My mornings are usually somewhat complicated affairs. The alarm clock goes off at an unearthly hour of can’t-even-mention-it-here, more often than not coming as a devastatingly unexpected surprise and therefore not very fondly greeted. Sometime later I’m to be found sitting at the kitchentable, staring at the pictures and words on the morning paper, reading the articles but not really grasping what is actually said in the text. Headlines and captions may penetrate the fog of my brain still waiting to wake up properly but any other arrangements of letters beyond those is just that, randomly arranged sets of letters and therefore mostly unintelligible to me. During the ensuing day, after I’ve reached proper mental functionality again, some of these things may trickle back to my mind, form into coherent sentences and start to make sense.

This is how daily news are processed in my private quarters of the head. I regularly have my moments of Eureka when some interesting piece of news comes filtering back to me in the afternoon, all vague and elusive because the details were too much to handle in those fragile early morning moments, and I can barely contain myself for the rest of the day until I get back home to read more carefully the article and quench my thirst for knowledge upon that particular matter. Often only to find out that The Loved One has already taken the newspaper out to trash on her way to work.

Naturally all this doesn’t apply to weekend mornings when I have plenty of time to spend with the newspaper and digest the information contained therein. And this doesn’t apply to the next item either, for it was so curious and interesting in the first place that I read it immediately with thought and care, snapping up one level unusually early towards daytime consciousness, and as a result was late for work. Which didn’t really matter since my work mostly involves only me, labouring away at my own pace. Here’s the item of interest.

Caravaggio was an Italian artist who lived, painted, romped around and generally made a difference briefly at the start of 17^th century. To the left we see his self portrait where he poses as Bacchus, looking utterly disturbing and disturbed. Antero Kahila, on the other hand, is a Finnish artist who has worked since 2003 on reconstructing a Caravaggio painting called “St Matthew and the Angel” and has now finished this gargantuan undertaking. The result is being displayed at Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki. The original painting was destroyed in a fire during the bombing of Berlin on 1945 and only black and white photographs of the painting remain to this day. But now it’s reconstructed, using those photographs and, to define the colours, other works by Caravaggio and the “consultation of the highly acclaimed international group of experts.”

Hip hooray. Now what on earth might drive a person to do such a thing? Especially a person whose original works clearly have a spirit of their own and show the artists’ talent and vision to be far removed from themes used by Caravaggio? Why would someone spend years in trying to create as accurate as possible a copy of something already done by someone else? And by someone so alien who comes from so different a background, presumably with values, opinions, instincts and lifestyle so different that were these two people put in the same room together they would hardly find anything in common between them. I bet Kahila doesn’t sleep his nights fully clothed with a sword on his side. And Caravaggio would probably have some very sharp things to say about (not to mention poke at) the impersonator, as he reportedly had in his late years been in the habit of going around mercilessly mocking other painters he felt were lacking in talent.

Talent should be used to express your own visions, not to replicate someone elses’. I’m drawing a far-fetched analogy here, but this somehow reminds me of the recent interview with a current Guns ‘n Roses drummer where he tells how he replicated exactly, note-to-note his predecessors’ drum parts for 30 songs in the studio, taking seven months to do so. The cost of two days in that studio equals the whole budget for the upcoming Sinisthra album. The absurdity of this goes way beyond the limits of my understanding.

On the positive side, this has resparked my interest on Caravaggio and I’ve now examined his works a bit more closely, something I’ve been meaning to do since I saw a documentary of him on TV some time ago. As a person he seems to have been the classically unbalanced not-fit-for-society type, of the kind most often responsible for most attractive artistic creations. This here Wikipedia link is a splendid starting point on everything related to this fascinating artist.Here’s a list of his known paintings. Check out the tremendous amount of emotion and expressiveness he’s crammed into his works. Some of them look like photographs, the use of contrast and painstaking detail is at times just stunning and most of them have characters with eyes that lock gazes with you and pour their hurt and misery upon you, ignoring the timegap of several centuries.

I’m too worked up now to babble about wines or music or anything else anymore so I’ll just stop writing and stare for a while how Holofernes gets his due below.