The Moment of Caravaggio 9780691252988

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
Lecture 1 Boy Bitten by a Lizard
Lecture 2 Immersion and Specularity
Lecture 3 The Invention of Absorption
Lecture 4 Skepticism, Shakespeare, Address, Density
Lecture 5 Severed Representations
Lecture 6 The Internal Structure of the Pictorial Act
Conclusion
Notes
Photography and Copyright Credits
Index

Citation preview

The Moment of

CARAVAGGIO

The Moment of

CARAVAGGIO Michael Fried

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Bollingen Series XXXV: 51

princeton university press princeton and oxford

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fried, Michael. The moment of Caravaggio / Michael Fried. p. cm. — (The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts) (Bollingen series ; XXXV, 51) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-14701-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 1573–1610. Boy bitten by a lizard. 2. Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 1573– 1610—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Composition (Art) 4. Painting, Italian—Italy— Rome—16th century. 5. Painting, Italian—Italy—Rome—17th century. I. Title. ND623.C26A633 2010 759.5—dc22 2010007715 This is the fi fty-fi rst volume of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The volumes of lectures constitute Number XXXV in Bollingen Series, sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation. Frontispiece: Caravaggio, Crowning with Thorns, ca. 1602–5? Oil on canvas, 127 × 166 cm., detail of man in armor and a plumed hat. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. 307 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon text with Adobe Jensen display Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu New paperback printing 2023 ISBN (paper) 978-0-691-14701-7 ISBN (ebook) 978-0-691-25298-8

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

have been delivered annually since 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, with the goal of bringing “the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” As publication was always an essential part of the vision for the Mellon Lectures, a relationship was established between the National Gallery and the Bollingen Foundation for a series of books based on the talks. The first book in the series was published in 1953, and since 1967 all lectures have been published by Princeton University Press as part of the Bollingen Series. Now, for the first time, all the books in the series are available in one or more formats, including paperback and e-book, making many volumes that have long been out of print accessible to future generations of readers. This edition is supported by a gift in memory of Charles Scribner, Jr., former trustee and president of Princeton University Press. The Press is grateful to the Scribner family for their formative and enduring support, and for their commitment to preserving the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for posterity. Images in this edition may have been altered in size and color from their appearance in the original print editions to make this book available in accessible formats.

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To Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, whose teaching, friendship, and unflagging support made this book possible,

and to the memory of my parents, Benjamin H. Fried and Jeanette Dubin Fried, who did everything in their power to feed and encourage my early love of painting

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1 Lecture 1

Boy Bitten by a Lizard

Lecture 2

Immersion and Specularity

Lecture 3

The Invention of Absorption

Lecture 4

Skepticism, Shakespeare, Address, Density

Lecture 5

Severed Representations

Lecture 6

The Internal Structure of the Pictorial Act

Conclusion 227 Notes 245 Photography and Copyright Credits 293 Index 295

7 39 69 99

141 195

Preface and Acknowledgments As the reader will soon discover, I have kept rhetorically to the lecture format throughout this book. I have also stuck fairly closely to the subject matter of each of the original Mellon Lectures, though I have felt free to introduce additional material and in general to expand on those initial texts in all sorts of ways. Lectures 4 and 5 in particular are much longer than they originally were. By far my largest intellectual debt is owed to my former Johns Hopkins colleagues Elizabeth Cropper, at present dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and Charles Dempsey. The greater part of what I know about Caravaggio and, more broadly, late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury painting comes directly from their teaching, writing, and conversation as well as from the numerous glorious occasions both in this country and abroad when we have looked at paintings together, often in the company of my wife, Ruth Leys. Their scholarly generosity to me over thirty years has been unstinting, and without their example, encouragement, and friendship I would never have dreamed of going public about Caravaggio. Any reader of this book who has the smallest familiarity with their writings will be in no doubt as to the seriousness of my engagement with their thought. I am grateful, too, to Keith Christiansen, whose knowledge of and feeling for Caravaggio’s art (also for that of the Carracci and the Caravaggisti) are profound and who time and again has responded almost instantaneously—and always helpfully—to my queries about particular works and issues. His own scholarship figures importantly in what follows. Ruth Leys gave me critical feedback on the original lectures and continued to do so as I worked them into this book. Others with whom I shared ideas and who contributed to my project in diverse ways are the late Daniel Arasse, Jennifer Ashton, Stephen Bann, Leonard Barkan, Stephen Campbell, Giovanni Careri, Stanley Cavell, Michael Cole, Allen Grossman, Michael Koortbojian, Peter Lukehart, Joseph Marioni, Walter Benn Michaels, Shilpa Prasad, Robert Pippin, and Ralph Ubl. No doubt there are others whom I should be mentioning. Also in the background to this book is a radiant intelligence, the late Louis Marin; I cherish the memory of the many times we stood side by side before one great

seventeenth-century painting or another. I wish, too, that I could hand a copy to my beloved teacher, the late Sydney J. Freedberg. Graduate students or former graduate students who assisted me with the notes include Elena Calvillo, Christopher Nygren, Eva Struhal, and Ittai Weinryb. Donald Juedes, librarian for the History of Art (and other departments) at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, indefatigably helped me get hold of bibliographic materials that I needed. At the National Gallery of Art I especially appreciated the encouragement of the late Philip Conisbee, Elizabeth Cropper, and Andrew Robison, among others. Faya Causey, Therese O’Malley, Earl Powell III, and Alan Shestack also deserve warm thanks. No lecturer has ever worked with a better or more genial slide technician than Jeannie Bernhards. I pretty much completed the final version of this book in the course of the academic year 2007–8, which I had the privilege to spend as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. As I had been assured by former Fellows would be the case, working conditions were ideal and the brilliant library staff under the leadership of Gisela Bottomley did everything possible to assist me in my research. I will add that one of the highlights of my year at WiKo was the opportunity to present a version of lecture 3, “The Invention of Absorption,” in honor of Willibald Sauerländer’s eighty-fourth birthday. The personal exchanges with Sauerländer that followed that evening are, for me, unforgettable. I cannot adequately thank Henry C. Millon, former dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, for inviting me to give the 2002 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts; to say that I never imagined that such an invitation might come my way is an understatement. I am grateful, too, to Salvatore Settis for graciously allowing me to quote from an unpublished draft of his 2001 Mellon Lectures on Giorgione and Caravaggio. A Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded my year in Berlin, as well as various journeys to look at paintings, and in other respects enabled me to complete this book under optimal conditions. Indeed, I feel as if the entire project has been under Mellon auspices from the very first. At Princeton University Press, I have worked closely with a superb editor, Hanne Winarsky. At the National Gallery of Art, Sara Sanders-Buell efficiently assembled the required images for illustrations. Some last remarks. The 2002 Mellon Lectures were the fifty-first in a distinguished series. I could not appreciate more the intellectual eminence of my predecessors and indeed my successors. But I am likely to remain unique among Mellon Lecturers in having had in constant attendance on six consecutive Sunday afternoons both my then ninety-two-year-old mother and my then eight-year-old daughter. I would like to imagine that their joint presence in my audience (Anna in the first row, as near to the lectern as she could sit) and all that it meant to me can be sensed throughout the pages of this book.

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preface and acknowledgments

The Moment of

CARAVAGGIO

Introduction Some of the ideas put forward in these lectures were first tried out in November 1993 in a lecture entitled “Thoughts on Caravaggio,” which I gave at a symposium in honor of the late Louis Marin at Johns Hopkins University and subsequently published in Critical Inquiry. I was excited by certain possibilities of developing those ideas I sensed at the time, and after completing my trilogy on major stages in the development of French painting between the mid-eighteenth century and the advent of Edouard Manet and his generation in the 1860s (Manet’s Modernism, the third book in the trilogy, came out in 1996), I began to think seriously about engaging in a more sustained way with Caravaggio’s art. This led to a great deal of focused looking and reading, much of it guided by my then Johns Hopkins colleagues Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, but with no clear end in view. Everything changed, however, when in the summer of 2000, to my utter surprise, I received an invitation from Henry C. Millon, at that time dean of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, to deliver the fifty-first A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art. Although I knew it would be a stretch, I decided early on to commit myself to Caravaggio as their subject. In this introduction I want to say just a little, the bare minimum, about the relation of these lectures to my previous books on French painting. In the first place, there is a somewhat complex relationship between a central theme in the first book in my “absorption” trilogy, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), namely the simultaneous theorization and emergence of the modern (but premodernist) easel painting and—a principal concern of these lectures—the coming into prominence of the autonomous and independent “gallery picture” in the Roman art world of the 1590s and early 1600s. Not that the two developments are equivalent. As I demonstrate in Absorption and Theatricality and elsewhere, the Diderotian easel painting (or tableau) seeks crucially to establish the supreme fiction or ontological illusion that the beholder does not exist, that there is no one standing before the canvas. It does this principally in two ways: through the persuasive representation of figures so deeply absorbed in

what they are doing, feeling, and thinking that they appear oblivious to anything else, specifically including the beholder’s presence before the canvas, and by means of an ideal of pictorial unity according to which all the elements in the painting are perceived as motivated by a single dramatic imperative (one might say: as absorbed in or by that imperative) so that the beholder instinctively feels that they cannot be other than as they are. In other words, with regard both to action and expression and to composition (itself conceived by Diderot as comprising considerations of action and expression), the tableau presents itself as concerned solely with its own internal necessities, and therefore as devoid of the least hint of theatricality—a key term for me, as readers of my previous books hardly need to be told. At the same time, equally crucially, the tableau’s thematic and compositional closure upon itself is understood as arresting the actual beholder before the work and, indeed, as transfixing him or her there with a new intensity. The tension between these linked imperatives—at once to deny and (thereby) to transfix the beholder—is in the end unresolvable, and in the second and third books of my trilogy, Courbet’s Realism (1990) and Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996), I analyze the dialectical vicissitudes and modifications of the Diderotian paradigm up through its abandonment or rather its radical reconfiguration in the art of Manet and his generation. What occurred in Rome in the 1590s and early 1600s differs from the foregoing in two basic regards. First, the concept of theatricality, understood in the strongly pejorative sense it acquired in mid-eighteenth-century France, has no direct purchase on the art I consider here. This is a vital point in and of itself, one that I return to more than once in what follows, but what adds to its urgency in the present context is that in the course of this book I try to show that at exactly that moment, the 1590s and early 1600s, there took place in a series of key works by Caravaggio (also in certain paintings by the Carracci) a development that I call the invention of absorption, by which I mean that absorptive themes and effects emerged as central to the enterprise of painting as never before. But unlike the situation in France during the second half of the eighteenth century, the advent of absorptive painting in Rome and Bologna shortly before and after 1600 appears not to have carried with it the pointed, Diderotian sense that the figure or figures in question are wholly unaware of the viewer standing before the picture. Or rather, whatever intimation of unawareness there may appear to be goes hand in hand with a new, or newly explicit, thematization of pictorial address—for example, by means of painted figures who appear openly to address the viewer, a state of affairs that contrasts strongly with the later French situation in which the very notion of address is from the first highly suspicious. (Eventually, however, address may be said to triumph, at the expense of absorption, and in radically revised form—as facingness and strikingness—in Manet’s epochal masterpieces of the first half of the 1860s. To show in fine detail how this took place is my aim in Manet’s Modernism.)

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introduction

Second, the pursuit of the independent and autonomous “gallery picture” in the work of Caravaggio and his successors, the Caravaggisti, does not find expression in a commensurate pursuit of dramatic unity. That will come about toward 1630 in the art of Nicolas Poussin, a body of work that has always rightly been seen—in the first place by Poussin himself—as standing in the strongest imaginable contrast to Caravaggio’s revolutionary but also deeply problematic achievement. What must be stressed, however, is that just those elements of Caravaggio’s art which presumably Poussin least admired—the realism, the extreme chiaroscuro, the replacement of traditional narrative by something much stranger and more idiosyncratic, the continual resort to effects of instantaneousness (not, as we shall see, that those effects are in the end decisive), the obsessive reference to his own physical likeness, and finally the obsessive concern with violent subject matter, above all the subject of decapitation— had for their deepest rationale the severing or cutting out of the painting from its immediate environment as well as, at the limit of possibility, from the painter himself. At any rate, this will be my claim in the pages that follow. Another set of relations with my own previous work concerns the status and meaning of Caravaggio’s realism or naturalism. Again, this is a major topic in these lectures, but I will simply say here that my account of Caravaggio’s enterprise would not have been possible other than on the basis, or against the background, of my understanding of the art of the great nineteenth-century painter—and self-proclaimed Realist—Gustave Courbet. For both Courbet and Caravaggio the self-portrait, by which I mean both the self-portrait as such and the “implicit” or “expanded” selfportrait—the disguised, displaced, or metaphorical portrayal of the artist in the act of making his painting—is nothing less than foundational. And as I remark at one point, that this can be shown to be true—or at least can be argued with some force— of the art of the two arch-realists in the entire Western tradition is a matter of profound interest historically, artistically, and ontologically. There are crucial differences between their respective projects: whereas in my account Courbet aspires hyperbolically toward a physically impossible state of merger with the painting being realized at the end of his brush or knife, Caravaggio’s paintings can be shown to imply two distinct (and only notionally temporal) “moments” in their production, an initial immersive “moment” in which the painter is to be imagined as continuous with the picture on which he is working, of being “one with” it or, as I mainly want to say, immersed in it, and a subsequent, specular “moment” in which he finally separates or cuts himself off from the picture, which thereby is given up to visuality, to spectatordom, as if once and for all—but the feat of separation turns out to be difficult if not impossible to achieve, to make hold, and that too is readable in the paintings. The internal dynamic of Caravaggio’s art, I shall suggest, consists largely in the mutual interaction of both “moments” and also between each of them and relations of absorption and address as well as of other polarities, such as painting and mirroring.

introduction

3

The complexity and, equally important, the sheer lability of the relationships that result, not just from work to work but within individual canvases, are a source at once of his art’s continuing fascination for commentators and of the resistance it has unfailingly offered to even the most brilliant and ingenious attempts to pin down its meaning formally, expressively, ideologically. Probably this is enough by way of introduction—I sense that the issues that animate these lectures are too difficult or perhaps simply too obscure to lend themselves comfortably to summary in advance (also to retrospective summary, as it turns out). But I hope that they will become clear enough in their proper place. In closing I want to make three additional points. First, as a longtime unofficial student of Charles Dempsey, I early on imbibed from him the notion that it would be futile to engage with the art of Caravaggio without at the same time taking into account the artistic and pedagogical project of the reform of Italian painting that began in Bologna in the 1580s, the immediate fruits of which, in the art of Caravaggio’s chief rival (and artistic peer), Annibale Carracci, Dempsey sees as providing a decisive stimulus for the former’s achievement starting with the Saint Matthew paintings in San Luigi dei Francese. Accordingly, lectures 2, 4, and 5 include extended discussions of works by Ludovico and Annibale Carracci (indeed, in their Bolognese fresco cycles, by all the Carracci), in order to convey something of the larger network of concerns in which both they and Caravaggio are in their respective ways caught up. Second, in the course of pursuing the necessary research for this book, I arrived at a partial understanding, new at least to me, of certain aspects of the art of some of the so-called Caravaggisti—Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Orazio Borgianni, Giovanni Serodine, Bartolomeo Manfredi, Valentin de Boulogne, and Nicolas Régnier prominent among them (more recently, Cecco del Caravaggio as well). Doing justice to this material will require further work, but I want to alert the reader that those artists too have their place in what follows—a far smaller one than they deserve, but a place nevertheless. Third, and perhaps most important, I want to make clear that I do not conceive of this book as offering a comprehensive account of Caravaggio’s achievement. Specifically, I have relatively little to say about his major altarpieces; I discuss the Death of the Virgin, the Saint Matthew paintings just mentioned (not altarpieces exactly), the Cerasi chapel pictures (ditto, and I deal with them in passing), the Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, and the Beheading of John the Baptist in Malta. But for reasons that doubtless have something to do with the mode of collective address to the faithful inherent in the altarpiece format, my emphasis falls, as I have already suggested, on his “gallery pictures,” which is to say on roughly twenty-five paintings of moderate size depicting half- or three-quarter-length figures for the most part engaged in some ostensibly simple—though often in fact extremely complex— action or sequence of actions, at the outset of his career secular and thereafter

4

introduction

mainly religious in content. Not that I consider the altarpieces as a class to be less innovative or compelling than the “gallery pictures.” But, by virtue of being differently conceived relative to their intended place and function, the altarpieces largely escape the terms of analysis that, I hope productively, are brought to bear upon the latter.

introduction

5

1.1 Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, ca. 1595–96. Oil on canvas, 66 × 49.5 cm. National Gallery, London. Bought with the aid of a contribution from the J. Paul Getty Jr. Endowment Fund, 1986

1

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L E LEC C T UTRUER E

Boy Bitten by a Lizard To someone like myself coming to Caravaggio studies from outside, it has been surprising to realize that during the past forty years or more one of the most discussed canvases by the master has been a work from the later phase of his early period, Boy Bitten by a Lizard of circa 1595–96 (fig. 1.1). (The date just given follows the scholarly consensus. Also, there are two versions of Boy Bitten by a Lizard, one in the National Gallery in London—which I shall be working with—and another in the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence [fig. 1.2]. Both are superb, and today are usually considered to be Caravaggio himself.) One of the earliest mentions of Boy Bitten by a Lizard is by Giovanni Baglione, writing around 1625, roughly fifteen years after the artist’s death. Baglione reports how the youthful painter, then simply Michelangelo Merisi, arrived in Rome from the town of Caravaggio in Lombardy. “Then he moved into the house of the Cavaliere Giuseppe Cesari d’Arpino [a successful painter] for a few months,” Baglione writes. “From there he tried to live by himself, and he painted some portraits of himself in the mirror. The first was a Bacchus with different bunches of grapes, painted with great care though a bit dry in style. He also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was all done meticulously.” Much recent discussion of Boy Bitten by a Lizard has focused on the question of its symbolic meaning or lack of it. So, for example (merely to skim the surface of a large secondary literature), several art historians have insisted that it be understood in the context of early seicento poetry; for others, its meaning is Christian, the “androgynous” appearance of the youth being “an intentional allusion to Love and Eternity”; one writer sees it as emblematizing the choleric temperament, and another as representing Touch in a series of pictures illustrating the senses; still others take the biting lizard to be emblematic of love poisoned by envy or jealousy; while Howard Hibbard, in his important but no longer wholly current book on the painter, suggests that it should perhaps be read as a vanitas allegory, though he also feels that it has probably been overinterpreted, but then he emphasizes the sexually symbolic connotations of roses worn behind the ear and the middle finger itself and adds “there is no avoiding the need to interpret.” Indeed, Hibbard pretty much

1.2 Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, ca. 1594. Oil on canvas, 65.8 × 49.5 cm. Fondazione Roberto Longhi, Florence. Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi

endorses Donald Posner’s view that Boy Bitten by a Lizard is one of a number of early works by Caravaggio whose subject matter (“androgynous youths” in states of partial undress) and mode of presentation (actively “soliciting” the spectator) are explicitly “homosexual” or “homo-erotic.” This remains a tender crux in present-day Caravaggio criticism. I only observe that Posner’s treatment of the topic, perhaps inevitably given when it was written, is crude and ahistorical (as Spear and others have remarked); that a 1995 book by Creighton Gilbert argues vigorously against the “homosexual” interpretation on grounds any subsequent treatment of the topic will have to take into account; and that the works in question nevertheless are sufficiently exceptional in costume, pose, and address to the viewer for the matter of their sexual connotations to remain an open question. (A recent article by John M. Moffitt strongly endorses Posner’s position.) Finally, scholars of Caravaggio as redoubtable as Roberto Longhi and Mina Gregori have explained the picture mainly as a study of extreme expression, that is, as essentially realistic in intent.

