gams, but here we get a shot of naked shoulder and a pretty face. We also get a timeless ephebe.

Is it a Caravaggio self-portrait? Possibly, but more likely the model is Mario Minniti (1577–1640), an artist who was, in the late 1590s, a frequent Caravaggio model, with dark curls, come-hither chestnut eyes, and lush, bee-stung lips. A replica of Boy Bitten by a Lizard — close to a duplicate, since it’s painted by Caravaggio — is at the National Gallery in London. The Longhi Caravaggio has been in the U.S. before, but not for a while.

Caravaggio has many calling cards, but among them is “painter of violent death.” Roman Mannerism, the movement he displaced, wasn’t against martyrdoms, but they tended to be la-di-da and powered by sprezzatura, an effortless grace and nonchalance even as the soon-to-be-saint was getting his eyes gouged out. Caravaggio’s martyrs tended to feel the pain. Boy Bitten by a Lizard is his early stab, so to speak, at horror. It could have been worse, I thought, being in Florida. It could have been an alligator. That would have ruffled his hair.

Lorenzo Lotto’s four panels of saints from 1540 are worth seeing, since Lotto’s figures have a flesh-and-blood look and are honest likenesses. He inspired Caravaggio, we’re told, but this is a circuitous proposition. What’s on view in the show is what Longhi collected, and he didn’t own work by Tanzio da Varallo, Boltraffio, or Arcimboldo — early, intense realists who are all either from Lombardy, where Caravaggio grew up, or nearby. Lotto worked in Venice, the Marche region in central Italy, and Rome, and 1540 and the 1590s are far from each other. No matter. Lotto’s San Pietro Martire (Friar Angelo Ferretti as Saint Peter Martyr) and Santo Domenicano (Saint Dominic) are, given their era of peak Mannerism, to-the-point and rigorous.

Ribera is Spanish but made his career first in Parma around 1611 and, before long, in Naples, where Caravaggio spent two stints. In 1607, Caravaggio painted The Seven Acts of Mercy for the Pio Monte Della Misericordia church in Naples. Later, he painted The Flagellation of Christ, frank and pathetic, and, in 1610, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, his last painting and done when he was a fugitive from a Rome murder rap. Ursula was among the 11,000 holy virgins martyred by Huns in the deep, dark past, though her story is more dramatic since the Hun king, smitten, asked her to marry him first. She declined, and he promptly shot her through with arrows. All three are high Caravaggio, dramatic, spooky, and surreal.

We don’t know where Ribera first saw Caravaggio’s work, possibly in Naples, possibly in Rome. But around 1613 he did a series of spartan, tenebrous, imaginary Apostle portraits, five of which landed in Longhi’s collection. In taut drama, they best Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Ribera’s Saint Thomas is in profile, carnal but hieratic. In Saint Bartholomew, from about 1630, the Apostle who’s skinned alive holds the knife, defiant yet otherworldly. Is he already dead? They’re forthrightly, even bluntly, presented in the show, which sets off their dramatic economy.

There’s Carlo Saraceni’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, from the 1610s, too, and every good Baroque show needs a severed head. A better prototype for film noir is hard to find. And Matthias Stomer, possibly Stom, the very good Dutch, possibly Flemish, Caravaggisti gets his place in the sun. The Annunciation of Samson’s Birth, from the early 1630s, and The Healing of Tobit, from 1640, are also in the show, both luscious and golden. Stomer spent most of his career in Rome and isn’t well known in America at all.

In Caravaggio’s Light isn’t the most original thing in the world. The Longhi foundation is a generous lender. Still, Caravaggios in America are few and far between. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, the only Caravaggio is at the Kimbell in Fort Worth. About a dozen are in the U.S. Many are in Rome, in the churches for which they were painted. St. Petersburg’s MFA has one for a few months and presents it and the other Caravaggisti con brio. The wall color and suggestively Baroque wallpaper are deep blue. An ample, pulled-back curtain at the entrance adds to the drama. The show will travel to the Mint Museum this spring. Alas, there’s no catalogue.

The MFA has a nice, Neoclassical building in a prime location on the bay in a destination city with 275,000 people and a metro-area population of more than 2 million, but the museum is an uneven work in progress. The collection isn’t online — at this point in the digital age, that’s incompetence — and the website is primitive, I’d say 20 years out of date. A website is an essential marketing tool, and it’s a cheap way — no printed books required — to detail what the museum owns, who supports it, its finances, and its history. The MFA’s PR game needs to be upped, but, to be fair, the museum probably isn’t accustomed to inquisitive, in-depth art critics. For the museum’s PR office, I’d suggest that no response is never a good response to routine questions.

The MFA doesn’t do annual reports anymore, but that might be a function of its difficult and recent transition in leadership. It experienced a tempest in a teapot two years ago when a Greek antiquities show it organized and planned to send to the Denver Art Museum collapsed after Denver suggested that the show possibly included works in the U.S. illegally, having been looted from their source countries. The poor antiquities curator at the MFA was canned. The director soon followed him on the unemployment line. I’m so finished with antiquities restitutions to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, and, of all places, Iran. We Americans have given back so many great objects, and they end up in storage.

The new director is Klaudio Rodriguez, who started late last year. He’s from Florida, but he spent a few years as director of the Bronx Museum. In the MFA’s press release announcing his selection, it touted his commitment to artists who are POC, People of Color, which isn’t a bad idea in itself, but POP, People of Pallor, aren’t to be barred when it comes to new acquisitions. A better idea is a focus, not an exclusive one, on artists from the Tampa Bay area regardless of skin chromatics.

The MFA has a small — not tiny — endowment and raises most of its operating money through admission fees, annual giving, and income from the gift shop and from renting the place. This will change over the years as Florida grows richer and refugees from the tired, high-tax Northeast and Rust Belt see it as home, a sweet low-tax, well-run home.

From its opening in 1965, the museum’s ambition was to be encyclopedic, a miniature Met or Art Institute of Chicago. It’s the only art museum in Florida with a mission of this scope, and it touts itself as covering 5,000 years of human history. In 2019, the museum bought Kehinde Wiley’s Leviathan Zodiac (The World Stage: Israel), from 2011. It’s not bad. Wiley is overrated, but this one shows a young Israeli man dressed in contemporary casual clothes and posing as a Roman emperor. The museum also has a very rare Hellenistic bronze head of Dionysus; a gaudy, big Georgia O’Keeffe flower picture from 1927; Mesoamerican jade; Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s 1799 showstopping portrait of her daughter as the goddess Flora; a very beautiful Monet Thames scene from 1904; And a lovely Monet snow scene from 1879, as if locals, most from up North, care to be reminded about what they’re missing. The museum just redid its antiquities galleries. George Inness’s winter home was near St. Petersburg. His 1893 Florida moonrise picture is lovely.

I’d call the collection good and conservative. The museum was founded by Margaret Acheson Stuart, a rich transplant whose father was among Thomas Edison’s partners in the invention of the lightbulb. The local Junior League helped mightily. I’m not surprised that the core collection shows the sensibility of smart, well-educated women. For many museums in the South especially, Junior League involvement and passion were pivotal.

The concept of an encyclopedic museum seems very rooted in the old cities in the Northeast and Midwest where fabulous wealth and collections came early. It seems Victorian now, populist in a way, since there’s something for every taste, but a burden for new institutions. I’m not sure that Sun Belt people care about that kind of depth and breadth. The weather’s too nice.