Remembering Caravaggio, The Lute Player Print

A reproduction of this painting, the Hermitage version, hung above my bed all my childhood. My mother wanted to awaken in me a taste for classical beauty and music. She succeeded only too well. Every time I went to sleep, I looked at that melancholic, tender face, at those pink lips slightly swollen as if in honey syrup, at those delicate fingers playing over the strings, and dreamed of becoming like this amazing beauty. I was happy to already have the black eyes and hair, by birth, but how to achieve that perfection - of that coquettish turn of the head, of that mysteriously smiling lips? I even started playing the guitar, without much success, - just to resemble her.... Her?... Did I say - her? Well, I had just turned thirteen when the picture fell off the nail. Its back then revealed to me the terrible truth: my idol and long-time role model was.... a guy. Ew... I will never ever be like him. And that was just the beginning of a series of disappointments that shattered what seemed to me at the time to be my only true image of the world. The perfectly clear and understandable world in which not only men and women, but also the art, art art-creators must be flawless. As to Caravaggio... He was a drunkard and a brawler, and a thief, and even, according to rumors, a mean murderer to boot. He even beat his gentle Italian mother on her deathbed, which is a real disgrace not only in Italian climes.... In short, I took the picture that had betrayed me to the trash, and started creating for myself other, more suitable ideals, turning to more decent classics. But the wild youthful maximalism, thank God, usually disappears with the years. And in its place grows the experience that the world, as well as its beauty, is pretty versatile, after all. Now I am even enjoying the humble recognition of the seemingly unjust fact that the masterpieces of world art are not always created by proper, orderly citizens, by law-abiding do-gooders...