8

lecture one

Another crux, of particular interest to me, concerns Baglione’s statement that the young Caravaggio “painted some portraits of himself in the mirror.” For some commentators, the sitter for Boy Bitten by a Lizard was plainly Caravaggio himself, for others not; and the same question has arisen with respect to other early works, including the so-called Sick Bacchus in the Borghese (which in the “Age of Caravaggio” exhibition of 1985 was renamed Self-Portrait as Bacchus); the Uffizi Bacchus, in which the protagonist’s facial features seem not to resemble Caravaggio’s and yet (as will emerge) the question of Caravaggio’s “presence” in the canvas cannot be ruled out; and the stupendous Medusa. Let me say at once that I take Boy Bitten by a Lizard to be essentially a self-portrait made with the help of a mirror, but I also agree with those writers, such as Louis Marin, who urge that we think of the issue of the self-portrait in Caravaggio’s oeuvre in a freer, less merely literal light. In any case, the notion that the boy may be identified with the youthful Caravaggio hardly begins to suggest the intricacies of the painting’s relation to its maker; unraveling those complexities and placing them in a rudimentary context will occupy the whole of the first two lectures. A further point worth stressing is that Boy Bitten by a Lizard has universally been perceived, not without reason, as depicting a momentary or instantaneous state of affairs. Longhi, the foremost figure in earlier Caravaggio scholarship, saw in it a demonstration of the artist’s skill in rendering “the fleeting moment in which sharp pain is reflected in the boy’s expression,” while more recently the depicted action has been described as “frozen in a fraction of a second, as in a snapshot.” Friedlaender and Hibbard, too, underscore the seeming momentariness of the depicted event. In this regard, the painting has been assimilated to what is widely taken to be the main temporal register of Caravaggio’s art, as in Gregori’s statement that he tended to depict “violent, instantaneous action” or Marin’s remark that “[in Caravaggio’s] work the expression of emotions has been reduced down to the intensity of a single, instantaneous impression. This reduction amounts to a kind of ‘Medusa-effect.’ ” There can be no doubt that formulations such as these capture an essential aspect of the look or “style” of many of Caravaggio’s paintings, but throughout these lectures I shall be claiming that the underlying temporal structure of his art is more complex and specifically more divided than has previously been recognized. (More broadly, my approach to his art will be structural rather than stylistic.) So much by way of prologue to my own reading of Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Perhaps the quickest way of broaching that reading is by means of a comparison, one that obviously has no historical force but just for that reason serves to throw into relief an underlying structure or (to deploy a helpful French term) an implied dispositif shared by both works. (The two terms, structure and dispositif, are not quite synonymous: in Stephen Melville’s useful formulation, a dispositif is a setup exterior to painting that provides a way for painting to happen, something capable of assigning painting its structure.) The comparison I have in mind is with Henri

boy bitten by a lizard

9

Matisse’s Self-Portrait of 1918 (fig. 1.3), and I want to call attention to two points: first, Matisse’s use of a mirror has resulted in an image of the right-handed painter wielding a brush in his left, not his right hand (and holding a palette in his right, not his left hand); and, second, the painter is shown working on a canvas, a small sliver of the edge of which can be glimpsed at the bottom right of the Self-Portrait. If we now look again at Boy Bitten by a Lizard, it becomes possible to see that painting as an analogous mirror representation of the painter in the act of painting his own self-portrait, but one that has been disguised and distorted just enough (indeed, more than enough) for it to have escaped being understood in that light until now. Thus, the boy’s upraised left hand near the right-hand edge of the picture, which has always been viewed merely as gesturing with surprise, makes a different kind of sense especially with respect to its place in the composition if it is seen as a disguised mirror image of the artist-model’s right hand in the act of wielding a brush (the brush itself having been omitted), while the boy’s right hand, which not only is not shown gripping a palette but appears to be in the wrong position to do so (i.e., palm down rather than palm up), nevertheless is roughly where it ought to be in order to be read as a mirror image of the artist-model’s left hand engaged in its necessary albeit subordinate task. Another conspicuous feature of the composition, the way in which the boy’s upper body turns away from the viewer, also takes on new meaning if it is seen as reflecting the actual orientation of the artist-model as he turned from the mirror to his canvas and back again (it is as though the boy’s head remains fixated on the mirror while his upper body pivots toward the canvas), though here too commentators have been prevented from considering that possibility by the exaggerated upward thrust of the boy’s right shoulder as well as by the fact that the shoulder is provocatively bare. As Posner’s article makes clear, nothing has seemed more foreign to the presumably virile agency involved in the act of painting than the “ambivalent” or “ambiguous” sexuality of Boy Bitten by a Lizard’s protagonist. If the basic terms of the comparison are provisionally granted, several key differences between the two works come at once to the fore. First, in Boy Bitten by a Lizard we are not shown even a partial side view of the canvas on which, in my account, the boy is to be understood as working; rather, the implication is that the canvas is just beyond the right-hand framing edge of Boy Bitten by a Lizard itself. Second, whereas Matisse has portrayed himself looking at the canvas on which he is working, Caravaggio has represented himself staring, if that is the word, at his image in the mirror, which is why the boy appears to be looking more or less directly at the viewer standing before the picture. (By “more or less directly” I mean to acknowledge that the boy’s gaze is not directed absolutely, unarguably, at the viewer, imagining the latter to be standing dead center before the canvas. The question is what to make of this, and my impulse is to treat it as unimportant, for two reasons: first, because in this particular instance it does not call for interpretation; and, second, because similar slippages concerning the directionality of gazes are found elsewhere in Caravaggio’s art, in

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lecture one

1.3 Henri Matisse, Self-Portrait, 1918. Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm. Dépôt du Musée du Louvre, Musée départemental Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambrésis. © 2010 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

paintings as different from each other as the Cardsharps, Judith and Holofernes, and Incredulity of Thomas, a fact that suggests to me that this was an area in which Caravaggio’s control of his medium was less than perfect. In other words, I do not believe that Caravaggio positively intended that not quite dead-center mode of address.) To generalize my point, modern commentators have rightly stressed the forcefulness

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with which Caravaggio’s paintings at all stages of his career thematize or otherwise draw attention to their relation to the viewer. But what by and large has not been recognized is that Caravaggio is one of those rare painters—the nineteenth-century French Realist Gustave Courbet is another—whose paintings must be understood as evoking a primary, even primordial, relationship to the painter himself, who afterward is succeeded, but never wholly supplanted, by other viewers, by the viewer in general, in a word by us. One scholar who never loses sight of that aspect of Caravaggio’s art is S. J. Freedberg in a chapter on Caravaggio in his last book, Circa 1600. But because Freedberg does not treat the self-portraits, he never addresses the equally crucial question of the relation to Caravaggio of paintings bearing his own image or, rather, of the many paintings in his oeuvre that in one way or another thematize the primordialness of that relationship. Third, whereas Matisse’s Self-Portrait depicts the artist as occupied or absorbed in a single protracted action (painting) or sequence of smaller acts (applying paint to canvas), Boy Bitten by a Lizard appears to evoke a sharply distinct moment of pain, surprise, and shock, as the boy recoils from the unexpected bite. The evocation of such a moment goes a long way toward masking or distorting what I am claiming is the picture’s underlying subject. This is a lot to take in all at once, and before pursuing my account of Boy Bitten by a Lizard in lecture 2, I want briefly to explore certain related points. The first concerns the general topic of reflection or, say, the use of mirrors by painters in the Renaissance and after. The motif of reflection in polished armor or a convex mirror has its roots in northern art, most famously in the work of Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck, as for example in the latter’s Van der Peale Madonna with its reflective armor (mirroring a standing figure who may or may not be the painter) and Arnolfini Wedding Portrait with its framed convex mirror reflecting the bride and groom from the rear along with, facing them, other figures in the same room. Still in the North, later works of special interest include Pieter Claesz’s Still Life in Nuremburg and a similar work by Clara Peeters (both early 1600s), in both of which we find reflections of the artist in the act of making the paintings in question. (In Claesz’s still life, the artist’s reflection is seen in a spherical mirror; in Peeters’s canvas, multiple reflections appear in a highly wrought goblet’s globular mirroring surfaces.) In Italy, key figures include Leon Battista Alberti, who in his influential treatise On Painting (1435) cites the mirror as a tool and compares painting to Narcissus “embracing with art what is presented on the surface of the water in the fountain” (Caravaggio’s Narcissus is discussed further on in this book); Leonardo da Vinci, who writes in his notebooks that the mirror is or should be the painter’s master in that the image in a mirror is a perfect test for a painting of a given subject; and the early sixteenth-century Venetian painter Giorgione, who is said by one of the fictive participants in Paolo Pino’s Dialogue on Painting of 1548 to have “painted a picture of an armed Saint George, standing and leaning on the shaft of a spear, with his feet at the very edge of a limpid and clear pool—which [pool] was transfixed by the entire figure, foreshortened as

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far as the crown of the head; in addition, he had feigned a mirror leaning against a tree trunk, in which the entire figure was reflected from the back and one side. He depicted a second mirror opposite this, in which was visible the entire other side of the Saint George. And this he did in support [of the argument] that a painter can show an entire figure at a single glance, which a sculptor cannot.” The terms of Pino’s description are those of the paragone or competition between artistic media, here between painting and sculpture, a major theme in sixteenth-century writing about the arts (Leonardo is equally concerned to prove the superiority of painting to poetry). The canvas in question has been lost (if we assume that something like it once existed), but Giorgione’s invention may have an echo in a remarkable painting in the Louvre by the Bergamesque painter Girolamo Savoldo, Portrait of a Man in Armor (ca. 1528–30; fig. 1.4), often mistakenly called Gaston de Foix, which Creighton Gilbert was perhaps the first to suggest should be seen as a self-portrait. (Pino was Savoldo’s student.) In fact, Savoldo’s canvas provides a precocious precedent for Caravaggio, in that I understand the respective positions of the artist-sitter’s right and left arms and hands as miming in reverse those of the artist-viewer as he worked on the painting (as if the artist-sitter’s extended left arm were holding a brush and the bent right arm were gripping a palette)—in reverse, because, this being a selfportrait, Savoldo would presumably have been portraying his image in a mirror (i.e., the entire scene represented in the painting should be understood as a mirror image). In addition, Savoldo depicts two other mirrors, one of which, the large mirror that occupies the upper right quadrant of the canvas, reverses back the implied mirror reversal of artist-sitter’s arms and hands. Thus, in that mirror the artist-sitter’s right arm is shown extended and the left not, which is what in actual fact would have been the case (the artist-viewer’s extended right arm wielding a brush, the bent left arm holding a palette). The genius of this construction is that it explicitly presents the mirror not simply as an indispensable element in a paragone between painting and sculpture but also, equally important, as a device or technology for reversing right and left; this in turn shows that a heightened consciousness of the workings of reversal was in place as early as the second half of the 1520s. (Throughout this lecture and the next, I shall be making a terminological distinction between the artist-sitter, the depicted subject of a self-portrait, and the artist-viewer, the maker of the selfportrait and also, inevitably, its first viewer or beholder. This may seem awkward but it is required for keeping actual and depicted artists straight.) One final, telling stroke is worth noting: the artist-sitter’s right hand is reflected and thus reversed in the armored breastplate in the lower right foreground of the canvas; this too undoes the mirror reversal of the basic image and allows one to understand that reflection as potentially aligned with the artist-viewer’s left hand holding a palette. A related topic concerns the availability of mirrors in the Renaissance and early seventeenth century. As I have already noted, round convex mirrors were available from an early date, and one of the most intriguing Italian paintings of the sixteenth

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1.4 Girolamo Savoldo, Portrait of a Man in Armor, here identified as a Self-Portrait, ca. 1528–30. Oil on canvas, 91 × 123 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

century, the youthful Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1523–24; fig. 1.5), presents itself as exactly reproducing, on a round and convex support, the image in such a mirror, with all the distortions toward the circumference that that entailed. Notice, too, that the painting depicts only the artist-sitter’s right hand, which we understand to be the reflection of the artist-viewer’s left; presumably the artist-viewer’s right hand was engaged in making the painting. Also, toward the extreme right of the painting we see a curving gold band, which according to the implied logic of the image can be nothing other than the frame around the self-portrait itself, at a right angle to the mirror (more on this logic shortly). An important question is exactly when flat mirrors became available, and the answer seems to be starting in the early sixteenth century. (By flat mirrors I mean mirrors made of silvered glass; polished metal mirrors would have been available all along.) It is often stated that the earliest flat mirrors tended to be quite small, but by the 1520s and 1530s there are paintings and engravings by Parmigianino, Savoldo (the one we have just considered), Girolamo Bedoli, Titian, and others that depict flat mirrors—one assumes they are of glass—of a perfectly useful size. In any case, there is not the slightest question as to the availability of flat mirrors by the 1580s and after.

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1.5 Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1523. Oil on wood, diameter 24.4 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

This brings me to a further point, a crucial one, concerning the precise structure or dispositif that is plainly operating in Matisse’s Self-Portrait of 1918 and that I have suggested is at work in Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard as well (also in Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). If we look again at the Matisse, the initial impression, once we take in the sliver of the canvas at the lower right, is not only that the painting portrays what the artist saw in a mirror but also that the painting has eclipsed the mirror, as if there were space on the wall before us for one or the other but not both. But if we think harder about the implied arrangement—if we take the painted image as a reliable guide to the actual circumstances of its making, which of course may not be justified by the facts (but what matters is that the viewer is invited to understand the image in those terms)—we soon realize that the canvas and the mirror were never exactly competitors for the same space (at the same time, so to speak). According to the structure or dispositif—the elementary technology—I have been describing, we are asked to visualize the canvas and the mirror as having “originally” been at right angles to one another, with the artist-viewer positioned between them so as to be able to study his reversed image in the mirror and then, pivoting to his right, to transpose it onto the painting gradually being realized under his brush. Only after the painting was finished was it hung where the mirror had been;

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only then did the painting displace the mirror, though of course by virtue of doing so it also preserved the “original” mirror image in a way that perhaps no other kind of self-portrait could have done as well. Put slightly differently, the logic of this particular mode of mirror representation, which for obvious reasons I call “right-angle,” is such that the painting appears to insist on its virtual identity with the absent mirror while representing itself—itself “originally,” in the process of being painted—as nonidentical with the picture surface, indeed as rotated ninety degrees into the picture space in the immediate vicinity of the right-hand or left-hand framing edge. It may also be the case, as in Boy Bitten by a Lizard, that the painting represents itself “originally” not only as rotated ninety degrees into the picture space but also—I am deliberately stretching the notion of representation here—as placed just beyond the right- or left-hand framing edge, that is, as just barely excluded from the pictorial field, which however must be thought of as oriented to that excluded element fully as much as to the implied mirror. (In Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, we are given a glimpse of the frame but nothing more.) I believe that right-angle mirror representation played an important role in Caravaggio’s art, especially during its formative period, but before going on to make that case I want to consider the previous history of the right-angle dispositif itself. Although art historians have on occasion acknowledged its mode of functioning in specific instances, it has never been singled out for study in its own right, with the result that its considerable significance for the history of painting from the Renaissance to the modern period has not been recognized. My investigations into its origins are hardly definitive, but my present sense of the matter is that it may well have been invented more or less simultaneously in Florence and Venice (and perhaps elsewhere?) in the first decades of the sixteenth century. For example, a small Pontormo drawing of around 1515 in the Uffizi is generally taken to be a self-portrait (fig. 1.6); if we accept as veridical the unusual bodily orientation of the artist-sitter turning his upper body to the left (our right) while staring directly out of the sheet at a mirror, we are led to imagine the artist-viewer, the presumed maker of the drawing, working on a sheet of paper at a right angle to that mirror. (My impression is that the sheet together with some kind of hard backing would have been held or otherwise supported more or less vertically, perhaps in part by the artist-sitter’s right—that is, the artist-viewer’s left—arm and hand. Note too that we are not shown the artist-sitter’s left—the artist-viewer’s right—hand actually making marks on the sheet of paper.) Or, if this seems too conjectural a starting point, consider the somewhat later and much better-known drawing in red chalk in the British Museum, which depicts the almost nude Pontormo standing sideways and looking at and indeed pointing with his right arm and hand at something “this” side of the sheet of paper, while with his left arm he reaches beyond the limit of the sheet to the right (fig. 1.7). Scholars before me have suggested that he is pointing at his image in a mirror, probably a piece of polished metal, while drawing that image on a vertical sheet of paper that we are not

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1.6 Jacopo Pontormo, Self-Portrait Study, ca. 1515. Red chalk on paper, 11.4 × 7.1 cm. Uffizi Museum, Florence-Vasan, Rome

1.7 Jacopo Pontormo, Self-Portrait Study, ca. 1525. Red chalk on paper, 28.4 × 20.2 cm. The British Museum, London

shown but that we understand to be the “original” of the sheet we are now looking at; factoring in the effects of mirror reversal, we realize that the artist-viewer, Pontormo himself, would have been drawing with his right hand and pointing with his left, which is precisely what we would expect given his right-handedness. In other words, all the elements of right-angle mirror representation are present in this arresting work, which Janet Cox Rearick places around 1525.

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1.8 Raphael Sanzio, Self-Portrait, 1508–9? Oil on panel, 47.3 × 34.8 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

1.9 Giorgione, Self-Portrait as David, ca. 1500. Oil on canvas, 52 × 43 cm., trimmed. Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig, Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen

1.10 Wenceslas Hollar, engraving after Giorgione, Self-Portrait as David, 1650. Etching, second state of two, 25 × 18.2 cm. (Reversed.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1920 (20.81.3.235)

Other drawings by Pontormo are pertinent to our inquiry, but perhaps the more important question is when the right-angle dispositif made itself felt in painting. We should not expect a definitive answer. Take, for example, Raphael’s altogether winning Self-Portrait of 1508–9 in the Uffizi (fig. 1.8), a work that could never be said to announce the operations of such a dispositif in the way that the second of the two Pontormo drawings manifestly does. But for a long time now I have sensed at work in Raphael’s canvas—specifically, in the position of the artist-sitter’s upper body and the apparent extension, if that is the word, of his left arm toward the lower right-hand edge of the canvas—more than a hint of a right-angle structure. Is this a fantasy or is such a structure actually in force? And if the latter is the case, are we to imagine that Raphael expected sophisticated viewers to grasp what he had done? Or consider, shifting attention to Venice, Giorgione’s Self-Portrait of around 1508 in Braunschweig (fig. 1.9), which if in fact by his hand must have been cut down from a larger image of the painter as David with the head of Goliath. (For the latter I am reproducing a seventeenth-century engraving by Wenceslas Hollar, reversed so as to match the orientation of the painting [fig. 1.10].) In this instance, too, the painting does not explicitly portray its own production, though the strongly foreshortened head of Goliath is more or less exactly where a palette would be if it did. Indeed, a closely related work, a Self-Portrait on paper mounted on wood in Budapest (fig. 1.11), might be a study for the Braunschweig canvas. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden writes that “the gaze in this small picture is much more direct, penetrating, artistically examining; and at the same time the position of the head seems consciously posed.

