Camera Illuminata — an evening of five new solos and duets, inspired by paintings of Caravaggio, Currin, Degas, Flandrin, and Schiele.

The show derives its name from camera obscura ("dark chamber"), a device used by painters to view a scene projected as an image inside of a dark box.

In Camera Illuminata, the inverse is achieved, as two-dimensional paintings inspire dances, cast into the lit space of a white box theater.

Where: Joyce SoHo (155 Mercer Street - New York City)
When: December 3-5, 2004 at 8 p.m.
Contact info for tickets: (212) 334-7479

Learn before you go: read a new interview with artistic director, Dušan Týnek.

Related stories: Caravaggio: The Man. The Myth. The Soap Opera.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (b.1571 - d.1610) led a life even more theatrical than his paintings. Orphaned at age 11, he was apprenticed to a painter the same year. Having learned what he could about the craft of painting, he wandered over to Rome in the early 1590s and starved for the next few years. He finally he found a broker for his canvases in 1595; through this connection, he was introduced to Cardinal Francesco del Monte.

Del Monte invited Caravaggio to receive board and lodgings in the house of the cardinal. Despite grinding poverty, Caravaggio had already painted up to 40 canvases before finding a patron; the paintings done in his early years later became some of his best-known works, including "Boy with a Fruit Basket" (1593) and "The Young Bacchus" (1593).

Having settled in for a bit without, one assumes, much additional trauma, Caravaggio obtained the commission for the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, in 1597.

At age 24, he'd established himself as a painter of renown, and was off on a hot streak. Away he went, between 1598-1601, off on plans for three huge canvases depicting scenes from saint's lives: "St. Matthew and the Angel," "The Calling of St. Matthew," and, the bummer, "The Martyrdom of St. Matthew."

And then...

The canvas which was commissioned to hang over the altar, "St. Matthew and the Angel," shocked the canons of the church; Caravaggio had painted St. Matthew as a common laborer, in a rough tunic. Then there was the angel. Rather than dangling about graciously mid-air plucking a harp, the angel was actively — arguing, almost, with the saint, shoving his hand over the page of a book, as if impatient with a man unschooled and illiterate.

Well, the papal court wasn't having any of that, and the painting had to be redone. The original canvas was later purchased by Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, made its way to Berlin in the mid 1940s, and was subsequently destroyed.