QUOTING CARAVAGGIO

Samuel Klein reflects on the controversial images of Israeli photographer Adi Nes

‘Sisyphus is the absurd hero...His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth...But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks...This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy’ – Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

In his most recent book, To Heal a Fractured World (London: Continuum, 2005), Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks notes that Jews have never coined a word that means ‘tragedy’ in the Greek sense. The founders of Hebrew revivalism had to resort to transliteration. Tragediah is apparently the closest word you will find in modern Hebrew.This simple fact, observes Rabbi Sacks, speaks volumes for the resilience of the Jewish people in denying the historical determinism of philosophers such as Hegel or Nietzsche.

Tragedy tells a story of human beings with their yearnings and ambitions, in a world-order governed by ananke – blind fate. Like the well-known and oft-quoted fable of Sisyphus, Greek mythology warns us, in Sacks’s words, that

our dreams are destined to crash against the rocks of a reality fundamentally different to our existence.They are hubris, and are always punished by nemesis.

This narrative of mortal hubris and divine nemesis was fundamental to an understanding of the National Gallery’s landmark exhibition Caravaggio: the Final Years this spring. In the paintings on display, the shifting planes of light and dark captured scenes of spiritual anagnorisis – those moments of perception and clarity that in Greek tragedy precipitate a reversal or sudden change of fortune in the lives of ordinary men and women. Unsurprisingly – given the subject matter of the exhibition – in most instances it signalled a turn for the worse.

Caravaggio was obviously not trying to impress a Jewish audience with his reading of the New Testament. Yet strangely and perhaps somewhat obsessively, as I walked out of the National Gallery exhibition one April afternoon,I felt that, at least in his representation of hope as an active virtue, Caravaggio’s portrayal of the (mostly Jewish) protagonists – St Andrew, St Peter St. John and Jesus – came very close to Rabbi Sacks’s description of transcendence:

Hope and tragedy do not differ about the facts, but about interpretation and expectation...Those who hope, strive. Those who are disillusioned, accept.

Adi Nes, ‘Untitled 1999’, from the Soldiers series