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1.11 Giorgione, Self-Portrait, ca. 1500. Oil on paper mounted on wood, 31.5 × 28.5 cm. Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest

1.12 Andrea del Sarto, Self-Portrait, ca. 1528–30. Fresco on ceramic tile, 51.5 × 37.5 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

1.13 Tintoretto, Self-Portrait, ca. 1545–50. Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 38 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Marion R. Ascoli and the Marion R. and Max Ascoli Fund in honor of Lessing Rosenwald, 1983

Instead of the melancholy, contemplative expression we find in the Braunschweig painting, there is a feeling of concentrated self-observation.” This is acute, to which I would add that the position of the head is consistent with a right-angle dispositif. Other sixteenth-century paintings, two of many, that have always given me a strong right-angle feeling are Andrea del Sarto’s Self-Portrait in fresco on ceramic tile of circa 1528–30 in the Uffizi (fig. 1.12) and Jacopo Tintoretto’s Self-Portrait of circa 1545–50 in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (fig. 1.13). However, there can be no doubt as to how we are meant to construe the young Alessandro Allori’s Self-Portrait of around 1555 in the Uffizi (fig. 1.14), a work that Joanna Woods-Marsden claims “introduced the new attributes of brush and palette into the vocabulary of Italian self-portraiture.” No doubt it did, but its more profound innovation is structural: to the best of my knowledge Allori’s is the first painting in Italian art, and perhaps anywhere, to make explicit use of right-angle mirror representation as its organizing principle. In other words, Allori has portrayed himself working on a canvas that is just off picture to the left but that we are invited to imagine as vertically oriented and at a right angle to the mirror into which the artist is presumably looking. The whole business takes place at close range, and (as Woods-Marsden remarks) there is only a short distance between the artist-sitter’s head and the implied canvas on which he is shown working; the effect of the Self-Portrait on the viewer is therefore initially one of vividness and immediacy, succeeded by a phase of intellectual reflection (no pun intended) necessary to grasp the full import of the right-angle scenario (this must have been especially true when the painting was first shown). Note by the

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1.14 Alessandro Allori, Self-Portrait, ca. 1555. Oil on canvas, 60 × 46 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

1.15 Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait at the Clavichord, ca. 1556–57. Oil on canvas, 56.5 × 48 cm., Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples

way that Allori has not followed the image in the mirror to the extent of portraying himself with the brush in his left hand; on the contrary, he has corrected or normalized that image so as to depict himself as others would have seen him, with the brush in his right hand and the palette in his left. (How do I know Allori and, for that matter, Pontormo and Raphael were right-handed? By the predominant upper rightto-lower left direction of the hatching in their drawings.) This is not the place to survey the use of the right-angle dispositif in both explicit and nonexplicit forms by artists after Allori, but three examples by painters linked with Milan call for special mention. The first is Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait at the Clavichord (ca. 1556–57; fig. 1.15) in Naples, which is distinctly right-angle in feeling and shows both hands engaged with her instrument, which extends off canvas to the left. The second is Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Self-Portrait as Abbot of the Accademia della Valle di Bregno (fig. 1.16; 1568) in the Brera, a curious work in which just possibly the hefty staff suspended between the artist-sitter’s left shoulder and the picture plane may be understood as a somewhat aggressive metaphor for the painter’s brush. The third example, lesser known than the other two, and plainly corrected with respect to left and right, is of particular interest because of the identity of its maker, the Bergamese painter Simone Peterzano. The painting in question is signed and dated 1589 (fig. 1.17); the hands with brush and palette have only just been fitted in, with the result that they do not convey an impression of having actually been observed as the hands in the Allori do (misleadingly, because the Allori hands correct the reversed mirror image). But this does not prevent them from

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1.16 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Self-Portrait as Abbot of the Accademia della Valle di Bregno, 1568. Oil on canvas, 56 × 44 cm. Pinacotheca di Brera, Milan

1.17 Simone Peterzano, Self-Portrait, 1589. Oil on panel, 23 × 16.5 cm. Private collection, Rome

positing the presence of the “original” canvas just off picture to the left. Peterzano in the 1580s lived and worked in Milan, and the special interest of his Self-Portrait derives from the fact that he was Caravaggio’s teacher: for four years, starting in 1584, the young Michelangelo Merisi was apprenticed to him, which is to say that we can place him in or at least around Peterzano’s studio when the latter made the self-portrait in question. I suggest that the eighteen-year-old painter, about to go out on his own, filed away for future reference not only the image but also the technology of its production. Two other self-portraits, both considerably more complex than those we have discussed until now (except Savoldo’s Portrait of a Man in Armor), are worth looking at in this connection. The first, in the Martin-von-Wagner-Museum in Würzburg, is called Self-Portrait with an Architect Friend (fig. 1.18). I follow here the modern attribution of it to the Genoese painter Giovanni Battista Paggi along with a dating in the mid- or late 1580s. The architect friend is the figure in black who has been portrayed with his back largely to the viewer in the immediate foreground. It is also the architect’s face that we see reflected in a framed mirror hanging on a wall immediately to the right of the “actual” architect’s profil perdu. (The wall is not far

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1.18 Giovanni Battista Paggi, SelfPortrait with Architect Friend, ca. 1580–90. Oil on canvas, 81 × 62 cm. Martin von Wagner Museum der Universität Würzburg

removed from the picture plane. Also, fascinatingly, the mirror would normally have been protected by a thin sheet of wood, which has been slid to the left to expose the mirror for use.) Finally, it is the maker of this painting, Paggi or whoever, whom we see reflected in that mirror to the right of the reflection of the architect; and if we look closely we observe that we are also shown the artist-sitter’s left hand wielding a brush in a manner that implies that he is at work on a canvas that, once again, is rotated ninety degrees from the axis of the mirror and is just off canvas (i.e., off mirror) to the right. To cap all this off, the architect seems to be pointing toward the reflected image of the painter with his left hand while manipulating a pair of compasses with his right; however, neither hand appears in the mirror, even as we are invited to compare the “actual” architect’s pointing left hand with the reflected painter’s left hand, which we understand to be a reversed image of the right hand with which the painter—the artist-viewer—executed the picture. The result is a highly sophisticated, not to say didactic construction, and part of its relevance to my argument is that together with the much more famous work I am about to consider, it suggests that the

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right-angle dispositif not only was current among Italian painters by the last decades of the sixteenth century but in addition was a device that positively invited technical and intellectual elaboration. Significantly, the more famous work I have in mind is by the other indisputably great figure besides Caravaggio in the renewal of Italian painting in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Annibale Carracci—the Self-Portrait with Figures in the Brera of the mid- or late 1580s (fig. 1.19). At the center of the painting there is the artist-sitter, at work on a canvas that we are invited to regard as roughly at right angles to the plane of the mirror into which presumably he is gazing; unlike the self-portraits we have examined until now—except the Matisse—we are shown the side of the fictive canvas, with its gleaming nail heads, as well as a hint of the canvas’s back. (A few missing nail heads may perhaps be taken to suggest that the actual painting—not the depicted canvas on the easel—is not quite finished.) In addition there are three other persons, who appear to be involved in a transaction that has been variously interpreted. To the right, a man with downcast eyes and a deeply absorbed air, the lower half of whose face is obscured by the depicted canvas, at first seems to be handing something—a scraper, it is sometimes said, with some black pigment on it—to a boy, while at the left an older man, whose state of mind is unreadable but seems akin to reverie, looks on, or perhaps gazes abstractedly at the canvas on which the depicted Annibale has been working. (This is the usual account of what the painting offers to be seen. My belief, however, after repeated viewings, is that the absorbed man is offering the pigment to the artist-sitter, who needs it in order to complete the lower portion of the depicted painting, which I take to be none other than the Self-Portrait with Figures itself. That is, I take this to be the actual painting’s implied scenario. The boy seems almost an afterthought, as if he were inserted into the picture late in its making, perhaps in the interest of associating the composition as a whole with the picture type of the Ages of Man, which is how Roberto Zapperi understands it.) As in Paggi’s Self-Portrait with an Architect Friend, Annibale’s image of himself is mirror-reversed: the artist-sitter wields his brush with his left hand while holding a palette with his right. Here I want to note an unmistakable sense of strain: the hand holding the palette feels too much like a right hand (it dominates the other hand not just compositionally but empathically, kinesthetically), while the hand wielding the brush seems insufficiently like a left hand (the identities of the thumb and forefinger switch back and forth like aspects of a duck-rabbit illusion). This in itself is not unusual; mirror reversal often produces awkward effects as ocular evidence and bodily experience come uncontrollably into conflict. In Matisse’s Self-Portrait, for example, the artist-sitter’s right thumb gripping the palette is uncomfortably prominent by virtue of both its size and the way in which it has been outlined in black, so much so that we are all but compelled to reimagine it as an image of the artist-viewer’s left thumb seen by the latter not in a mirror but directly, and not just seen but felt, experienced, in all its lived immediacy, which is

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1.19 Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait with Figures, ca. 1585–90. Oil on canvas, 60 × 48 cm. Pinacotheca di Brera, Milan

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also to say that the palette, which in the painting tilts improbably away from the artist-sitter, asks to be reimagined as having been based on the artist-viewer’s direct view of his actual palette, which he might well have looked down upon at approximately the same angle. (All this, of course, has an intentional character that is absent from the problematic hands in Annibale’s picture, but the intentionalness is, I think, superadded to a sense of difficulty that arose within the situation of Matisse portraying his mirror reflection.) To return to Annibale’s picture, about which I shall have more to say in lecture 5, my larger point for the time being is that right-angle mirror representation was clearly a focus of pictorial experiment among Italian artists in the years just before Caravaggio’s arrival in Rome. I also want to consider a further range of issues associated with the topic of mirror reversal as such. As we have seen, some of the sixteenth-century self-portraits we have considered are mirror-reversed and some are not. More precisely, the Paggi and Annibale paintings, together with Boy Bitten by a Lizard, strongly suggest that for a protracted moment in the 1580s and 1590s mirror reversal was allowed free and unembarrassed expression. (Another work I might have adduced in this connection is Luca Cambiaso’s lost Portrait of the Artist Painting a Portrait of His Father, of roughly 1570 [fig. 1.20]. Still another is Annibale’s older brother Agostino’s playful, not to say sly Self-Portrait [1589–90; fig. 1.21] in the Uffizi: the sitter looks the viewer in the eye as he displays palm up his open right hand—but of course the image in the mirror would have been of his open left hand, the right hand being engaged in making the painting itself, off mirror, as it were.) Very quickly, however, the situation changed, and starting around 1600 and with only a handful of exceptions, manifest or explicit mirror reversal vanished from European painting for more than 250 years. In its place, painters who sought to portray themselves in the act of painting, or simply holding the instruments of their art, placed the brush in their right hand and the palette in their left, thereby presenting themselves as they appeared to others rather than to themselves gazing in a mirror. (I think of this convention as normalizing.) And yet throughout that period we glimpse in self-portrait after selfportrait, including many in which the instruments of painting do not appear, what might be described as the latent presence, sometimes barely a hint and sometimes considerably more, of both the right-angle dispositif and mirror reversal. Striking instances include Ludovico Cigoli’s intimately observed Self-Portrait (1606–7; fig. 1.22) in the Uffizi, in which the artist-sitter holds several brushes in his left hand (so he is not quite shown in the act of painting the canvas implicitly off picture to the right); Caravaggio’s brilliant follower Orazio Borgianni’s haunted and haunting Self-Portrait of around 1615 (fig. 1.23) in Rome, a work that comes as near to explicitness as it is possible to do while depicting only the artist-sitter’s head and upper body (an earlier Self-Portrait in the Prado fully exhibits the right-angle dispositif but has the brush in his right hand and the palette in his left); and Cristofano Allori’s Self-Portrait (1606–10; fig. 1.24) in the Uffizi, Allori being another

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1.20 Luca Cambiaso, Portrait of the Artist Painting a Portrait of His Father, ca. 1570. Oil on canvas, 104 × 97 cm. Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Blanco, Genoa

1.21 Agostino Carracci, Self-Portrait, 1589–90. Oil on canvas, 70.8 × 56.2 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

1.23 Orazio Borgianni, Self-Portrait, ca. 1615. Oil on canvas, 55 × 39 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome

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1.22 Ludovico Cigoli, Self-Portrait, 1606–7. Oil on canvas, 58.5 × 44 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

1.24 Cristofano Allori, Self-Portrait, 1606–10. Oil on canvas, 53.5 × 40.3 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

1.25 Cristofano Allori, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1613. Oil on canvas, 120.4 × 100.3 cm. The Royal Collection

painter who early on was keenly aware of Caravaggio’s realist precedent, as his Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1613; fig. 1.25) demonstrates beyond all doubt. (The ravishingly beautiful Judith is said to be based on Allori’s mistress, Maria di Giovanni Mazzafirri, who according to Filippo Baldinucci had left him; appropriately, Holofernes’ head bears Allori’s features, following the model of Goliath’s head in Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath in the Borghese, a work then in Florence. What is less clear is whether Judith’s pose, with the sword in her right hand extended beyond the left-hand edge of the picture, was intended to allude to the right-angle dispositif.) In addition, there are Peter Paul Rubens’s superb Self-Portrait in a Circle of Friends (1602–6; fig. 1.26) in Cologne, in which the painter, standing sideways to the picture plane, has portrayed himself looking out of the canvas over his left shoulder in a manner that at once pointedly raises and, I want to say, implicitly answers the question as to how he managed to depict himself thus (other figures in the painting evoke the trope of mirroring by the way in which they face

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1.26 Peter Paul Rubens, Self-Portrait in a Circle of Friends, ca. 1602–6. Oil on canvas, 77.5 × 101 cm. WallrafRichartz Museum, Cologne

1.27 Anthony Van Dyck, Self-Portrait, ca. 1613–14. Oil on panel, 26 × 20 cm. Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Kunst, Vienna

1.28 Anthony Van Dyck, Self-Portrait with Sunflower, ca. 1633. Oil on canvas, 60 × 73 cm. Private collection

each other from the left- and right-hand halves of the composition); the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Anthony Van Dyck’s small Self-Portrait in Vienna (ca. 1613–14; fig. 1.27), a tour de force of execution that, although eliding the artist-sitter’s hands, was plainly intended to demonstrate the very young painter’s mastery of the subgenre (in consequence of which it provides compelling evidence of the latter’s intelligibility at the time); Van Dyck’s later, enigmatic Self-Portrait with Sunflower (ca. 1633; fig.

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1.29 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, ca. 1636–38. Oil on panel, 63.2 × 50.2 cm. Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena

1.30 Salvator Rosa, Self-Portrait, ca. 1650. Oil on canvas, 74 × 60 cm. The Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, John and Rhoda Lord Family Fund

1.31 Willem Drost, Self-Portrait, ca. 1662. Oil on canvas, 72 × 64 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

1.28), the head and face in which could have been painted no other way (if we assume that they were painted from life, as the conventions of the genre invite one to believe); Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait of circa 1636–38 in Pasadena (fig. 1.29), in which the artist-sitter’s left hand tucked into his jacket at the breast cannot disguise its implied extension off canvas to the right; Salvator Rosa’s Self-Portrait in Detroit (ca. 1650; fig. 1.30), in which the converging gazes of the artist-sitter’s two eyes suggest a

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1.32 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 1649. Oil on canvas, 78 × 65 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

1.33 Charles Lebrun, Evrard Jabach and His Family, ca. 1657–59. Oil on canvas, 276 × 325 cm. Formerly Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin (destroyed in the Second World War)

sustained effort at scrutinizing his image in a mirror; and Willem Drost’s Self-Portrait (ca. 1662; fig. 1.31) in the Uffizi, in which the artist-sitter holds a pair of compasses in his left, therefore “actually” his right, hand. Something also should be said about two remarkable French paintings: first, Nicolas Poussin’s Self-Portrait (1649; fig. 1.32) in Berlin, made for his friend Jean Pointel, in which the artist-sitter holds a metal chalk holder in his left hand while supporting a book with his right. His body is turned toward the right (his left), and his hands cross at the wrist, which Louis Marin acutely reads as an acknowledgment of mirror reversal; the question is whether the Self-Portrait is based on a right-angle dispositif, which seems possible but not certain. The second French painting that bears on these concerns, Charles Lebrun’s Evrard Jabach and His Family (ca. 1657–59; fig. 1.33), formerly in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, was destroyed in the Second World War. It was an ambitious effort, portraying no less than six members of the Jabach family as well as, behind the wealthy banker, a mirror in which was reflected the painter-sitter at work on a large canvas and holding his palette in his right (the painter-viewer’s left) hand. If the Jabach Family had not been destroyed, it would doubtless be a frequent term of comparison with Velásquez’s Las Meninas. Finally, Carlo Dolci’s “double” Self-Portrait (1674; fig. 1.34), also in the Uffizi, depicts the artist-sitter holding in his right hand a colored drawing (or a painting on paper) of himself in profile wearing glasses, a smock, and a hat—studio clothes rather than formal dress—and intently at work on a picture, presumably that very drawing, off image to the left. In the picture-within-the-picture (i.e., the colored

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1.34 Carlo Dolci, Self-Portrait, 1674. Oil on canvas, 74.3 × 60.5 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

drawing) the artist-sitter wields his brush with his right hand, indicating that it is not mirror-reversed (other drawings leave no doubt that Dolci was right-handed). What I find especially intriguing, though, is the way in which Dolci has presented two different images of himself in a single canvas, the first wholly engaged in the act of painting and the second exhibiting to the viewer the product of that act, as if the true subject of his Self-Portrait were two distinct phases or “moments” in its coming into existence or, perhaps more accurately, in the coming into existence of the colored drawing that is its ultimate center of interest. (The full significance of this will emerge in lecture 2.) Two northern works of some complexity are also relevant here. The better known— also artistically the superior—of the two is the Dutch painter David Bailly’s Vanitas Still Life (1651; fig. 1.35), in which the straightforward portrayal of an unknown young painter at the left is not simply juxtaposed but also contrasted with the oval self-portrait of Bailly that the young painter supports in his left hand, the self-portrait

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1.35 David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life, 1651. Oil on panel, 89.5 × 122 cm. Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, The Netherlands

1.36 David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life, detail of oval self-portrait

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1.37 Antonie van Steenwinkel, Portrait of the Artist and a Youth, 1630s. Oil on canvas, 85 × 64 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp

being to my mind a clear-cut instance of right-angle mirror representation (fig. 1.36). The more complex of the two works is Antonie van Steenwinkel’s Portrait of the Artist and a Youth (1630s; fig. 1.37), which provocatively combines a frontal composition of a wooden table supporting a black-framed mirror with a right-angle-type portrait of the artist. In greater detail, the table includes toward the bottom of the canvas and in the immediate foreground a drawer, which as far as one can see is empty, open toward the viewer; on the table top, also partly reflected in the mirror, are items symbolic of the theme of memento mori: from left to right an hourglass, books (no doubt of religious inspiration), and a human skull. The mirror itself seems to be held upright by the youth of the painting’s title, who grips the frame on two sides and who, peering around the mirror at the right (his left), looks smilingly at the viewer. Finally, reflected in the mirror is an image of the elegantly mustached and goateed painter, wearing a lace collar and an enormous hat with upturned brim, who also gazes directly toward the viewer but whose bodily orientation, implying a canvas off mirror to the right, is pointedly contrasted not only with that of the youth but also with the frontality and trompe-l’oeil immediacy of the table-drawer-mirror construction as a whole. The

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result is a brilliant jeu d’esprit—hence the reflected painter’s knowing smile. My interest in Steenwinkel’s picture, in other words, is that it shows that by the 1630s an artist could play with the motif of right-angle mirror representation, presumably with the confidence that sophisticated viewers would get the joke. My further claim, which could be substantiated ad infinitum, is that throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries painters of self-portraits regularly made use of right-angle mirror representation in works that deliberately stop short of declaring the fact, and moreover that they did so fully expecting that other painters, and no doubt cultivated amateurs as well, would recognize and appreciate what they had done. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century and going on into the nineteenth, we find isolated self-portraits in which mirror reversal is acknowledged unambiguously; significant instances include works by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Jacques-Louis David, Emil Janssen, Jean-Baptiste Corot, and Théodore Chassériau. Among these the Reynolds (Uffizi), David, Janssen, and Corot (Uffizi) are also unambiguously right-angle. In addition, there is a witty lithograph by Honoré Daumier, A Frenchman Painted by Himself (1848; fig. 1.38), which depicts a painter seen from behind at work on a self-portrait; Daumier shows him squinting fiercely into the mirror to his right—the image on the canvas squints fiercely as well—as if to draw attention to the sheer artifice of the basic dispositif. But it is only around 1860, with the arrival on the French scene of the generation of Edouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, and James McNeill Whistler, that normalization and disguise come abruptly to an end—not universally but with sufficient frequency for the date to mark an epoch in Western painting. For example, a masterly self-portrait drawing by Fantin of around 1860 (fig. 1.39) depicts the young artist-sitter gripping with his right hand a tablet on which presumably he is drawing with his left as he scrutinizes his own features in a mirror directly in front of him. In that drawing, too, the direction of the hatching from upper right to lower left leaves no doubt as to the artist-viewer’s actual right-handedness; indeed, the assertion of right-handedness in the graphic fabric of this and other Fantin self-portrait drawings is sufficiently powerful to have led me in Manet’s Modernism to interpret the drawings as divided between two different and, in a sense, opposed pictorial regimes: an emerging optical or ocular regime, keyed to the artist viewer’s strictly visual experience—think of Impressionism, barely a decade away—and a bodily regime not yet altogether outdated, keyed to his sense of corporeal reality, as in the art of Manet’s immediate predecessor, Courbet. (Earlier I noted signs of tension or conflict between optical and bodily modes of experience in the artist-sitter’s right hand in Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures and in the outsized thumb and palette in Matisse’s Self-Portrait. In Fantin’s drawings, however, the division between regimes is managed with aplomb. As will become clear further on, a not dissimilar division between optical and bodily realisms is found in major paintings by Caravaggio, there too without any hint of tension or conflict.)

