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Caravaggio, fugitive genius

When Caravaggio died in 1610 aged 38 he was the most famous painter in Italy, and for many years afterwards he continued to be the most influential. His reputation slumped in subsequent centuries but his stock has steadily risen in recent decades. His works are now widely regarded as the most immediately compelling and dramatic in the whole history of Italian art.

With unflinching realism, stark contrasts of light and shade and intense emotional power, his art burst upon the tired, febrile artistic scene of fin-de-siècle Italy like a Damascene conversion. His pictures were radical, innovatory, even shocking; his personality was arrogant, tempestuous and violent. Accused of murder, he fled Rome and sought exile successively in Naples, Malta and Sicily, time and again obliged to move on by further conflict.

Nevertheless, in his own lifetime connoisseurs clamoured for works. His patrons and protectors were among the richest and most powerful of cardinals, bankers and aristocrats. Though paintings by him are now to be found in museums around the world, many remain in the cities where he produced them and some are still in the original architectural context of the chapels for which they were made.

This voyage visits all the principal places in which Caravaggio worked, retraces his journeys and enables unhurried viewing of many of his finest paintings. The focus on a single artist provides a thematic stringency which is unprecedented for a cruise of this kind, but it also provides a springboard to enhance the understanding and appreciation of the glories of seventeenth and eighteenth-century art and architecture in southern Italy.

This was a period when Italy still led the world in artistic endeavour. Passion and triumph; remorse and magnificence; striving for originality while maintaining deference towards the heritage of the Renaissance and of Ancient Rome: these are some of the characteristics of Baroque art and architecture which are among the most uplifting and emotionally potent of the European tradition.

Temples of ‘Greater Greece’

In the Aegean heartlands of ancient Greece there was an abundance of energy and enterprise but a superabundance of people and an acute shortage of cultivatable land. The solution was to send seaborne parties of young men across the Mediterranean in search of sites where they could settle and found colonies.

The colonies in southern Italy and Sicily were particularly successful – despite frequent strife with natives, Carthaginians, Romans and other Greeks – and rapidly outgrew their mother cities in prosperity and architectural magnificence. The Greeks themselves coined the phrase which is better known in its Latin form, Magna Graecia, ‘Greater Greece’.

The most evocative evidence for this phenomenon lies in the splendid crop of Doric temples, more numerous and on the whole larger and much better preserved than their counterparts in Greece proper. Looked at dispassionately, the Doric temple is an odd invention: extreme subordination of function to form, misuse of stone as a building material, ornamentation with bits and bobs of no evident meaning, design sophistications too refined to see. Odder still, the form continued as a living tradition for nearly 500 years with no significant change, and this among people who were the most original thinkers in the history of humankind.

But being dispassionate is not an option. The peripteral, pedimented form is deeply embedded in our psyche and is unquestionably of consummate beauty. Despite extraordinary similarities, in fact no two temples are alike, and informed examination of the best examples provides an aesthetic feast of the highest order.

Of course, there was more to Greek civilization than temple buildings. This cruise also explores other aspects of the Classical world, with due attention to Roman civilization, particularly in Rome and Naples.

A study of volcanoes

Talk about eruptions will not be confined to artistic temperament. The Caravaggio route happens to coincide with the only belt of volcanic activity in Europe, and there will be a number of optional excursions with the resident vulcanologist.

An outcome of the collision between the African and European plates, a volcanic belt cuts through Sicily and southern Italy. Vesuvius, whose eruption in ad 79 famously destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, is the only currently active volcano on the European mainland, and though modest in size, has been studied more than most, largely due to the hazard it poses to Naples.

Strómboli, which pokes out of the sea north of Sicily, is the most continuously active and throws up showers of sparks many times a day. At 3,300 metres Mount Etna is one of the world’s largest. Eruptions have been increasing in number and intensity in the last few years. We also pass close to the cone of Vulcano (Lipari), the volcano that gave its name to the science.

Private concerts

A very special feature of this cruise are the three private concerts, all in magnificent and highly appropriate settings, all with some of the very best specialist musicians in Europe.

DAY 1, ROME. There is a short evening concert of Baroque music in the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, one of the grandest private palaces in the city. Subject to confirmation, we have engaged an outstanding Italian chamber ensemble specialising in this repertoire.

DAY 3, NAPLES. The Tallis Scholars, under the direction of their founder Peter Phillips, is one of the world’s leading specialists in a capella polyphony. They perform works by the Neapolitan aristocrat Gesualdo, appropriate because Gesualdo was an exact contemporary of Caravaggio and was also obliged to leave his home city because of a murder charge. Equally apposite is the location, the chapel of Pio Monte della Misericordia, because above the high altar hangs Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy, one of his greatest paintings.

DAY 11, VALLETTA. The Manoel Theatre, dating to 1731, is one of the earliest surviving and fully functioning theatres in Europe. In this delightful setting there will be a full-length concert of music contemporary with the theatre by composers including Locatelli, Tartini and Vivaldi. The period instrument ensemble La Serenissima, directed by the violinist Adrian Chandler and specialising in Vivaldi, provides performances of memorable vivacity.