Black Paper Writing in a Dark Time

He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror, and a pest. But I don't go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are, and certainly not because of how good *he* was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. Here was an artist who depicted fruit in its ripeness and at the moment it had begun to rot, an artist who painted flesh at its most delicately seductive and its most grievously injured. When he showed suffering, he showed it so startlingly well because he was on both sides of it: he meted it out to others and received it in his own body. Caravaggio is long dead, as are his victims. What remains is his work, and I don't have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear, and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.