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1.38 Honoré Daumier, Un français peint par luimême, 1848. Lithograph. Bibliothèque nationale de France

1.39 Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait, ca. 1860. Charcoal estompe, reworked with brush, 14.2 × 12 cm. Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques (fonds Orsay)

Mirror reversal is also at work in Whistler’s The Artist in His Studio (1865–66; fig. 1.40), a characteristically elegant variation on the right-angle dispositif we have been tracking; in Manet’s great Self-Portrait with a Palette (1878–79; fig. 1.41), in which the deliberate blurring of the artist-sitter’s left hand is meant to evoke the difficulty of the artist-viewer’s rapidly moving right hand capturing its reflection in paint; and in Cézanne’s monumental Self-Portrait in the Bührle Collection (ca. 1890; fig. 1.42). Painters outside of France took part in this same fundamental shift of attitude, as is shown by numerous works by Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, such as the former’s intense, strongly focused Self-Portrait in Cologne (1908; fig. 1.43) and the latter’s Self-Portrait in a White Smock also in Cologne (1918; fig. 1.44), not to mention a well-known photograph of Liebermann holding brush and palette and facing away from the camera in the vertex between one of his self-portraits and the mirror that presumably was used in its making (1930; fig. 1.45). Finally, I want to juxtapose Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard to Gustave Caillebotte’s Self-Portrait at the Easel (1879–80; fig. 1.46), an almost disturbingly explicit—because drawing attention to the impossibility of the artist-sitter’s having in view both the mirror and his canvas at the same time—right-angle construction. By

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1.40 James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Artist in His Studio, 1865–66. Oil on wood, 62.9 × 46.4 cm. Friends of American Art Collection, 1912.141, The Art Institute of Chicago

1.41 Edouard Manet, Self-Portrait with a Palette, 1878–79. Oil on canvas, 83 × 67 cm. Collection of Steven and Alexandra Cohen

1.42 Paul Cézanne, Self-Portrait with Palette, ca. 1890. Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm. Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zurich

1.43 Max Liebermann, Self-Portrait, 1908. Oil on canvas, 87.5 × 71 cm. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne

1.44 Lovis Corinth, Self-Portrait in a White Smock, 1918. Oil on canvas, 105 × 80 cm. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne

1.45 Photograph of Max Liebermann working on a self-portrait, 1930. Aufnahme Felix H. Mann, Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin

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1.46 Gustave Caillebotte, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1879–80. Oil on canvas, 90 × 115 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Comité Caillebotte, Paris

now I hope my reading of Caravaggio’s picture is starting to seem, if not quite irresistible, at any rate much more plausible—phenomenologically and historically—than when first proposed. In any case, I am now in a position to say something further about Boy Bitten by a Lizard’s significance as a self-portrait for the larger question of the structure and the meaning of Caravaggio’s art.

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Detail from figure 2.1

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L ELEC CTU RR EE TU

Immersion and Specularity To plunge right in, I suggest that what ultimately Boy Bitten by a Lizard (fig. 2.1) portrays—what we are, if not quite invited to see in it, at least enabled to see in it once we understand it as a disguised right-angle self-portrait—is not one but two “moments” in its production. The first is a “moment” of extended duration, of the painter’s engagement in the ongoing, repetitive, partly automatistic act of painting; I call that “moment” immersive, imagining the painter as so caught up, so immersed, in this phase of his work on the painting (or rather, simply, in his work on the painting) as to be less than fully aware of any sharp distinction between the painting and himself. The second is a “moment,” notionally instantaneous, of separating or indeed recoiling from the painting, of becoming detached from it, which is to say of no longer being immersed in work on it but rather of seeing it, taking it in, as if for the first time; I call that “moment” specular, meaning thereby to emphasize the strictly visual or optical relation between the artist-viewer and the image, or image-artifact, that he has just brought into being. The contrast between the two “moments,” one might say, is between the artist’s being “in” the painting (or at least “continuous” with it in the ongoing process by which the painted image was laid down on the canvas) and finding himself “outside” the painting, of discovering that he has become not just detached but distanced from it, in a relationship of mutual facing (also mutual freezing) that first establishes the painted image as an image and with it the painting as a picture, as fundamentally addressed to a viewer—in the first instance, to the artist himself (or herself, needless to say). In Boy Bitten by a Lizard, the second or specular “moment” is dramatized to the extent of largely eclipsing the first, which can be recovered, made intuitable, only by an act of interpretation that cannot quite point to knockdown evidence in its support either inside or outside the painting. By way of staking out further reaches of my argument, I want to claim that precisely such a double or divided relationship between painter and painting—at once immersive and specular, continuous and discontinuous, prior to the act of viewing and thematizing that act with unprecedented violence—lies at the core of much of Caravaggio’s art, including (or especially) his most radically inventive creations.

2.1 Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, ca. 1595. Oil on canvas, 66 × 49.5 cm. National Gallery, London. Bought with the aid of a contribution from the J. Paul Getty Jr. Endowment Fund, 1986

Several very different comparisons are helpful here. The first, roughly contemporary with Boy Bitten by a Lizard, is with a famous episode from canto 16 of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (first published 1581), as well as with one particular pictorial representation of that episode by an artist we have already encountered, Annibale Carracci. The episode concerns the decisive moment in the relations between Rinaldo, bravest of the Christian knights and protagonist of the poem, and Armida, a beautiful sorceress who captured Rinaldo but then fell in love with him and brought him to her palace. On awakening, Rinaldo in turn fell in love with Armida. In the meantime, his absence from the battlefield prevented the advance of the Christian army, and Goffredo—Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the Christian forces—has dispatched two knights, Carlo and Ubaldo, to bring him back to the war. In Giovanni Careri’s paraphrase:

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Before leaving on this mission, Carlo and Ubaldo have been instructed by the good magician of Ascalona. He gives them a magic staff with which to paralyze the wild animals who guard the walls, a plan of the labyrinth that hides the door, and a polished shield in which Rinaldo will see his effeminate image. Having passed the animals and the labyrinth, Carlo and Ubaldo come to a halt in front of the door to contemplate the gold bas-relief which depicts the celebrated tales of men dominated by woman: Hercules and Iole and Anthony and Cleopatra. When they finally arrive at the palace and enter it they find themselves in a marvelous garden, a locus amenus of eternal spring. . . . The warriors, a “rigid and constant couple,” resist the privileged call of the senses even while the animals and plants around them indulge in the heat of passion. This cosmological blooming of sensual love reaches its apogee in the middle of the garden, where the two lovers are lying on the grass. Hidden by plants, Carlo and Ubaldo watch Armida bending over Rinaldo who is lying on her breast, moving his face towards hers. Rinaldo heaves so strong a sigh that the two voyeurs are fearful of seeing his soul leave him and enter the soul of his beloved. To this figure of the imminent incorporation of the lover into the beloved, Tasso adds the figure of the stamping of the beloved’s portrait in the lover’s soul: From the lover’s side there hung a crystal glass, shining and smooth—strange thing for him to wear. He rose, and held it out between his hands, in the rites of Love the chosen minister. She with eyes laughing, he with eyes ablaze, in different objects see one object there: she sees herself in the mirror, while he spies himself in the calm reflection of her eyes. stanza 20

Careri’s reading of this scene emphasizes Rinaldo’s “feminization” owing to his mirroring of, in that sense identification with, the beautiful Armida. (The slight ambiguity as to exactly how we are to imagine Rinaldo “spying himself in the calm reflection of her eyes” is also present in the Italian.) And in fact Carlo and Ubaldo summon Rinaldo back to himself by showing him his reflection in their mirrorshield, at which point, Tasso writes: He turned his glance upon the brilliant shield and saw himself for what he was, how tressed with dainty touches, reeking of perfume, his hair in curls and tassels on his vest, his dangling sword effeminate at his side, prettified—not to mention all the rest, for it’s a dandy ornament he bore, not a ferocious instrument of war! stanza 30

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It at once turns out that Rinaldo “could not long sustain” the sight of his own reflection; he looks down in shame, and within a few stanzas prepares to return with his companions to the war (“he flung his toys and bangles off for good / pathetic emblems of his servitude, / and was in haste to go, and through the crooked / confusion of the maze he exited” [stanzas 34–35]). For Careri, the episode is a crux in his interpretation of the poem together with all of its pictorial renderings during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as (what he calls) a “ ‘civilization object,’ in which the figures of the affective experience have been ritualized and thus ‘civilized.’ ” Following Norbert Elias, Careri holds that “the process of civilization of courtier society implies a growing internalizing of the control of affect”; what takes place in the episode, in his account, is a process in which “the experience of himself as a woman is necessary to constitute the masculine identity of the hero,” that is, “to find the measure of the control of his affects that he has to oppose to the consistent danger of abandoning himself to pleasurable desires, here figured as a process of feminization. In the court society of the counter-reformation the border of this self-control is a frontier on which a strong tension and a continuous work of reinforcement is exercised.” No doubt Careri is right in terms of his argument. However, my own interest in the episode focuses on the contrast between the two devices that Careri aptly calls the “love mirror” and the “shield mirror,” or rather between what I would redescribe as Rinaldo’s immersion in Armida’s beauty (also in the sight of her immersion in the mirror image of her beauty) and the disruption of that state by the onset of a specular relation to his own (feminized) reflected image in the “shield mirror” brought to the garden by Carlo and Ubaldo solely for that purpose. Put another way, Rinaldo at the start of the episode is himself a “love mirror,” which is to say a living instance of the “moment” of immersion: “O turn,” said he, “turn,” said the cavalier, “to me those blessed eyes with which you bless! You may not know it, but in my desire lies the true portrait of your loveliness. Its wondrous form shows in the crystal’s art but truer in the mirror of my heart.” stanza 21

In contrast the “shield mirror” surprises him with an image of himself (as feminized) that produces precisely the distancing effect that I have associated with the “moment” of specularity, and my suggestion is that some measure of the fascination that this episode evidently held for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers and artists had to do not only with the struggle between feminizing love on the one side and the masculine code of honor and Catholic morality on the other but also with the thematizing of the two antithetical but intimately related “moments” that I have claimed to find in Boy Bitten by a Lizard.

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2.2 Annibale Carracci, Rinaldo and Armida, 1601–2. Oil on canvas, 166 × 237 cm. Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples

In a recent book, Careri considers depictions of the Rinaldo-Armida episode by Ludovico Carracci, Annibale Carracci, Domenichino, Mattia Preti, and Francesco Mattei. The most remarkable of these, as he recognizes, is Annibale’s canvas in Naples (1601–2; fig. 2.2), in which the two lovers’ mutual immersion knows no limit, at the same time as perhaps the most extreme feature of Rinaldo’s feminization (in my reading, not Careri’s), the isolating or framing of his left breast and nipple beneath his left wrist, has the effect of breaking the mood of amatory identification for the viewer. That is, the breast and nipple, once one becomes aware of them, are so startling—all the more so in that Armida’s breasts are hidden by Rinaldo’s supine body—that it is as if the viewer thereby undergoes a version of the “moment” of specularity and distancing that the episode as a whole dramatizes. Hence, perhaps, the minor role given to the twinned Carlo and Ubaldo looking on from the bushes to the left—the viewer’s distancing in effect anticipates that of the hero. (This is not the first and it will not be the last time a painting by Annibale comes in for interpretive scrutiny in these lectures.) The second, more extended comparison I want to make is with works by the nineteenth-century French Realist painter Gustave Courbet. It is often said that the

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modern rediscovery of Caravaggio took place under the sign of Courbet’s Realism, which in the early twentieth century (and, for that matter, in much subsequent literature) was equated purely and simply with a thoroughgoing naturalism. My book Courbet’s Realism, building on the conclusions of an earlier one, Absorption and Theatricality, puts forward a very different account of Courbet’s enterprise, and it is largely against the background of that account that I have come to understand Caravaggio in the terms so far put forward in these lectures. Briefly, I see Courbet as one of two culminating figures, the other being Edouard Manet, in a central antitheatrical tradition that arose within French painting and art criticism shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century. At the core of that tradition was the demand, first articulated theoretically by the great philosophe and pioneer art critic and theorist (and theorist of the stage) Denis Diderot, that a painting—more precisely, an easel painting—somehow establish the metaphysical illusion that the beholder does not exist, that there is no one standing before the canvas. In the work of a succession of important painters from Jean-Baptiste Greuze to Jean-François Millet, this was to be accomplished by closing the representation to the beholder, above all by depicting figures wholly engrossed or absorbed in actions or states of mind and body, and who therefore were perceived as unaware of being beheld (as though that apparent unawareness, that perfect absorption of the figures in the world of the representation, were experienced as curtaining off or walling off the representation from the beholder). By the 1840s and 1850s, however, the resort to absorption—and a fortiori to pictorial drama as a heightened form of absorption—increasingly fell short of producing the desired effect; the figures in question were increasingly perceived not as truly engaged or absorbed in what they were doing but as merely wishing to appear so, which of course utterly destroyed the ontological illusion of their “aloneness” relative to the beholder that was called for by Diderot’s antitheatrical ideal. (The topic of absorption will return in force in lecture 3.) In Courbet’s art of the 1840s and after, which I see as responding in an ingenious and unexpected way to the failure of the Diderotian project in its classic form, the issue of theatricality is differently engaged: by a strategy of the all-but-corporeal merging on the part of the painter—identified now as the painting’s first beholder, or painter-beholder—with the work before him, the painting being realized under his brush. At least with respect to that beholder (the painter-beholder or artist-viewer), the painting would ideally escape beholding completely; there would be no one before it looking on because the beholder who had been there was now incorporated or disseminated in the work itself. One early sign of that endeavor was Courbet’s reliance throughout the 1840s on the genre of the self-portrait. In a strictly conventional sense, the self-portrait begins by putting the painter in the picture. What makes Courbet’s self-portraits unique are the measures he took to convert that conventional relationship into a quasi-literal, quasi-corporeal one, that is, to project himself as if bodily into the painting on which he was working. For example, in the

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early and uncharacteristic Desperate Man (1843?; fig. 2.3), the aim is one of aggressively, explosively, closing the gap—undoing the separation—between artist-sitter and artist-viewer, as if the two could be made to coincide and merge in the immediate vicinity of the picture surface. In another early work, the delicate Self-Portrait with Black Dog (1844; fig. 2.4), the artist-sitter’s bodily orientation allows his right hand to be portrayed in a way that subtly suggests an analogy not only with the orientation but also with the activity of the artist-viewer’s right hand wielding a brush, here figured by a pipe. Moreover, the landscape vista to the right can almost be seen as a picture on an easel, foreshadowing the central group in the Painter’s Studio (1855), while the partial fusion of Courbet and dog serves as a natural metaphor for the desired merging of artist-viewer and painting (also for their essential separateness). Or again, in the most important self-portrait of the 1840s, the much-darkened Man with the Leather Belt (1845–46?; fig. 2.5), the artist-sitter’s dramatically lit and sculpturally powerful right hand and wrist at the center of the composition have been turned back into the picture space, with the result that they are now wholly congruent with—they may be imagined virtually to coincide with—what we take to have been the orientation and indeed the action of the artist-viewer’s right hand and arm as they reached toward and in a sense into the canvas bearing a brush loaded with paint. In the Man with the Leather Belt, too, the otherwise unmotivated action of the artist-sitter’s left hand gripping his belt may be read as a disguised or metaphorical image of the action of the artist-viewer’s left hand holding his palette. To give no more than the briefest indication of the subsequent evolution of Courbet’s art, his Realist canvases of the late 1840s and 1850s can largely be understood as expanded and implicit self-portraits of the painter at work on the painting. So, for example, in The Stonebreakers (1849, formerly in Dresden, destroyed in World War II; fig. 2.6), I see the young man depicted largely from the rear and bearing a basket of stones not simply as a figure for or as personifying the painter’s left hand gripping a palette but almost as continuous with that hand and the effort it put forth, just as I read the older man raising a hammer almost as continuous with the painter’s right hand wielding the brush with which the picture was painted. Note in this connection how the depiction of left and right within the Stonebreakers—of the palette-hand and the brush-hand, as it were—is congruent with left and right “outside” it—with the left-right orientation of the painter at work on the canvas. This is a general feature of Courbet’s art, and its significance with respect to Caravaggio will become clear as we proceed. It follows that Courbet and Caravaggio may be seen as pursuing very nearly antithetical enterprises. Whereas in my account Courbet (as painter-beholder of his paintings) strives to achieve a relationship of quasi-corporeal merging with the painting on which he is working, Caravaggio in the second, more conspicuously thematized “moment” in the production of his works finds himself compelled to dramatize the very shock of separation and withdrawal from the representation, thereby

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2.3 Gustave Courbet, Desperate Man, 1843? Oil on canvas, 45 × 54 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of Conseil Investissement Art, BNP Paribas

2.4 Gustave Courbet, SelfPortrait with Black Dog, 1844. Oil on canvas, 46 × 55 cm. Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit-Palais

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2.5 Gustave Courbet, Man with the Leather Belt, 1845– 46? Oil on canvas, 100 × 82 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris

2.6 Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849. Oil on canvas, 165 × 257 cm. Formerly Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (destroyed in Second World War)

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establishing the latter, not exactly as theatrical (the Diderotian and post-Diderotian problematic of theatricality and antitheatricality does not yet apply; more on this further on), but in a new and highly polarized relation to the general issue of spectatordom (that is what it means to call the second “moment” a specular one). It therefore makes perfect sense, as I demonstrate in Courbet’s Realism, that the basic terms of Courbet’s project led him consistently to avoid or minimize effects of violence; in contrast, Caravaggio’s project drove him again and again to produce paintings as violent, not to say brutal, as any in the history of European art. In keeping with this difference of aim, we find in Courbet’s and Caravaggio’s respective self-portraits antithetical relations to the use of a mirror. For Courbet, the ideal would be to bypass the mirror entirely by painting himself directly into the picture before him; as I observe in Courbet’s Realism, his most characteristic selfportraits give the impression that a mirror might have been used to provide information about his features but not at all to guide the movements of his brush across the canvas. One marker of this is Courbet’s evident desire to avoid both mirror reversal of right and left and its structural opposite, the reversal of mirror reversal, which is to say the “normalization” of right and left, in favor of what I have just called relations of congruence of right and left between the painted image and his own bodily orientation, the better to facilitate his virtual merging with the painting.1 We have seen how this works in the case of the Stonebreakers. In the Man with the Leather Belt, the turning back of the sitter’s right hand into the picture space allows it to be aligned with the painter-beholder’s right hand, as I have also remarked; but Courbet was able to devise no comparable solution for the sitter’s left hand, which with respect to the impulse toward merger—as an image of the painter-beholder’s left or palette-hand—is exactly where it should not be (at the lower right). As regards the treatment of right and left, Courbet’s breakthrough to the large, ostensibly more impersonal Realist canvases of the late 1840s and 1850s enabled him to be truer to his actual bodily orientation than had been possible within the conventions of the self-portrait. In contrast, Caravaggio’s self-portraits, once they are understood as 1. I know of three exceptions to this. The first two, both of which are discussed in Courbet’s Realism, are The Cellist (1847) and the fine charcoal drawing, The Painter at His Easel (1847; see pp. 81–83, 95–96, and 312, n. 170). The third, not mentioned in that book, is a vigorous charcoal drawing from ca. 1847 (fig. 2.7) in which the artist-sitter, seated largely sideways, supports with his right hand a sketchbook or writing board that one assumes bears the drawing “itself” as he pivots his head and upper body toward the viewer (“originally” toward a mirror). Presumably he is making the drawing in question with his left hand, which we do not see. But note the series of heavily marked curved lines in the lower right quadrant of the sheet: I take these to indicate the sort of effort toward quasi-bodily merging with the work being made that I associate more broadly with Courbet’s art. Indeed, the combination of mirror reflection plus a thematization of bodiliness looks forward to the drawings by Fantin-Latour of around 1860 that I touched on toward the end of lecture 1. See Gustave Courbet, exh. cat. (New York, 2008), cat. 14, p. 117, entry by Laurence de Cars.

