Middle Ages Out of Bounds

CARAVAGGIO IS a fictionalised biopic, made in 1986, about the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). Jarman's fifth feature, the work is notorious for its manipulations of time and history. Whether deployed as a visual device, or as an interpretive framework that serves to connect aspects of Caravaggio's paintings and biography, anachronism is deliberately cultivated in the film as a representational strategy. Rejecting the golden rule of mainstream art history – or indeed any kind of history – not to “project” our own realities onto the realities of the past, Caravaggio reinvents the biography of the eponymous painter as an imperfect mirror of Jarman's own. “Rome circa 1595 meets New York circa 1985” is how one representative of the museum world, Keith Christiansen, summed up Jarman's project. “As entertainment,” Christiansen scoffs, “I am sure it has its fans, but I cannot recommend it to anyone interested in an art-historical shortcut.” Here, conversely, I propose a revaluation of Jarman's filmmaking that serves to draw out its art-historical potential: the director's sense of images as temporally discordant objects throws into relief art history's customary refusal to attend to what one of the discipline's major dissenting voices, Georges Didi-Huberman, has called the “sovereignty of anachronism.”

Additionally, this chapter brings into sharper focus Jarman's investment in what he perceived as a characteristically “medieval” relationship to time and history. The anachronism that, the filmmaker suggested, typified Caravaggio's own approach to the classical and biblical subject matter of his paintings was rooted in the aesthetic codes of the Middle Ages. In an interview given shortly before Jarman began work on filming Caravaggio, he describes how painters in modernity increasingly strove to “reconstruct the past with the look of the past,” thereby developing a more “archaeological” approach to visualisation of the past. “This reaches a crescendo,” he adds, “in the 19th century with artists like the pre-Raphaelites who do biblical and medieval scenes.” Characterising this “archaeological field” as an attitude that has in turn shaped approaches to history in contemporary British cinema and period drama, the director subsequently aligns himself with what he calls the “other tradition,” whereby: