Caravaggio Reflections and Refractions

As this collection of essays makes clear, the paths to grasping the complexity of Caravaggio’s art are multiple and variable. Art historians from the UK and North America offer new or recently updated interpretations of the works of seventeenth-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and of his many followers known as the Caravaggisti. The volume deals with all the major aspects of Caravaggio’s paintings: technique, creative process, religious context, innovations in pictorial genre and narrative, market strategies, biography, patronage, reception, and new hermeneutical trends. The concluding section tackles the essential question of Caravaggio’s legacy and the production of his followers-not only in terms of style but from some highly innovative strategies: concettismo; art marketing and the price of pictures; self-fashioning and biography; and the concept of emulation.

Contents: Introduction: the Caravaggio conundrum, Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone; Caravaggio betrayals: the lost painter and the ’great swindle’, David M. Stone; Caravaggio’s painting technique: a brief survey based on paintings in the National Gallery, London, Larry Keith; Caravaggio’s Portrait of Maffeo Barberini in the Palazzo Corsini, Florence, Keith Christiansen; Touching is believing: Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas in counter-reformatory Rome, Erin E. Benay; Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, Giulio Mancini, and the Madonna Blasphemed, Frances Gage; Talking pictures: sound in Caravaggio’s art, Catherine Puglisi; Caravaggio’s angels, Steven F. Ostrow; Caravaggio and the ’truth in pointing’, Jonathan Unglaub; Caravaggio the barbarian, Philip Sohm; The bottom line of painting Caravaggesque, Richard E. Spear; Galileo Galilei and Artemesia Gentileschi: between the history of ideas and microhistory, Elizabeth Cropper; Perfectly true, perfectly false: cardsharps and fortune-tellers by Caravaggio and La Tour, Gail Feigenbaum; Rembrandt and Caravaggio: emulation without imitation, H. Perry Chapman; Interpreting Caravaggio in the second half of the twentieth century: between Galileo and Heidegger, Giordano Bruno and Laplanche, Lorenzo Pericolo; Bibliography; Index.

Lorenzo Pericolo is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Warwick, UK. David M. Stone is Professor and Director of the Curatorial Track PhD Program in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware, USA.