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2.7 Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait with a Sketchbook, 1847. Charcoal on paper, 45 × 34 cm. Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques (fonds Orsay)

such, seem openly to acknowledge the presence of a mirror, both by the character of the figures’ gazes and by the painter’s evident acceptance of, though not in all cases insistence upon, mirror reversal. In fact, it is tempting to associate the mirror image with what I have been calling specularity and the painting with its opposite, but despite the terminological connection between mirrors and specularity (a “speculum” is a kind of mirror), the temptation must be resisted: first, because there is no reason to think that the painter in the first of the two “moments” I have evoked was not as immersed in the contemplation of his mirror image as he was in the act of rendering that image in the painting; and, second, because in the end it was, of course, the painted image whose separation from both painter and beholder Caravaggio in my account found it necessary to dramatize and thereby to enforce. And yet a distinction between mirroring and painting, or perhaps simply a sense of the real or implied presence of a mirror image “within” the painted one, seems somehow to bear on, to be entangled with, the opposition between immersion and specularity that I have tried to show is at work in Boy Bitten by a Lizard. It is therefore intensely interesting to me that in an important essay Charles Dempsey has qualified Caravaggio’s naturalist or realist style as in decisive respects mirrorlike. Extrapolating from an article by Chiara Gauna that contrasts two seventeenth-century Spanish conceptions of naturalism, one generalizing or

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“macular” (or “maculated”—somewhat rough, painterly, even patchlike) and the other particularizing or “specular” (meaning mirrorlike; not the term I use in opposition to “immersive”), the first associated with late Titian and the second with Caravaggio and early Velásquez, Dempsey writes that the specular style “produces the effect of light reflecting, mirror-like, from the smooth surface of the painting itself, and hence of an actual world in a moment of flux.” As we shall see, Caravaggio’s paintings often thematize reflection as such; I shall refer more than once to Dempsey’s article in what follows. Of course, to claim that Courbet and Caravaggio are very nearly antithetical figures in these regards is also to say that they were concerned with intimately related issues. For one thing, the self-portrait, not just in its own right but equally importantly in the form of a disguised or inexplicit mode of self-representation, occupies a privileged place in both their oeuvres. Because they are the two arch-realists in all Western painting, this is, to put it mildly, deeply thought provoking. For another, while I do not quite wish to say that the first, immersive “moment” in the Caravaggian problematic corresponds exactly to Courbet’s ideal of quasi-corporeal merging, it nevertheless makes sense to think of Courbet in the Stonebreakers and other Realist canvases as striving hyperbolically to make a painting that is never wholly given up to specularity, not to mention that it seems plausible to describe the man and boy in that picture as immersed in their respective tasks, which I have interpreted as representing the two-handed act of painting. It is striking, too, that in works by both artists the bottom few inches of the canvas, which is where the question of continuity versus discontinuity between the world of the painting and the world “this” side of it becomes most pressing, is a zone of particular sensitivity. Indeed, we might note the similarities between the treatment of fruit and drapery in the extreme foreground of Boy Bitten by a Lizard and the handling of leather-bound portfolio and related elements in the equivalent sector of Man with the Leather Belt. In addition, both painters favored compositions in which a relatively small number of figures are depicted in close proximity to the picture surface; both worked on a dark ground and made frequent use of effects of strong chiaroscuro; and both were criticized in their own time for their apparent failure to master the depiction of action. My final comparison calls for some advance explanation. What I have been calling two “moments” in the production of Caravaggio’s paintings are not exactly to be thought of as succeeding one another in time. We might say that his paintings encourage us to consider them in that light, and it may be that it is only with the aid of a temporal metaphor that the polarity in question can be conceptualized at all. But the distinction I am after is structural rather than temporal and is best imagined as potentially in play throughout the production and perhaps also the contemplation of Caravaggio’s paintings. In this respect the “moments” of immersion and specularity are not unlike those in some psychoanalytic scenarios, to which they bear a certain relation. So, for example, Leo Bersani in Baudelaire and Freud remarks about a

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“masochistic” scenario he has just formulated out of elements in Sigmund Freud’s “Economic Problem of Masochism” and “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”: The chronology is false because of the intersubjective nature of the entire fantasy process. In the wish to master the other, we immediately encounter a resistance which redirects the desire for mastery onto the self. It seems likely that we experience simultaneously the desire to control the other, the desire to control the self, the desire to be controlled by the other, the masochistic pleasure in being mastered, and the masochistic excitement of identifying with the other’s suffering in our sadistic violence toward him. The different steps of a process must already be accomplished at the moment the process “begins”; the various representations along a line of fantasy are merely the spelling out of an intentionality sufficiently dense to inspire the articulations of a fantasy-drama.

Also in a psychoanalytic vein but still more pertinent because evoking a problematic whose outcome might roughly be analogized with the “moment” of specularity (“that personage is in the painting, I [the painter, the first viewer] am me”) is Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s insistence that hypnotic or (a key term for him) mimetic identification should be understood as a “blind” relationship or rapport that, in a crucial sense, is prior to the existence (the “birth” or “rebirth”) of the autonomous, spectating subject. Put slightly differently, in such a rapport the very distinction between subject and object is suspended or dissolved, “since that ‘object’ is ‘me.’ ” As BorchJacobsen explains in his pathbreaking book, The Freudian Subject: In this connection, we must not let ourselves be misled by Freud’s genetic presentation of the concept of narcissism: narcissism does not precede the relation to the other, and likewise the delusion of grandeur in narcissism is not a return to the original solitude of a monad walled in upon itself. There is only one “stage,” and it is that of the primary opening (the narcissistic wound), which opens me to myself as (the) other. So let us not dream, with Freud, of an ego whose existence would precede sociality (or—and it is the same thing—a sociality that would relate already-constituted subjects to each other). This would be to theorize with delusion, to speculate in line with desire. For narcissism is precisely that: the violent affirmation of the ego, the violent desire to annul that primitive alteration that makes me desire (myself) as the mimetic double [i.e., as the identificatory “object”]. Here we find a sort of instantaneous undertow that makes desire forgetful of its own origin, as [René] Girard sees quite clearly: desire is mimetic and by the same token narcissistic, and that means that it launches headlong into a systematic, unreflective forgetfulness of what institutes it.

The next paragraph begins: “It follows that desire is love of oneself, as Freud writes [who also terms that love “homosexual”]: self-love, love of the proper. It follows too that it is organized as a vehement rejection of all resemblance, all mimesis. To recognize that I resemble the other, that I resemble myself in him even in my own desire,

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would be tantamount to admitting the inadmissible: that I am not myself and that my most proper being is over there, in that double who enrages me.” My last comparison, in other words, is between the “moment” of immersion and mimetic rapport as theorized by Borch-Jacobsen, which by its very nature is affectively ambivalent; “the ‘rapport,’ being at the limit a rapport of total identification,” he writes, “oscillates permanently between a fascinated assimilation to the other and a hate-driven assimilation of the other (who is thus rejected as other)” (cf. BorchJacobsen’s reference, quoted above, to “that double who enrages me”). In Freud’s somewhat milder formulation, cited by Borch-Jacobsen, “it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal.” And at the point of someone’s or something’s removal—the boy-bitten-by-the-lizard’s, the artist-sitter’s, the painting’s—the specular subject is “born” (more precisely, “born again”), and the painting, the specular artifact, is released into history. It is evident that the several comparisons just sketched differ significantly from each other. The first, with the episode from Tasso, is meant to show that there existed a roughly contemporary (actually slightly earlier) major work of Italian literature in which a crucial episode dramatized fairly closely the sort of contrast between “moments” of immersion and specularity that I have claimed to find in Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Similarly, Annibale’s Rinaldo and Armida, based on that episode and painted during the first years of the seventeenth century, contrives to produce an effect of distancing and specularity “within” an otherwise seamless evocation of the “moment” of amatory immersion. I think of both comparisons as contextual in a historical sense, a description that also applies to my remarks in lecture 1 about the two phases or “moments” in play in Carlo Dolci’s “double” Self-Portrait in the Uffizi (fig. 2.8). Granted, Dolci’s picture was made more than three-quarters of a century after Boy Bitten by a Lizard. But the clarity, almost the literalness, with which it evokes the “moments” in question gives it something of the force of a retrospective commentary on the earlier work. Moreover, a preparatory drawing by Dolci in the Uffizi goes further than the colored drawing in the Self-Portrait toward suggesting what the “moment” of immersion in the act of painting might actually have looked like (fig. 2.9). Or indeed, if we take seriously the intimation in the preparatory drawing of rapt immersion giving way to dawning surprise, toward evoking the transition between “moments” of immersion and specularity or perhaps their fleeting and unstable coexistence in an almost unimaginable “moment” of its own. Viewed in that light, the melancholic mood of the artist-sitter holding and, in effect, exhibiting the colored drawing in the Uffizi canvas conveys a sense of the aftermath of an intensely identificatory rapport. (I shall have more to say about Dolci, a fascinating artist, in the conclusion to this book.) The comparison with Courbet’s project of merger is more ontological in nature, that is, it holds that the enterprise of the greatest realist painter of the nineteenth century crucially involved an antithetical dynamic to the one I see operating in Boy

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2.8 Carlo Dolci, Self-Portrait, 1674. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

2.9 Carlo Dolci, preparatory drawing for Self-Portrait. Galleria degli Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Florence, inv. n. 1173F

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Bitten by a Lizard. This helps flesh out, by contrast, my account of that painting even as it raises the possibility, to be pursued further as we proceed, that Caravaggio and Courbet may be seen as belonging to a single, overarching historical development. So there is a historical dimension to the second comparison as well, just as the first is by no means devoid of ontological implications. Finally, the comparison with psychoanalytic theory, specifically with BorchJacobsen’s revisionist account of mimetic identification and counteridentification (the two are inextricable), goes at least some way toward suggesting what sort of “psychology”—what conception of the human subject—might be most in line with the reading of Caravaggio’s painting that I have been putting forward to this point.

There is more to say about Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Take, for example, the glass vase filled with water and containing a single rose, along with some small white flowers, in the right foreground (fig. 2.10). The dazzlingly painted vase bears toward its right a complex structure of reflections that at first glance may seem to be at odds with the rest of the composition: whereas the dominant flow of light in the painting as a whole is from the upper left toward the lower right (the vase casts a shadow in that direction), the reflections appear to imply the existence of a window or skylight not to the left, where logically it should be, but to the right, where no light is coming from. But in fact the reflections are consistent with the presence of a light source at the upper left (this can be verified by simple experiment), which is to say that they are a masterly expression of Caravaggio’s commitment to a new, optically acute mode of realism that we have learned to think of as aligned with the scientific interests of the Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, in whose palace the painter then lived. But despite their accuracy, or rather owing to the way in which Boy Bitten by a Lizard makes a point of that accuracy, the reflections also inevitably direct the viewer’s attention toward the right, beyond the framing edge, where in my reading the excluded canvas is to be found. And this suggests that the reflections are perhaps to be understood not simply as an index of a new “scientific” realism—that Del Monte’s world touched on that of Galileo is not the least interesting fact about it—but also as acknowledging, even compensating for, the act of exclusion. This is even more plainly the import of the shadowy, jagged-ended, nonrealistic strip of drapery that fairly flies off the boy’s left shoulder in the direction of the right-hand framing edge. By the same token, the marvelously delicate rose surrounded by dark green leaves that obscures the neck of the vase even as it seems to draw the light to its own internal articulations may perhaps be seen as figuring, if not the first immersive “moment” as such, at any rate a nonspecular relation to the rose as a motif—as if we are invited to imagine an act of painting that could render that motif only by “blindly” submitting to it, losing itself in its folds. (I am interpreting at full stretch here.) Note, too, the obvious analogy between the other rose behind the boy’s ear and, precisely,

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2.10 Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, detail of vase with rose

the boy’s ear, a crucial body part in Caravaggio’s pictures. An interesting and, to my mind, highly suggestive fact that has emerged from the study of X-radiographs of Caravaggio’s canvases is that he habitually began painting heads by depicting ears, not eyes—as if to forestall, to defer as long as possible, a dynamic of the gaze. And in general in his paintings ears are given fully as much prominence as eyes. (Caravaggio’s antithesis in this respect would be Frans Hals, for whom the imagination of an outward gaze from the untouched canvas appears to have been primary, initiatory.) This too may seem to align the compound motif of the rose/ear with the realm of the nonspecular. Again, however, matters are not so clear-cut. The boy’s silent scream, mentioned by Baglione, is an “aural” impression that contributes powerfully to the ultimate effect of separation, which is to say of specularity at its most vivid, freezing, Medusizing. Two other works by Caravaggio of the mid-1590s that engage with these concerns are the Sick Bacchus or Self-Portrait as Bacchus (ca. 1593–94; fig. 2.11) in the Borghese Gallery in Rome and the much-restored Musicians (1595–96; fig. 2.12) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of the Sick Bacchus I will simply say that the absence of an extended or upraised left arm and hand in no way tells against the basic terms of the reading I have put forward with regard to Boy Bitten by a Lizard; on the contrary, partly on the strength of that reading, I am led to see in the conspicuous absence (in the conspicuousness of the absence) of such an arm and hand simply another disguise for or distortion of the reflected image of the artist-viewer’s extended right arm and hand at work on the painting. It comes as something of a jolt when one eventually notices that the young man’s left hand as well as his right is clutching

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the bunch of grapes; even then, however, it is impossible to make this observation tell in one’s response to the picture. The left hand does not seem to belong there. As for the Musicians, a work I shall return to in lecture 4, the young man holding a cornetto and whose body turns toward the right while he looks directly out of the painting has been persuasively identified as the twenty-five- or twenty-six-year-old Caravaggio, but what I want to draw attention to is that the young man’s bodily orientation, the direction of his gaze, and of course the cornetto itself (as a stand-in for a paintbrush) all invite us to see him as still another right-angle mirror representation of the artist-viewer in the act of painting. (Whether Caravaggio actually painted that figure using the right-angle dispositif cannot be known; what seems clear is that he wished to associate his image in that picture with the right-angle structure that he had already used at least twice.) Later on I shall suggest that the young man, evidently a violinist, studying a musical score and depicted from the rear in the right foreground bears a relationship of congruence to the orientation of the embodied painter (both violinist and painter face into the painting), which is to say that in the Musicians, as in other works by Caravaggio, the painter is at least doubly “present,” as mirror image and as corporealized surrogate or double, without there being the least hint of tension between the two—a point the full significance of which must be left undeveloped for the time being.

I now want to turn briefly to several other works by Caravaggio by way both of amplifying my claims so far and of foreshadowing others to come. Consider, for example, perhaps the most compelling of the early half-length single-figure paintings, the Uffizi Bacchus of around 1596–97 (fig. 2.13). A young man of distinctly “soft” appearance reclines on one elbow on pillows covered with grayish white drapery, an arrangement presumably meant to replicate the setting of a classical symposium— but of course the artist could not resist showing us a bit of pillow with its light blue ticking, thus deliberately undercutting the classical effect. The young man himself, who gazes composedly at the viewer with slightly inclined head, is only partly draped in a “toga” similar to those of the sick Bacchus and the musician, which is to say that his right shoulder and arm and much of his chest are bare; he wears a garland of grapes and leaves in his improbably dense black curls, and with his left arm and hand extends a shallow-bowl goblet of red wine toward the viewer. The fingers of his right hand seem to be playing with the black bow of a sash. On the grayish tablelike surface before him sits a basket of fruit, many of which are blemished and overripe (the pomegranate, for example, has already burst), along with, to the left, a carafe of wine from which presumably the wine in the goblet has just been poured (the surface of the wine in the carafe seems still to be in motion, with tiny bubbles at its circumference). (The basket of fruit is one of no less than four in Caravaggio’s paintings of these years.) Judging by the protagonist’s facial features, the Bacchus is

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2.11 Caravaggio, Sick Bacchus (Bacchino Malato), ca. 1593–94. Oil on canvas, 67 × 53 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome, inv. 534

2.12 Caravaggio, The Musicians, ca. 1595–96. Oil on canvas, 92 × 118.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1952 (52.81)

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2.13 Caravaggio, Bacchus, ca. 1596–97. Oil on canvas, 95 × 85 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 531

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not literally a self-portrait, though it has sometimes been taken for one. But it has always been viewed as close in spirit to Boy Bitten by a Lizard, and if we think of it in the context of the general question of self-representation with the aid of a mirror, imagining the mirror this time to have been not at right angles to the canvas but in effect as coinciding and in a sense competing with it, we realize that Bacchus’s gesture of extending the goblet of wine toward the beholder may be seen as a disguised mirror representation of the painter’s (the artist-viewer’s) right arm and hand reaching directly toward the picture surface and wielding the brush with which the picture was painted. In fact, the “original” location of the mirror or even whether a mirror was actually used is unknowable; my point is that unlike the Boy Bitten by a Lizard and related works, the Bacchus does not imply a right-angle relation of mirror to canvas but rather suggests an impossible conflation of the two. Moreover, if we look more closely at the arm, hand, and wineglass (fig. 2.14), we are struck by what appears to be (what appears to be; I shall come back to this) a pattern of concentric ripples on the surface of the wine, a striking detail that brilliantly evokes the movement of Bacchus’s arm and hand toward the viewer. Mina Gregori indeed has described the ripples as “enhancing the effect of instantaneousness,” and one sees what she means. But I am impressed by something else as well: the strong visual analogy between the seeming ripples in the wine and the concentric folds in the drapery covering Bacchus’s left arm, an analogy that suggests a certain continuity between the two, as if the ripples are to be seen (are also to be seen) as prolonging the gesture of the arm—indefinitely, as it were—rather than as simply or univocally signifying the freezing of that gesture in an effect of pure instantaneousness. To be more exact, and recalling the distinctly noninstantaneous tenor of the depicted Matisse’s action in his Self-Portrait of 1918, I see the analogy between the ripples and the folds as evoking the protracted or repetitive act of applying paint to canvas, which is to say that I read Bacchus’s gesture—not his figure as a whole, but the action of his left arm and hand—as evoking what I have been calling the “moment” of immersion or continuity (of prolongation, one might also say). All this may seem to go quite far, but there is a further consideration whose import is very nearly incalculable. I have said that there appear to be ripples on the surface of the wine in the goblet; in actuality, what has been depicted—through the wine, not on its surface—are concentric or rather parallel spirals in the glass bowl of the goblet itself. In one sense this relates the goblet all the more closely to the concentric folds in Bacchus’s drapery. And, of course, the dominant impression conveyed is indeed of ripples on the surface of the wine, as Gregori’s remarks attest. But the tension between that impression and what on closer viewing turn out to be the facts of the case introduces a level of complication that goes beyond what I have said so far. At the very least, the tension suggests a split or division within the painted image analogous to that between “moments” of immersion and specularity, though once again it is impossible simply to align the “ripples” and spirals respectively with the one or the

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2.14 Caravaggio, Bacchus, detail of hand and wineglass

other. The ripples suggest instantaneousness, as Gregori says, but they can also (as I have indicated) be taken to suggest a kind of continuousness or prolongation that I have associated with immersion. By the same token, the spirals being “frozen” can seem to line up with the specular “moment,” but the very fact that they can be observed only by close and committed looking works against the distancing that specularity typically entails. In both cases, the opposed readings are equally plausible, a state of affairs I take to be paradigmatic of the viewer’s relation to Caravaggio’s art in a wider sense. One other, extremely important feature of the Bacchus must be mentioned for which no adequate illustration exists. When the painting was cleaned in the early 1920s, a small head was discovered reflected in the convex surface of the carafe at the lower left. According to Gregori, “the reflected head is that of a male, who wears a contemporary costume with a white collar; there also seems to be a painting seen from the back, as though on an easel.” For obvious reasons, the figure of the man has been considered a self-portrait, but what is equally important is that the reflection may be taken as acknowledging not just the self-portrait character of the representation as a whole but also that what ultimately is portrayed in the Bacchus is the production of the Bacchus, with everything that that implies. Once again it is tempting to associate the reflection with the “moment” of specularity (perhaps contrasting the carafe of wine with the goblet, which up to a point feels right), but again it is a temptation to be resisted, in the first place because it too is discernible only at very close range and in the second because the painting on the easel Gregori saw in the reflection was turned away from the viewer, as if not ready to be viewed.

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Here I want to propose a generalization about the internal structure of Caravaggio’s art, which I see as comprising a pair of constitutive polarities (more exactly, several such pairs; I shall be proposing others as we proceed). The polarities I have in mind at this point are: between “moments” of immersion and specularity, or between the immersive and the specular as such; and between painting and mirroring or painting and reflecting. Crucially, however, the respective terms of those polarities cannot simply be aligned with one another, the immersive “moment” lining up with painting and the specular “moment” with mirroring, or vice versa (any more than the seeming ripples and the material spirals in Bacchus’s goblet could be lined up unequivocally with either immersion or specularity). Rather, I see the two sets of terms as combining and interacting in subtle and unpredictable ways, sometimes differently in different portions of a single picture—the Bacchus, for example. If this is correct, it would go a long way toward explaining why Caravaggio’s art, despite having been the focus of intense critical and theoretical scrutiny, has proved so resistant to sustained pictorial analysis. To underscore the obsessive nature of the structures we have been tracing, and also by way of indicating how hard it has been for students of Caravaggio to break the spell of individual images so as to grasp structural resemblances that are in a sense obvious between works of widely disparate subject matter, I want to juxtapose to the Bacchus probably the most famous—certainly the most often reproduced—painting in Caravaggio’s oeuvre, David with the Head of Goliath in the Borghese Gallery (1606; fig. 2.15). A word about dating: at present a scholarly consensus holds that the David belongs to the last phase of Caravaggio’s career, the years 1609–10, toward the end of his second stay in Naples. However, several distinguished scholars, Keith Christiansen and David Stone among them, favor a date around 1606, most likely in the months following the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni in a street fight in Rome, either just before the artist’s first visit to Naples or shortly after his arrival there. My intuition is to agree with Christiansen and Stone, though I am under no illusion that my views on this matter carry weight (nor should they). Fortunately, precisely when the David was painted has no direct bearing on my argument. What matters is that from the moment Tomassoni bled to death from Caravaggio’s swordthrust, the artist, who had often previously been in trouble with the legal authorities, was subject to the gravest punishment, including decapitation, had he been taken on papal territory. Accordingly, he soon found himself on the run, with stays outside of Rome and then in Naples, Malta, Sicily, and Naples again before the botched attempt to return to Rome that ended with his death from fever at Porto Ercole in midJuly 1610. The David thus either prefigures or looks back upon the tragic downward course of the rest of his life. Simply considering the Bacchus and the David together makes several points. First, it is clear that we are dealing with two versions of a single figural dispositif. The principal action in both pictures is essentially the same: the protagonist extends

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2.15 Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, 1606. Oil on canvas, 125 × 101 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome

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his foreshortened left arm and hand toward the picture surface; the arm is lightly bent at the elbow, and the hand holds an object—a goblet of wine, the severed head of Goliath—in a manner that explicitly (in the Bacchus) or implicitly (in the David) proffers that object to the viewer. By now it hardly needs to be said that I interpret David’s gesture as I do Bacchus’s, as a disguised mirror representation of the act of applying paint to canvas, though there is also an important sense in which the head of Goliath may be taken as standing for the painting itself, or rather the painting as specular artifact, cut off from the immersive activity that brought it into being. Unlike the Bacchus, however, the David (as was alluded to in lecture 1) contains an unmistakable self-portrait: the head of Goliath bears Caravaggio’s features. This further confirms the intuition I have been pursuing to the effect that Caravaggio’s selfportraits often find ways to suggest the immersive and specular “moments” in their making—or, to put this somewhat differently, it confirms the notion that immersion and specularity emerge in those canvases as crucial parameters of the artist’s “subjectivity,” in whatever terms the latter is finally construed. (I have proposed that BorchJacobsen’s revisionist account of mimetic identification offers a powerful model of what those terms might be.) And this suggests in turn that Caravaggio’s obsession with images of decapitation in his art, starting with Judith and Holofernes (ca. 1599; fig. 5.7), may be understood as thematizing the specular “moment” as such, a “moment” I have characterized as one of separation, distancing, and discontinuity and which already in Boy Bitten by a Lizard is associated with violence, pain, and shock. Another difference between the Bacchus and the David is that in the latter neither David’s nor Goliath’s face looks out toward the viewer. Instead, both faces seem as if absorbed in painful thought: David actually—nothing in the painting is more remarkable than his expression of sorrowful contemplation (fig. 2.16) as he gazes at the fruit of his action; Goliath—how to describe not his expression so much as its existential modality? We recognize that he has been killed (twice over: by the stone that entered his forehead and by the severing of his head), and yet there is something in his look that evokes the prolongation of a thought, or perhaps what we are made to sense is simply the relaying, by his open, unseeing eyes, of the youthful David’s tenderly aversive gaze. Lecture 3 will be devoted to a consideration of Caravaggio’s epochal invention of a poetics of absorption as a central resource for painting. For the moment, though, let his David with the Head of Goliath stand as a tour de force of the representation of absorption even after violent death. Or, to go just a bit further: Goliath’s expression might also be said to “reflect” David’s, or perhaps it is David’s that does the “reflecting,” as is hinted at by the mirrorlike gleam of David’s naked sword. (Weapons and armor in Caravaggio’s paintings often connote mirroring—hence the artist’s predilection for gleaming armor and weaponry in scenes where both would seem less than inevitable.) And this is to say that even as David with the Head of Goliath allegorizes the specular “moment” of the handing over of the painting to the realm of visuality, it also allegorizes the inseparableness

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2.16 Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, detail of head of David

of that “moment” from the notionally prior one of immersion, here associated with the mutually “reflective” rapport between the two antagonists. I shall have more to say about the relation of absorption to immersion further on in this book. Various other works invite discussion at this juncture, none more urgently than the Head of Medusa in the Uffizi (ca. 1596–97, painted on an ornamental shield; fig. 4.7) and the London Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist, usually dated 1609 (fig. 2.17), the year before Caravaggio’s death. I discuss the Medusa in lecture 4, but I want to bring this lecture to a close with a few comments on the Salome, one of the exemplary works of his last phase. Briefly, I see the Salome as glossing David with the Head of Goliath by the addition of two other figures who seem almost to share, hence to divide, a single body (by no means a unique occurrence in Caravaggio’s art, as we shall see): Salome, who even as she holds a salver to receive the Baptist’s head, looks sharply off canvas to the left, and an old woman, presumably her servant, who gazes down over Salome’s shoulder at the severed head in fascination and distress, her hands clasped beneath her chin. Are we to think of Salome’s turn of the head and sidelong gaze as deferring the inevitable “moment” of specularity, as if not yet visually taking in the Baptist’s head? Or is it rather that, having seen the severed head, she now looks away—as if to forestall precisely the sort of response that her maid exemplifies? By the same token, is the old woman’s intense, almost prayerful, close-range gaze (but what exactly is she seeing from her point of view?) to be understood as still caught up in the “moment” of immersion, or does it mark a “subsequent” “moment” of appalled viewing—even, so to speak, of reimmersion? It is impossible to say. (More on reimmersion, too, further on.) Note, in any case,

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how Salome’s shawl binds together the salver and severed head, Salome herself, and the old woman in a single compound entity; by this means, the painting positively directs the viewer to interpret the two women’s actions as indicating a two- or threepart affective structure of visual response that cannot possibly be assimilated to the usual emphasis on Caravaggian instantaneousness. (One senses as well a certain rhythm or movement, from the head to the old woman and Salome and back again.) And note, too, the “relaying” or “reflecting” relationship between the old woman’s downward-tilted head and concentrated gaze and the downward inclination and lowered eyes of the Baptist’s severed head, a relationship not unlike that between David and the head of Goliath in the Borghese canvas, albeit even more salient owing to that mutual alignment. In both works, as elsewhere in Caravaggio, reflection or mirroring, verging on what earlier in this lecture, following Borch-Jacobsen, I have called mimesis, has been made part of both action and composition; this is an important point to which I shall return. To the right of the women, the executioner, a specular figure on the face of it, has been depicted gazing out of the painting, though not directly at the viewer, with a troubled expression on his face while holding the Baptist’s head in his right, not left hand, in order to deposit it in Salome’s salver; his gesture is therefore not a reversed mirror image of the act of painting, even as it matches that act fairly closely. At the same time, his left hand resting on the hilt of his sword in the painting’s lower right-hand corner is, I suggest, characteristic of the way in which that particular portion of the canvas is often a strongly marked location in Caravaggio’s art, bearing as it does a special connection to the location of the artist’s right or painting hand (about this also there will be more to say). The result is a dense and overdetermined network of relationships both corporeal and affective between the world of the painting and the world “this” side of the picture surface, if we understand by the latter in the first instance a kind of primal situation or scene of representation in which the painting was brought into being by the sighted and embodied artist. For what it is worth, I will add that the longer and more often I have stood before the Salome, the more definite has grown the conviction that the painting as a whole seeks to hover on the brink of specularity, as if only with reluctance delivering itself to the viewer. This impression is if anything even more powerful before the splendid Salome with the Head of John the Baptist in Madrid (ca. 1608; fig. 2.18), with its youthful, muscular executioner seen largely from the rear and absorbed in tragic contemplation of the Baptist’s severed head; the latter, darkly bearded and with gleaming brow, lying on its side and thus not immediately confronting the viewer; and the old woman here too “doubling” Salome as she gazes immersively (or reimmersively) at the head as in the London canvas, though with a more intellectually detached expression than in that work (the executioner’s expression seems more “naive,” in more immediate rapport with the severed head itself). The dark void toward the left of the composition is on the one hand characteristic of Caravaggio’s later work and on the other

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2.17 Caravaggio, Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist, 1609. Oil and egg on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. National Gallery, London. Bought, 1970

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2.18 Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, ca. 1608. Oil on canvas, 114 × 137 cm. Palacio Real, Parimonio Nacional, Madrid, inv. 10010026

carries for me the intimation of an absence—not precisely of a surrogate for the painter, as that would be the executioner by virtue of his position in the painting and his orientation with respect to the viewer, but of the act of violence that the painting as a whole implies but also contrives to suppress (the treatment of the immensely dignified Baptist’s head being a case in point). In the end, it is Salome herself, with sensuous décolletage and in a red cloak with magnificent folds, her fixated, unreadable gaze not directed off canvas as in the London picture but nevertheless not quite engaging the viewer (none of the four heads does that; instead, they make an almost musical structure of theme and variation), who embodies the eventual handing over of the painting to spectatordom.

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LECTURE LEC TU R E

The Invention of Absorption Fairly early in lecture 2, by way of preparing the ground for a brief account of Courbet’s Realism, I emphasized the importance in French painting from the mideighteenth-century on of a problematic of absorption—the depiction of figures so deeply engrossed in what they are doing, feeling, and thinking that they strike the viewer as wholly unaware of anything else, including the presence of the viewer before the painting. Toward the end of that lecture, I noted the absorptive mood of the figure of David in the superb and tragic David with the Head of Goliath in the Borghese. Now I want to argue that absorption first became a major resource for Western painting in certain works by Caravaggio of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; in lecture 4 I shall propose that that development was correlated with its antithesis (in a certain sense), a new and powerful thematization of what I shall call address; and I shall also try to say how those two polar entities, absorption and address, went together in his art. I think of the first development as the invention of absorption, understanding the notion of invention in a broad sense; it is also an important part of what I meant in the introduction to this book when I said that I would be suggesting that the roughly 280 years between the 1580s and 1590s in Bologna and Rome and the 1860s in Paris constitute a single chronological span, during which a particular set of pictorial issues arose, eventually moved to the very center of the enterprise of painting, and at a crucial time and place reached a stage of crisis that coincided with the emergence of the kind of art we have come to call modernist. Obviously there is much more at stake in all this than can be dealt with adequately in these lectures. But let me start by focusing on the question of absorption, as I conceive it. The first thing to make clear is that I am not proposing that nothing like an absorbed figure appeared in painting or, for that matter, sculpture before the late sixteenth century. As early as ancient Greek and Hellenistic art, there is no lack of sculptured or relief figures whose apparent states of mind might fairly be characterized as absorbed; consider, for example, the engraving of a Hellenistic sculpture of a Greek philosopher, possibly Diogenes (fig. 3.1), which in the early 1600s belonged to the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, one of Caravaggio’s most devoted

and sophisticated patrons. In later art, among the mourners gathered around the base of the cross in Crucifixions or around the lifeless body of Christ in Pietàs or Entombments, there are often personages (the Marys, Saint John) whom we would not hesitate to describe as absorbed in grief, just as there are more than a few paintings of the Adoration of the Shepherds or the Magi in which the adorers seem wholly engrossed in their contemplation of the Child. Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds (1500–1502; fig. 3.2) in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is a famous example of such a work. Other types of religious paintings, such as Sacred Conversations, sometimes have the same basic structure, and there are yet others, such as depictions of Saint Jerome in his study, that characteristically emphasize the absorbed states of mind of their protagonists; a striking instance of the latter is Vincenzo Catena’s Saint Jerome in His Study in London (ca. 1510; fig. 3.3). And then there is the massive example of Michelangelo, several of whose figures of prophets and sybils in the Sistine Ceiling are praised by Vasari in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptures, and Architects in terms that are implicitly absorptive. Thus, he cites [Michelangelo’s Erithrean] sybil [fig. 3.4] who . . . holds her book at a distance, and is about to turn the page; her legs are crossed and she is reflecting what she shall write, while a boy behind her is lighting her lamp. . . . He did next the Joel earnestly reading a scroll [fig. 3.5], with the most natural expression of satisfaction at what he finds written, exactly like one who has devoted close attention to some subject. Over the door of the chapel, Michelangelo placed the aged Zachariah [fig. 3.6], who is searching for something in a book, with one leg raised and the other down, though in his eager search he does not feel the discomfort [this is an instance of the kind of unawareness I mentioned above, in this case unawareness of one’s own bodily condition]. . . . But for Nature herself one must see the Isaiah [fig. 3.7], a figure wrapped in thought, with his legs crossed, one hand on his book to keep the place, and the elbow of the other arm also on the volume, and his chin in his hand. Being called by one of the boys behind, he rapidly turns his head without moving the rest of his body. This figure, when well studied, is a liberal education in all the principles of painting.

I take the last sentence to mean that among those principles is whatever is required in order to produce a forceful impression of inner concentration. Vasari is only slightly less eloquent about the sculptures in the Medici Tomb, including the figure of Night (fig. 3.8), which in his words “displays the somnolence of those who sleep,” sleep being, as certain paintings by Caravaggio’s follower Orazio Gentileschi powerfully demonstrate, an extreme modality of absorption. Another major painter who belongs to the immediate prehistory of the developments I am charting is Leonardo da Vinci, whose Female Head (known as La Scapigliata) of around 1506 in Parma (fig. 3.9), represents the ne plus ultra not only of Leonardesque sfumato, the handling of infinitesmal gradations between light and dark, but also of a characteristic form of extremely intense albeit ineffable

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3.1 Giovanni Luigi Valesio, Seated Philosopher (Diogenes). Engraving, Galleria Giustiniana, I, plate 114, National Gallery of Art Library. J. Paul Getty Fund in Honor of Franklin Murphy

3.2 Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds (Allendale Nativity), 1500–1502. Oil on wood panel, 91 × 111 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection

3.3 Vincenzo Catena, Saint Jerome in His Study, ca. 1510. Oil on canvas, 75.9 × 98.4 cm. National Gallery, London. Bought, 1862, NG 694

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3.4 Michelangelo, Erithrean Sybil, 1511. Fresco. Sistine Chapel. Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City, Italy

3.5 Michelangelo, Joel, 1511. Fresco. Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel. Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City, Italy

3.7 Michelangelo, Isaiah, 1511. Fresco. Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel. Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City, Italy

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3.6 Michelangelo, Zachariah, 1511. Fresco. Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel. Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City, Italy

3.8 Michelangelo, Night, 1526–31. Marble. Medici Tomb, Sagrestia Nuova, San Lorenzo, Florence

subjectivity. “The eyes do not focus on any outward object,” Alexander Nagel writes of La Scapigliata in an important article on sfumato, “and they give the impression that they will remain where they are: they see through the filter of an inner state, rather than receive immediate impressions from the outside world. It is the attitude of a being suspended in a state of mind beyond specific thought—unaware, even, of its own body.” Nagel continues: “One might say that as a result of his investigations Leonardo discovered an alternative to the familiar Albertian theory that in painting the movements of the soul are displayed solely through the movements of the body: here an inner life is suggested by a new order of pictorial effects, without recourse to action or narrative. The intimation of an interiority held in reserve, not necessarily externalized in the rhetoric of gesture, thematizes the claims to autonomy.” This is not exactly what we find in Caravaggio, but the stress on unawareness, the notion of an alternative to Albertian expressiveness, and the thematization of autonomy are all to the point. As is the emphasis on sfumato: eventually Caravaggian chiaroscuro will play a key role in the production of absorptive effects. Further sixteenth-century examples of absorptive motifs are not hard to find, though perhaps none is in its quiet way more compelling than Correggio’s Portrait of a Man (plausibly called by John Shearman A Monsignore Reading His Breviary) in Castello Sforzesco in Milan (ca. 1525; fig. 3.10); viewers who come upon it there by chance are likely to feel that it is as persuasive a representation of a man absorbed in reading as they have ever seen. And yet none of the works I have just cited quite marks the advent of absorption as a pictorial resource in its own right—as a theme or topos and a body of effects that artists could deliberately and knowingly exploit to achieve specific artistic ends. Now let us look at one of Caravaggio’s earliest religious paintings, the Penitent Magdalen of around 1596–97 (fig. 3.11). The basic motif could scarcely be simpler: a young woman with long, auburn, partly loosened hair and in a blouse that rests low on her shoulders, a grayish green dress with an elaborate stylized pattern, and a brownish drapery covering her lap and trailing onto the ground toward the right, sits on a low stool with her hands not quite crossed or clasping each other in her lap. Her head has fallen forward and to the left (our right), her eyes are shut or all but shut, and a single tear glistens on the side of her nose—not her cheek, as is often said; Caravaggio has been faithful to the pull of gravity, given the position of her head. A red sash tied in a bow circles her waist. On the ground just to her right (our left), we see pearl earrings, a pearl necklace, and other jewelry along with a flask of what might be wine. Traditionally, the Magdalen was held to be a beautiful young woman who had widely sinned (the usual understanding of her in Caravaggio’s time was as a prostitute) but who had recognized the divinity of Christ and who shortly before the crucifixion, in the house of Simon the Leper, had poured precious ointment on Christ’s head to the consternation of his disciples, who said it might have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor. Mary Magdalen was present at the crucifixion and was one of those who tended Christ’s dead body, and of course she was the first

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3.9 Leonardo da Vinci, Female Head (La Scapigliata), ca. 1506. Oil on panel, 27 × 21 cm. Galleria Nazionale di Parma

3.10 Correggio, Portrait of a Man (or A Monsignore Reading His Breviary), ca. 1525. Oil on canvas, 60 × 43 cm. Castello Sforzesco, Milan

person to whom the risen Christ revealed himself. Subsequently she renounced the world to lead a solitary life of religious devotion. The literature on the painting begins with the later seventeenth-century idealist writer Giovanni Bellori’s critique of Caravaggio as an artist who, since he aspired only to the glory of color, so that the complexion, skin, blood, and natural surfaces might appear real, . . . directed his eye and work solely to that end, leaving aside all the other aspects of art. Therefore, in order to find figure types and to compose them, when he came upon someone in town who pleased him he made no attempt to improve on the creations of nature. He painted a girl drying her hair, seated on a little chair with her hands in her lap. He portrayed her in a room, adding a small ointment jar [actually a flask of wine], jewels and gems on the floor, pretending that she is the Magdalen [la finse per Madalena]. She holds her head a little to one side, and her cheek, neck, and breast are rendered in pure, simple, and true colors, enhanced by the simplicity of the whole figure, with her arms covered by a blouse and her yellow gown drawn up to her knees over a white underskirt of flowered damask. We have described this figure in detail in order to show [Caravaggio’s] naturalistic style and the way in which he imitates truthful coloration by using only a few hues.

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3.11 Caravaggio, Penitent Magdalen, 1596–97. Oil on canvas, 122.5 × 98.5 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome

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The passage is a mix of admiration for Caravaggio’s realistic genius and implied criticism for his failure to depict the Magdalen herself rather than a young, lowerclass Roman woman, whom modern scholars have sought to identify as one Anna Bianchini, a friend of a courtesan, Fillide Melandroni, portrayed by Caravaggio in a canvas that was destroyed during World War II. Needless to say, modern commentators have also refused to accept Bellori’s evaluation of that failure. So, for example, Helen Langdon, in her excellent biography of the painter, praises Caravaggio’s originality in showing “an individual and melancholy young girl in a room, at the very moment when she sees that the pleasures of this world are a temptation. He puts the religious scene back into a real context, into the context of the everyday, renewing its immediacy, re-creating its meaning. . . . This ability to rethink religious imagery and to endow the intensely real with profound resonance remained characteristic of Caravaggio’s religious art.” Langdon’s remarks are mostly true as far as they go, but what I want to stress is that in the Penitent Magdalen Caravaggio sought to accomplish this not simply by posing a young woman in contemporary costume in an almost featureless room and then depicting her with unexampled realism, but also, crucially, by inviting the viewer to see the woman in his painting as wholly absorbed in painful thoughts and feelings—thoughts and feelings that, the painting suggests, lie too deep for expression in any more openly demonstrative form. The usual contrast that is drawn is with Titian’s Magdalen (1530–35; fig. 3.12), with her naked breasts, spectacularly flowing hair, pathos-filled upward gaze, and expressive gesture of the hand. As opposed to the extroversion of emotion in Titian’s canvas, the direction in Caravaggio’s is all inward: the young woman on her stool appears (or is meant to strike us as) so consumed in her reflections as to be indifferent or oblivious to the world around her. It would not be true to say that none of this is conveyed by bodily means; on the contrary, nothing is more important than her posture seated on the low stool, the precise slump of her head, the particular expression of her face, the strange slackness of her hands, which make contact with each other but seem to have altogether renounced outward action even of a devotional sort (they are conspicuously not clasped in prayer). But these and other bodily cues are nothing if not minimal, and they are also, significantly, without implied movement; we instinctively feel, without thinking about it, that the young woman in the painting has been as we find her for some considerable period of time and is likely to remain so indefinitely, or at least for some time longer. In other words, Langdon is not quite right to say—despite the discarded jewelry and the wine flask on the ground—that the painting depicts the young girl “at the very moment when she sees that the pleasures of the world are a temptation.” Nothing could be less momentary than the depicted states of mind and body of Caravaggio’s penitent. I have used the phrase “the invention of absorption” but there is also a sense in which Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalen is the scene of a momentous discovery: the

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3.12 Titian, Saint Mary Magdalen in Penitence, ca. 1530–35. Oil on canvas, 84 × 69 cm. Galleria Palatina di Palazzo Pitti, Florence

discovery that a powerful mode of emotional communication can be actuated by absolutely minimal physiognomic and gestural means. Put slightly differently, the discovery concerns what viewers, confronted with certain sorts of outwardly almost wholly inexpressive figures—figures who are outwardly inexpressive in certain distinctive ways—spontaneously do, at least in the Western tradition (but doesn’t this also hold for native viewers of countless sculptures of Buddha and Buddhist sages?): namely, read that lack of outward expression as an unmistakable sign of intense inwardness and sheer depth of feeling, as if in the presence of certain extremely slight but nevertheless telling visual hints or cues the illusion of absorption, which is to say the endowing of the figures in question with an imagined inner life comparable, if not superior, in intensity to the viewer’s own, proves irresistible. The discovery, in other words, is of the basic truth that human beings tend strongly to project—that by and large they cannot not project—a conviction of inwardness onto, or rather into, painted or sculpted figures who elicit that act of projection in various barely specifiable ways, which is why the magic of absorption continues more or less unabated to the present day. “Unlike [Caravaggio’s] solitary boy models,” another recent biographer, Peter Robb, writes apropos of the Penitent Magdalen, “the girl didn’t stare out at the viewer—she sat bowed and solitary, locked in a private misery. Not only the swollen face but the redness of her hands and pierced ear and the tangle of undone hair brought to mind the aftermath of an act of violence. The broken strings of pearls

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and other ornaments looked as if they’d been ripped off her rather than put aside, and recalled not so much the prostitute saint’s regret and renunciation as the punitive treatment courtesans were getting in Rome, the police whippings that might come a girl’s way if she plied her trade outside the ever narrower parameters allowed. A whipped and weeping courtesan wasn’t a rare thing in Rome. And a painter’s model, if it were a good looking young woman, was likely to be a courtesan.” This is, if anything, a more striking specimen of emotional projection than Langdon’s comments quoted earlier (despite being cast in the past tense, as if reporting on how the painting would have been viewed in its own time), and what should be noted is that Robb’s remarks replace the biblical Magdalen with the young Roman woman who he presumes served Caravaggio as a model. There will be more to say on the topic of models and posing shortly. Before leaving the Penitent Magdalen I want to pursue the thought that the impression of the young woman’s psychic inwardness is one with the illusion of the sheer temporal persistence of her condition. Specifically, I want to stress the sense in which both together underwrite a crucial aspect of the painting’s optical and particularizing (Charles Dempsey would say mirrorlike; more on this too in a moment) realist or naturalist style—I mean its close and detailed scrutiny of the young woman’s hair, face, hands, blouse, dress, drapery, and accessories. Not that close scrutiny of those would literally be impossible in the absence of the young woman’s absorption—obviously that is not the case. But there is, I suggest, a mutual affinity or attunement among the young woman’s state of mind, which in principle precludes awareness of her surroundings, the implied temporal protractedness of that state, and the pictorial project of close and detailed description (as well as, on the part of the viewer, the spectatorial project of close and detailed looking)—as if the first two somehow enable or at least promote the second two, by giving both artist and viewer all the time and freedom they require for their respective tasks. In addition, the young woman’s seeming obliviousness to being beheld serves as a guarantee of the naturalness of her actions, as minimal as the latter are, a point glimpsed early on by Leonardo and developed theoretically by Diderot in the 1750s and after. Put more broadly, there is a “natural” relation between absorption and realism that enters Western painting in force with Caravaggio (or so I claim) and that will go on to have a long and mostly unacknowledged history in the work of artists such as Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Georges de la Tour, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Terborch, Velásquez, Zurbarán, Chardin, Géricault, Meissonier, Menzel, Courbet, Millet, Caillebotte, Eakins, Liebermann, Hammershøi, Hopper, and, in our own time, mediated by photography, which itself often feasts on absorption, Gerhard Richter and Jeff Wall (among others).

Having said all this, I now want to suggest that the Penitent Magdalen goes only part of the way toward the massive and revolutionary thematization of absorption that

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I see as one of the hallmarks of Caravaggio’s achievement. The next major step, one that had immense impact on the art that followed, was taken in the splendid Incredulity of Saint Thomas of 1601–2 in Potsdam, one of the most often copied of all Caravaggio’s canvases. But I want to hold off looking at the Saint Thomas, and to turn instead to another manifestly absorptive work, the monumental Death of the Virgin in the Louvre, painted sometime between 1601 and 1606 (taking my cue from Keith Christiansen and others, I prefer 1601–2; fig. 3.13). The latter was a commissioned work for a family chapel in the new church of Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere; however, it was rejected by the Carmelite clergy of the church, almost certainly because of the highly unorthodox treatment of Mary, who has been depicted as a poor, all too obviously dead woman in a simple red dress with bare legs and somewhat swollen stomach stretched out on the simplest of pallets. (Following a glowing report from Rubens, it was subsequently acquired by Giovanni Magni for the Duke of Mantua.) But the true force of the painting resides in its unprecedented treatment of the mourning apostles gathered in the high, darkly shadowed death chamber. In Circa 1600, S. J. Freedberg compares the emotional restraint of this and other paintings by Caravaggio to a Raphaelesque classicism refounded in nature even while conceding the absence of outward signs of any such relation. He continues: [T]he center of gravity of Caravaggio’s style lies . . . in a very different place; his style is anchored at a far different depth into reality, and while he endows the ordinary with dignity of both form and emotion he never tries to escape reality or contravene it. And as this art probes more deeply into physical reality so does it come to seek, with everincreasing profundity, the inner reality of psychological experience. In the Death of the Virgin . . . the tenor of emotion, contained and stilled, remains like that of classicism, but it probes in private regions that the conventions of classicism would close off: there is no secret of the psyche that Caravaggio cannot find out. As he searches out the depths of feeling he insists increasingly that it convey a total authenticity, requiring that emotion wear the look and carry the behavior of the ordinary world, as different as possible from the styled world of art. In the Death of the Virgin the only touch of rhetoric or self-conscious art is in an accessory of setting, in the curtain; the human actors, unrhetorical and styleless, convey in each countenance their absolute veracity of feeling. The effect of truth is magnified by the complete absence in the actors of any device or action of dramatic kind. Caravaggio’s practice is the antithesis of the rising contemporary doctrine of the rhetorical affetti [outwardly directed gestures and facial expressions], of which Annibale Carracci at the same time gave such effective demonstration.

There could be no more eloquent appreciation of the artist’s accomplishment in this painting. What I want to add to Freedberg’s remarks is that the absence of rhetoric and drama, indeed virtually of style, that he finds so impressive is keyed to, goes hand in hand with, the primacy of absorption—here reinforced, made far more

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3.13 Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin, 1601–2. Oil on canvas, 369 × 245 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, no. 54

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powerful than in the Penitent Magdalen, both by the extreme chiaroscuro that first erupted in Caravaggio’s art in the Saint Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Chapel of 1599–1600 (also, to a lesser extent, in the Judith and Holofernes of almost exactly the same moment) and by an even more radical minimalism of expressive cues. Once again we are shown stationary figures apparently plunged in private thoughts and feelings. The young woman (Mary Magdalen) in the right foreground may be taken as epitomizing not only the theme of grief but also the means by which it is evoked (fig. 3.14): she sits slumped forward so that her face is hidden from view; light falls on her upper back, and the viewer’s gaze loses itself for a moment in contemplation of her carefully braided hair, the nape of her neck and her rosy left ear, the folds in the blouse covering her left arm; but our spontaneous conviction of her emotional state—our spontaneous endowing of Caravaggio’s figure with the keenest imagined inwardness—is all more unquestioning for the sense of exclusion from all direct communication with her. (No doubt the viewer’s prerecognition of the meaning of the scene as a whole contributes to the rapidity of this act of projection.) As for the apostles, Caravaggio has arranged the fall of light so as to cast their faces in shadow; we see bald heads and furrowed brows, but two of the more prominent figures cover their faces with their hands, and even though the others do not, I think it is fair to say that facial expressions, to the limited extent that we can make them out, carry a relatively small fraction of the emotional burden of the painting (I differ with Freedberg on this point). Far more important for the overall effect of the picture are the bent heads and restrained gestures (the open hand of the bearded man in yellow to the left of center seems almost excessive in that context), the absence of all suggestion of sudden movement (except for that hand), and the starkness, the blackness, of the enveloping chiaroscuro, all of which combine to lead the viewer to ascribe to the figures, not so much individually as collectively, an emotional inwardness that marks an epoch in the history of religious art. In the citation from Freedberg, the notion of depth or profundity occurs no less than four times along with the phrase “inner reality of psychological experience.” What I am trying to get at in these remarks is the pictorial means by which such an effect was achieved. Another thread in Freedberg’s remarks is the contrast between Caravaggio’s practice of “total authenticity” and anything hinting at rhetoric or self-consciousness. I suggest that the operative contrast is above all between the persuasive representation of the disciples’ and Mary Magdalen’s entire absorption in grief, with its connotations of perfect obliviousness to everything else, and what a future age, France in the Enlightenment and after, will call theatricality in the pejorative interpretation of the word. (Let me be clear: as I remark in the introduction, theatricality in the pejorative sense was not an issue for Caravaggio, or for the seventeenth century generally; put slightly differently, the figures’ seeming obliviousness to their surroundings does not positively or, say, decisively involve an obliviousness to being beheld. But the germ of the later development is already in place.) Freedberg’s observation to the effect that

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3.14 Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin, detail of Mary Magdalen

the only touch of rhetoric or self-conscious art in the painting is in the magnificent red curtain that dominates the upper portion of the scene is also to the point: one of Caravaggio’s most impressive, if insufficiently appreciated, gifts is for the handling of drapery of all sorts, as in Salome’s splendid red cloak in the Madrid canvas, and the curtain in the Death of the Virgin is perhaps the peak of his achievement in this line. Pamela Askew and others have discussed its possible symbolic connotations at some length, but what should be stressed—what I believe helps explain its extraordinary effectiveness as a kind of “resonator” or “intensifier” for the scene as a whole—is that for all its improbable size, coloristic splendor, and the drama of its folds, the persons in the room seem unaware of its existence. Its very rhetoricalness, to use Freedberg’s notion, is thus conscripted to an absorptive regime, allowing the curtain to “communicate” with the viewer from beyond or outside the closed consciousnesses of the picture’s human inhabitants.

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Finally, the Death of the Virgin reveals a further dimension of the affinity between absorption and realism I first noted in connection with the Penitent Magdalen. With the addition of strong chiaroscuro, Caravaggio has moved from delicate brocaded dresses and the like to simple robes in strong primary colors, which is to say that a particular sort of detailed pictorial description has vanished from his repertoire, as befits an altarpiece destined to be seen from a distance. But as the viewer’s eye explores the play of dark versus light, it automatically searches out and comes to rest on illuminated passages such as the Virgin’s face and hands, Mary Magdalen’s hair and nape, and the kneeling apostle’s hands raised to his throat and face, all of which have been treated in a manner that secures our conviction of the absolute verism of the picture as a whole.

The major painting that most interestingly complements the Death of the Virgin as a paradigm of absorption is the earlier Incredulity of Saint Thomas in Potsdam (1601–2; fig. 3.15). As its format suggests, the Thomas was not intended as an altarpiece; rather it was painted as a private commission for Ciriaco Mattei, a leading Roman collector, though within a few years it entered the collection of another of Caravaggio’s important patrons, Vincenzo Giustiniani (mentioned earlier in connection with the Hellenistic statue of a philosopher). One of the dramatic gains in art-historical scholarship since the publication of Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters in 1963 has been a vast increase in our knowledge about prominent early seventeenth-century Roman art patrons and collectors such as Ciriaco, Asdrubale, and Cardinal Girulamo Mattei, Vincenzo and Benedetto Giustiniani, Ottavio Costa, Giulio Mancini, and, arguably most important (at least for a time), Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. I have nothing to add to that knowledge, but it is important to my argument that their support of Caravaggio was a vital factor in the evolution of his art during his Roman years, during which the artist lived in the households first of Del Monte (between 1595 and 1601) and then of Ciriaco Mattei (until sometime in 1602–3). More broadly, the rise of a new class of ambitious and highly cultivated collectors and the construction of personal galleries for the exhibition of the works they owned encouraged the development of a particular kind of painting—not small but not outstandingly large, often religious in subject matter but not necessarily devotional in intent, framed and portable rather than fixed permanently in place, open to compositional and interpretive innovation, and typically, as in Caravaggio’s case, executed with a care that signaled the painter’s alertness both to the cultivated tastes of his elite viewership and to the circumstances of display that would make possible unusually close scrutiny of the finished artifact (also to the competitive market in which he or, much more rarely she, was forging a career). Such works are sometimes called “gallery pictures” and are best thought of as a version of—perhaps more accurately, an immediate forerunner of—the autonomous and essentially portable or,

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as is sometimes said, “homeless” easel picture that would presently emerge as the dominant pictorial form of the modern era. The Incredulity of Thomas is a prime specimen of the type. Its format, a horizontal rectangle roughly three and a half feet high by just under five feet wide, allowed the artist to deploy four roughly lifesize, three-quarter-length figures in a shallow space; this in turn made possible an extraordinarily authoritative close-range illusion of bodily presence, a quality that the painting itself thematizes in its principal action, the confirmation by Thomas of the bodily reality of the risen Christ. I think it is fair to say that the half- or threequarter-length format, to which Caravaggio continually returned, encouraged much of his most radically original work. As for its execution, the Thomas is as technically refined as any painting of Caravaggio’s artistic maturity; its somewhat golden glow derives from the eighteenth-century varnish that covers its surface and which apparently the authorities in Potsdam are reluctant to remove. (Who can blame them? The painting is stunning as it is.) What more than anything else gives the Thomas its transfixing impact, however, is the intensely absorptive character of the compositional gestalt, itself made possible by the three-quarter-length format. As Christ directs Thomas’s probing forefinger into the bloodless open wound in his side, Thomas himself strains forward with wide-open eyes as if to look as closely as possible at what he himself is doing and feeling, as if he cannot quite believe the witness of his sense of touch without the further confirmation of sight, a brilliant trumping of the conventional understanding of the event, touch confirming sight; meanwhile the other two disciples, crowding close behind him, peer intently at finger and wound as well. For his part, Christ bends his head to look directly down at his and Thomas’s hands. The four heads thus make a “concentrated diamond” (Hibbard’s phrase) in the upper center of the canvas, an unnatural but logically compelling arrangement that underscores the disciples’ common engrossment in the miraculous event taking place before their eyes (Christ too appears absorbed albeit in a purely inward, wholly unsurprised expressive register). Also contributing to the painting’s unity of absorptive effect is the masterly handling of light and shadow, plunging Christ’s face in shadow but exquisitely modeling his torso, and illuminating the brows and noses of the disciples while casting the lower portions of their faces in relative obscurity. This last refinement in turn directs attention to the near uniformity of the disciples’ expressions, so different from the variety and contrast among expressions and gestures called for by an art of the affetti (Alberti explicitly deplores repeating the same gesture or attitude). In sum, the dominant impression is of a scene of absolute and uncompromising concentration, with a minimum, though not a total absence, of individual nuance: if we look closely, it becomes clear—as Glenn Most observes in his fascinating book on the Doubting Thomas story—that the creases on Thomas’s brow evince an upward tension that suggests a dawning experience of wonder that cannot at all be read in the faces of the others. But we register that difference only after being struck by the deep accord

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Detail from figure 3.11

3.15 Caravaggio, Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601–2. Oil on canvas, 107 × 146 cm. Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg

among their expressions. In all these respects I know of nothing remotely like the Incredulity of Thomas in previous painting, and I am tempted to characterize its broader significance by saying that if in the Death of the Virgin (and before that the Penitent Magdalen) Caravaggio discovered that intense absorption could do the expressive work of the affetti, in this picture he discovered that intense and focused absorption could do the unifying work of composition—another key element in Albertian aesthetics—as it would be once more in the classical Poussinian aesthetics that was soon to come. Several other features of the Thomas are worth noting, above all the unexpected and shocking exposure in the lower left corner of the painting of part of Christ’s naked haunch; this indicates that Christ is still wearing his funeral shroud, and it also implicitly separates the viewer’s point of view from those of the painting’s inhabitants in that only the viewer is in a position to take it in. Much the same might be said about a less significant but more prominent detail, the small tear in the shoulder

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seam of Thomas’s jacket, which momentarily draws the viewer’s gaze away from the action that is the focus of all four figures’ attention. This becomes a characteristic device in Caravaggio’s art, one that contributes to the reality effect of the pictures in which it appears by attaching perceptual importance to a detail—typically a tear or a patch—that is at some distance from the focus of the figures’ attention and moreover has no meaning in itself. (The ragged hole in the green jacket of the disciple to the left of the London Supper at Emmaus is a case in point, as is the light-colored patch on the shoulder of Francis’s simple brown robe in Saint Francis in Meditation [1606?; fig. 3.16] in the Barberini, which even more perspicuously than the tear in Thomas’s jacket competes for the viewer’s attention with the saint’s absorbed features.) In the Potsdam canvas, of course, the tear might appear to have something in common with the wound in Christ’s side—but what? The analogy can seem almost deflationary, which cannot be correct. In any case, the tear attracts the eye and then releases it to return to the center of the drama. And then there are the robust, strongly modeled folds in the brownish red cloak of the middle disciple, another tour de force of drapery painting, which in this instance strikes a note of “masculine” energy that contrasts as if subliminally with the more “feminine” aura associated with Christ. By the latter adjective I am referring not just to the dangling coils of Christ’s hair and the smoothness of his features, but also to the abstractly “emotional” character of the folds in his shroud, especially the W-shaped fold linking his and Thomas’s right hands, a seemingly gratuitous piece of business that turns out to be altogether crucial to the painting’s overall impact (try blanking it out and see what happens). Added to this there is the exquisite, oddly poignant depiction of Christ’s nipples, a “female” characteristic intrinsic to the male body; no other artist has ever made of them what Caravaggio does, not just in this canvas but throughout his work. My claim is that all those details or features, with different degrees of salience, at once set off and are set off by, because they are excluded from, the collective absorption of the four figures. Finally, it occurs to me that both the Death of the Virgin and the Incredulity of Thomas may be viewed partly in the light of the long-standing philosophical and religious issue of skepticism, a topic that will engage us further in lecture 4. Thus, we might say that the Death of the Virgin implicitly raises the question as to whether the ordinary-seeming woman whose swollen dead body lies before us could possibly have been the mother of God (the thin halo Caravaggio provided for her gives us his answer, just as the rejection of the painting by the Carmelites gives us theirs), while the Incredulity of Thomas unforgettably depicts the most famous scene of successfully resolved skepticism in the New Testament.

Another three-quarter-length religious painting that belonged to Giustiniani, the Vienna Crowning with Thorns probably of ca. 1602–5? (fig. 3.17), develops further possibilities of an absorptive gestalt. (In the past there was doubt as to whether or

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3.16 Caravaggio, Saint Francis in Meditation, 1606? Oil on canvas, 128.2 × 97.4 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome (in deposit), D 130. From Chiesa di San Pietro, Carpieto Romano

not the Vienna canvas could be identified with the work listed in the Giustiniani inventory of 1638, but with the finding of crucial documentary evidence that doubt has been dispelled. It is also in superlative condition. Nevertheless, there continues to be a certain reuluctance to recognize it for what in my opinion it is, one of the absolute high points of Caravaggio’s art.) Even more strikingly than in the Thomas, the close-range three-quarter-length format seems to have enabled compositional invention: note how the artist simply did not have to worry about whether or not the thug on the right is stable on his feet, or to make clear why and how the man in armor at the left occupies a lower level than the seated Christ and his standing tormentors. In fact, the overall emotional tenor of the painting can be elusive, hard to grasp. At first glance, the two soldiers give the impression of smiting Christ on the head with staffs of reed, but if that is what they are doing it simply is not clear exactly how and where the blows are falling. Another possibility is that the soldiers are using their staffs to press down the crown of thorns on Christ’s head, but if that

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is what the artist intended—the longer one looks, the more likely it appears that that was his aim—the actual mechanics of the operation aren’t clear either, and in any case it is impossible to escape the feeling that both figures are based at least in part on stationary models posed by the artist. In principle, of course, the figures could be products of the painter’s memory and imagination, but everything we know about Caravaggio’s way of working at this stage of his career makes that unlikely. He himself was quoted by Karel van Mander as saying in 1600–1601 that he made no brushstroke without the living model; after 1606, when he is on the run, will be a different story. In addition, scholars have increasingly become aware of the significance of various “incisions” drawn by Caravaggio with a sharp instrument in the preparation of his pictures while the paint was still wet and which seem to have been used, as Keith Christiansen puts it in a fundamental article, “to record the pose of a model or to establish the relationship of various areas of a composition, thereby facilitating reposing the model at a later sitting.” As it turns out, the Crowning is particularly rich in these. More broadly, recent scholarship both on Caravaggio and on certain followers like Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi has emphasized the importance of the role of studio models in their work. This in turn takes up an important theme in seventeenth-century critiques of Caravaggio that saw in his revolutionary practice of posing models in a dark room with a single high light source and then depicting them as veristically as possible an explanation for his frequent failure, in the critics’ judgment, to represent action in a satisfying manner. My point is that such a critique might well be applied to the Vienna Crowning, though a further question, which I defer answering, might be just what difference that makes to a final assessment of the work. In addition, Christ’s state of mind is not immediately perspicuous (fig. 3.18). He seems to be seated or half-seated (on a ledge?) with his upper body leaning forward and to the left (our right); his shoulders and torso are naked, though most of his right arm and his thighs are wrapped in a superb red cloak draped around him in mockery by the soldiers, and his head, on a powerful neck—the muscles, tendons, and veins rendered with immense conviction—looks downward with open mouth and unseeing, or perhaps I should say un-outwardly seeing eyes. “What this Crown of Thorns lacked,” Peter Robb writes, “was any sense that what was going on particularly mattered. . . . The problem, as far as the painting’s interest went, was that recurring bugbear of Christian art, the slack and passive figure of Christ, whose glassy eyed air of someone sitting out a hair shampoo at the barber’s was enhanced and not concealed by the rhetorically off the shoulder placing of his red mantle. Just where your eye was most intently focused, interest died.” I think this is seriously offkey, and I quote it not at all to score points against the author, who has the merit of vigorously saying what he thinks he sees, but rather to show how possible it is for a committed viewer—and Robb is certainly that—to miss the force of one of Caravaggio’s absorptive masterpieces precisely because of what might be called the artist’s

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3.17 Caravaggio, Crowning with Thorns, ca. 1602–5? Oil on canvas, 127 × 166 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. 307

expressive minimalism. (So my earlier statement, to the effect that the viewer cannot not project strong emotion into Caravaggio’s absorbed figures, is not in all cases and for all viewers literally true, as Bellori’s description of the Magdalen showed long ago.) Specifically, Robb allows himself to be put off—less prejudicially: he is put off—by the lack of overt expression in Christ’s countenance instead of seeing in that expressive restraint the sign of a profoundly inward mood, which I understand as Christ’s recognition that these present events, this mockery, crowning, and beating—and soon to come, the road to Golgotha and the crucifixion—are the reality of what was foretold, promised, and set in motion long before. “So this is what was meant . . . ,” I imagine Christ thinking. The relevant Old Testament text is the “Servant of Adonai” chapters of Isaiah, where we read: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised and we esteemed him not.” And: “He was oppressed, and

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3.18 Caravaggio, Crowning with Thorns, detail of head of Christ

he was afflicted, and he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” (The fact that Christ’s mouth in the painting is very slightly open but obviously not in the act of speech might be a subtle variation on the second citation.) A particularly telling detail is the broken reed that Christ holds between the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand. This is, of course, a mock scepter and has been placed there by his tormentors; what I find inspired is the utter minimalism and at the same time the unmistakable definiteness of the act of holding it: it would be impossible to grip the reed less assertively, and yet it is gripped, it will not be allowed to fall, for the simple reason that it is as crucial a feature of the proceedings as the crown of thorns itself. Another way of putting this would be to say that Christ’s apparent state of mind or soul is one of complete acceptance of what is being done to him, which ought to and in a sense does mean absolute passivity but more profoundly means the opposite of passivity, first, because his acceptance of his sufferings and death has to have been willed by him and, second, because Christ’s Passion, from the Latin for suffering, is, from a Christian perspective, the very paradigm of efficacious action—it redeems all mankind. (It is also the very paradigm of an active passivity, the activity of passivity; there is also, of course, the passivity of activity, but that is not Caravaggio’s topic. Interestingly, it is Courbet’s.) A pertinent contemporary text comes from the poet Giovanni Batista Marino’s Sacred Discourses, in the first of which he writes of the shroud of Turin—but he might equally well be describing Caravaggio’s Crowning, which he would have known: “The Christian soul can

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contemplate [the duality of internal and external form] in this marvelous painting of Christ [which contains] internal design and external design, love and pain. The one is in the spirit, the other in the senses; the one is in the volition, the other in the execution. The one offers, the other suffers. The one chooses to suffer, the other actually suffers. The internal one is content to undergo an ugly and ignominious death for the salvation of mankind. The other submits and subjects himself to all those martyrdoms and tortures that the sins of man have earned.” The manner in which Christ in the Crowning grips his reed-scepter precisely captures this double valence. Significantly, there exists a series of Crownings by eminent Caravaggisti, successor artists like Orazio Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, Lionello Spada, Gerrit van Honthorst, Valentin de Boulogne, and Hendrick Ter Bruggen, each of which focuses on a slightly different antecedent moment in the biblical narrative specifically as regards the placing of the reed-scepter in Christ’s hand. This is striking enough to lead me to believe that Orazio and the others recognized the originality of Caravaggio’s brilliantly understated but theologically pregnant treatment of that motif and set out to depict exactly when and how the reed-scepter was forced on Christ by his tormentors; I see them as virtually competing with one another on this score. So, for example, in Orazio’s Crowning of roughly 1613–15 (fig. 3.19) in Braunschweig, closest of all to the original, the placing of the reed has become one of the two focal actions in the scene; there is also the hint of an analogy, no doubt unintended, between the mocking of Christ and the artist’s treatment of his actively passive model. Bartolomeo Manfredi’s canvas of around 1612–14 (fig. 3.20) in the Uffizi has one of the soldiers thrusting the reed-scepter across the middle of the picture toward Christ’s waiting left hand at the extreme right. In Lionello Spada’s version of the subject (1614–16; fig. 3.21) in the Barberini, despite the proliferation of figures and the difference in format, the placing of the reed more or less exactly as in the Vienna canvas is in effect the painting’s central event. In Gerrit von Honthorst’s nocturnal account (ca. 1617; fig. 3.22) in Los Angeles, a single tormentor forces the crown of thorns onto Christ’s head with a forked stick, while another mockingly inserts the reed-scepter into his passive right hand. In Valentin de Boulogne’s Crowning (1625; fig. 3.23) in Munich, the soldier forcing the crown on Christ wears armored gloves to protect his hands, while a kneeling soldier almost delicately inserts a prominent reedscepter into Christ’s left hand. And in Hendrick Ter Bruggen’s version (ca. 1625; fig. 3.24), for all its closeness to northern examples of the theme, the placing of the reed is again central while the obscuring of the second tormentor’s face by his upraised left arm all but announces the connection with Caravaggio. In all six pictures, in other words, the sense of creative commentary on, not just citation of, Caravaggio’s Crowning is unmistakable. At this point I want to say something about the fourth figure in the painting, who until now has only been mentioned: the man in armor and a plumed hat stationed at Christ’s side and watching the mocking, crowning, and so on as they take place. As

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3.19 Orazio Gentileschi, Christ Crowned with Thorns, ca. 1613–15. Oil on canvas, 119.5 × 148.5 cm. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen, inv. 805

3.20 Bartolomeo Manfredi, Crowning with Thorns, ca. 1612–14. Oil on canvas, 122 × 146 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

3.21 Lionello Spada, Crowning with Thorns, ca. 1614–16. Oil on canvas, 150 × 217 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome, inv. 2366

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3.22 Gerrit van Honthorst, Mocking of Christ, ca. 1617. Oil on canvas, 146 × 207 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of the Ahmanson Foundation

3.23 Valentin de Boulogne, Crowning with Thorns, ca. 1625. Oil on canvas, 132 × 96 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inv. 188

3.24 Hendrick Ter Bruggen, Christ Crowned with Thorns, ca. 1625. Oil on canvas, 105 × 133 cm. Private collection

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I noted earlier, he appears to stand on a slightly lower level than the others, all the while supporting his upper body with his right arm and hand, which rests on a rough wooden railing that juts into the picture space from the lower left (we can only guess at its relation to the rest of the scene). He has been depicted largely from behind, and the lower part of his face is obscured by his armored shoulder; the rest of his face is in dark shadow (light strikes his ear), while his profile has been turned away from the viewer. The result is not only another strategically deployed profil perdu but also a limit case of the physiognomic and gestural minimalism I have been tracking throughout this chapter, and the question, once again, is how we are to interpret this. Robb for one has no doubts: the man in armor, whom he plausibly calls “the supervising officer,” is said by him to “languidly rest his hand on a raw wooden trestle and gaze obliquely and unseeingly downward in a pose of deepest boredom”—the boredom, he suggests, of a model holding a pose. But nor do I have doubts: I take the man in armor—I say this as a first approximation—to be intensely absorbed by the tragic events happening before his eyes. He is gazing intently at Christ, and reflecting profoundly on what he sees; whether he is on the brink of conversion I would not venture to guess (one recent line of Caravaggio interpretation has been to imagine secondary figures in his paintings in those terms), nor is it obvious that he is moved, in the ordinary sense of the word; but that he is utterly fascinated, spellbound, transfixed, seems to me unquestionable, a state of mind that perhaps goes “beyond” absorption toward what in connection with Boy Bitten by a Lizard and related works I have called immersion. The context in which I introduced that notion concerned the painter’s psychic and physical involvement in the act of painting, a protracted “moment” of virtual continuity with the work itself—of being “in” it or “one with” it—that was then followed (so to speak) by a “moment” of separation and specularity, in which the painted image was first established as an image and with it the painting as a picture, an artifact fundamentally addressed to a viewer—in the first instance, to Caravaggio himself. By comparing the state of mind of the man in armor to immersion, I am suggesting that he is not in the least “separated” from Christ even as he gazes at him, and I am suggesting too that we understand in this light not just the surprising nearness of the man’s right hand to Christ’s but also the intimation, which I take to be palpable once we give it a chance, that his naked fingers, emerging from below the slightly too long, beautifully painted cuff, are involuntarily—that is, passively, “mimetically” (in Borch-Jacobsen’s sense of the term)—reaching or inching toward Christ’s own (fig. 3.25). Let me go further and propose that the ultimate actional focus of the painting lies precisely there, in the near conjunction of the two right hands. (In Giustiniani’s collection, the Crowning hung over a door. If that was its intended destination from the first, the activation of the bottom of the picture comes to seem less surprising though hardly less inspired.) In any case, we may say that the man in armor is observing Christ, studying him, extremely closely: perhaps simply because Christ’s state of mind, wholly intact

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3.25 Caravaggio, Crowning with Thorns, detail of Christ’s and the observer’s hands

despite the abuse directed at him, has compelled his attention; perhaps in the dawning recognition that this patiently suffering Jew is in fact the son of God; perhaps indeed in the grip of an impulse toward identification that goes traditionally by the name of the imitation of Christ. Finally, though, it is necessary to insist again on how extraordinarily little Caravaggio gives the viewer to go on by way of expressive physiognomy and overt behavior, a fact that threatens to expose the account I have just put forward as an interpretive fantasy. But I would counter that precisely by virtue of that expressive minimalism the viewer is invited to study the painting, in particular the figures of Christ and the armored observer, as closely and intently (as absorbedly, to say the least) as the observer, in my account, is studying Christ. All this is surely not unrelated to the rise of new devotional practices within the Catholic Church in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with their emphasis on meditation, inner vision, an entire discipline of subjectivity. But the observer figure might also be likened to an early seventeenth-century scientist studying an experiment of nature— someone like Galileo, with whose observational practices Caravaggio’s art has been associated by Ferdinando Bologna and, with qualification, by Elizabeth Cropper. In any case, it is worth noting how very little difference to my reading of the painting the less than wholly persuasive representation of the actions of the two thugs turns out to make. Can anyone seriously imagine that the Crowning would be a better painting, whatever that is taken to mean, if their actions were more “realistic” by whatever standards one wishes to propose? On a somewhat different note, if we assume, as seems likely, that the figures of Christ and the observer were also based on studio models, what if anything does that tell us about the “original” basis of the two figures’ respective states of mind and soul? Nothing at all, is the only possible

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answer—at any rate, it seems inconceivable that a model, no matter how amenable to the artist’s wishes, could have posed for those. So was there no such “original” basis for their states of mind other than in Caravaggio’s imagination, his own inward vision? Evidently all our talk of his use of models, all our justified confidence that he did use them, falls somewhat short of accounting for the final result. In closing, I want to call attention to the brilliant reflections on the observer’s superbly depicted armor, which recall not just the importance of mirrors in my reading of Caravaggio’s self-portraits in lectures 1 and 2 but also my suggestion that mirroring or reflection is one of the basic modalities of his art. In general, I see the frequent appearance of armor in Caravaggio’s paintings as marking the persistence of an entire poetics of mirroring that runs throughout his oeuvre and that in the Crowning may well have its metaphorical equivalent in a “mimetic” relationship between the observer and Christ (mirroring and immersion here lining up with one another). As for the elegant swept-back white plumes on the observer’s hat, they appear at first to be simply another instance of an element that conspicuously escapes and thereby sets off the absorptive logic of the painting as a whole, but then it occurs to one that they can also be seen as emblematizing a certain febrile excitement flaring within the observer’s mind and soul. Something not dissimilar takes place in Courbet’s incandescent Portrait of Baudelaire (ca. 1848; fig. 3.26), in which the poet, then in his late twenties, has been depicted seated before a table absorbed in a book. Toward his right, unnoticed by him, the white plume of a pen rises from an inkwell like some pure jet of poetic inspiration.

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3.26 Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Baudelaire, ca. 1848. Oil on canvas, 53 × 61 cm. Musée Fabre, Montpellier

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Detail from figure 4.15

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LECTURE LEC T U R E

Skepticism, Shakespeare, Address, Density To sum up my argument in lecture 3: I began by claiming that among the revolutionary aspects of Caravaggio’s art is the importance it bestows starting in the mid-1590s upon the depiction of persons who strike the viewer—who are invariably described by commentators—often on the basis of extremely slight physiognomic and gestural cues, as deeply or wholly absorbed in what they are doing, feeling, and thinking. I characterized this development as the invention of absorption (not out of whole cloth but as a major resource for painting), though I also spoke of it in terms of the discovery that a new and powerful mode of emotional communication could be brought about by absolutely minimal expressive means, and I further suggested that that discovery ultimately concerned the spontaneous tendency of human beings, at least in the West, to project emotion and (crucially) a conviction of inwardness “into” painted figures that often seem to provide only the most tenuous, all but fantasmatic basis for that feat of projection. An absorptive painting of this sort can represent a single figure, as in Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalen, or the Saint Francis in Meditation touched on in lecture 3, or—a work not yet mentioned—Saint Jerome Writing in the Borghese (ca. 1606; fig. 4.1). In the latter, light falls mainly on the saint’s bald crown and furrowed brow while his face, looking downward, is at once deeply shadowed and partly obscured by his beard. But the evocation of intense inwardness is nothing less than fierce, a quality underscored by the way in which Jerome, concentrating on the page open before him, appears unaware of, as if he has momentarily forgotten, his extended right arm and hand, the latter holding a quill pen that has just been dipped in ink. (Nor, a fortiori, does he register the human skull staring at him with its empty sockets.) Or an absorptive canvas can comprise a multiplicity of figures, grouped loosely, as in the Death of the Virgin, or rigorously, with apparent synchronicity both of outward attention and of inward response, as in the Incredulity of Thomas. Or it can present two or more figures, closely linked but profoundly absorbed in their respective states of mind and soul, like Christ and the man in armor observing him in the Vienna Crowning with Thorns.

4.1 Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, ca. 1606. Oil on canvas, 112 × 157 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome, inv. 56

Even among the four paintings that have been examined in some detail there is considerable variety in the figural and physiognomic means by which absorption is evoked. The penitent Magdalen in the Doria-Pamphili picture simply sits on a low stool, her hands in her lap and her downward-turned face all but expressionless even as a single teardrop glistens on the side of her nose. In the Death of the Virgin the faces of the apostles are mostly obscured by dark shadow, while that of the seated Magdalen is completely hidden from view. This is not the case in the Incredulity of Thomas, where the tremendous absorptive effect of the whole is achieved by a synchronization of bodily position and a near identity of facial expression: the three disciples all bend forward to peer intently at Christ’s wound with similarly intent gazes and furrowed brows, though Thomas, as we have seen, conveys a sense of wonder that the others do not. And in the Crowning with Thorns it is a question of what the viewer is to make of the exceedingly restrained expression on Christ’s downward face as well as of what can be discerned of the observer’s face, which, being shadowed and turned into the picture space, gives the viewer even less to go on—almost nothing in fact. In all four works the emphasis falls strongly on the implication of psychic and/ or spiritual “depth,” a metaphor that turns up repeatedly in Freedberg’s admiring account of the Death of the Virgin (and may be found in countless other descriptions

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of absorptive paintings by Caravaggio), to the extent that one begins to imagine a split or division between the inward condition, which by its very nature can seem unrepresentable (if nevertheless somehow intuitable), and the outward being, which may be seen and depicted but which in its near-absolute expressive restraint can appear almost inessential (but of course is indispensable—our response to the figures in question concerns nothing else). Something of the sort is hinted at in the passage on the shroud of Turin cited in lecture 3 from Marino’s Sacred Discourses, a text by a brilliant poet who knew and greatly admired Caravaggio. Altogether, it is hardly surprising that, writing a century later in a different artistic universe, the French art theorist Roger de Piles gave Caravaggio “zero” for Expression. All this is something new, not absolutely but effectively, in the history of European painting; at any rate, I know of nothing in previous—or for that matter in later— art like the emotional, spiritual, and artistic stakes of correctly responding to, not merely interpreting, the faces of Christ and the observer in the Vienna Crowning. If Peter Robb is right, the picture reproduces the boredom felt by its models; if I am right, it is a work of exceptional expressive and spiritual seriousness; others, perhaps many, may feel that both our views are extreme; and how is one to begin to judge who is right or more nearly right other than by looking closely and protractedly at the canvas itself, above all at the two crucial figures? Not that I have reason to doubt that Robb did precisely that. Rather, I take the difference between us to be more a matter of orientation than of simple looking. And as I have done my best to make clear, the orientation, the particular mode of attention and receptivity, that governs my description of the Crowning is informed by several decades of previous writing by me on absorption in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting—also in recent art photography—as well as by my discussion of immersion and specularity in lecture 2. One might say: all that writing, along with the innumerable paintings, prints, and photographs that inspired it, not to mention a considerable body of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art criticism by Diderot and his successors, are in play in my account of the Crowning, which partly for that reason—also as a point of methodological tact—seeks to stay as close to the perceptible facts of the case as it possibly can. Inevitably, such a procedure runs the risk of reading back into an earlier work features that belong properly, if indeed they do, only to later ones. But I hope to have discounted that risk in the first place by recognizing it and, more importantly, by making a concerted effort to intellectually and imaginatively reconstitute the Crowning’s original contexts of creation and reception. (In effect, I am asking the reader to try out understanding the Crowning and related works, along with certain features of the world in which they came into being, in my terms.) At any rate, I would not want my “exchange” with Robb, throughout which he has not been available to speak for himself, to be other than respectful. My main point, after all, the one to which I keep returning for the simple reason that it highlights all that is most radical in the new development, is that in Caravaggio the technology of

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absorption verges at times on the undetectable, which may be partly why this feature of his oeuvre has escaped notice as the profound artistic achievement that I believe it is. And as long as the Vienna Crowning is the topic, it should be remembered that Roberto Longhi—arguably the preeminent figure in the history of Caravaggio scholarship—long regarded it as at best a copy. Another point I have stressed concerns what I take to be the intimate connection that first fully emerges in Caravaggio’s art between absorption and realism, and here too the Crowning epitomizes the issue at hand. Only a style of minutely particularizing ocular or—Charles Dempsey’s terms, extrapolating from the seventeenthcentury Spanish painter-theorist Pacheco—specular or mirrorlike realism was capable of portraying the infinitesimal nuances of expression that I have claimed to find in Christ’s face and, very near the limit of discernibleness, in that of the observer. Conversely, it may be that only a pictorial thematics of intensely imagined inwardness could sufficiently have motivated the effect of temporal dilation or protraction that allowed such a style to reveal its fullest descriptive capabilities. Think of the time required to notice and then grasp the significance of the interplay between Christ’s and the observer’s hands. The logic of absorption is such that, as long as a particular feat of noticing and understanding lasts, the viewer is still “within” the implied temporality of the image. This is one reason why a minimally expressive absorptive figure in a painting—Caravaggio’s Magdalen, the observer in the Crowning—almost certainly makes a much greater impression of inwardness and “depth” on the viewer—on many viewers—than a comparably behaving (and comparably viewed) person would tend to make on another person in real life. The viewer of the painting is allowed to “feel himself or herself into” the depicted figure in a way that has no equivalent in our real-world relations with other persons. (Thus, art “outdoes” life, precisely by foregrounding its character as art.) Finally, it is surely significant that the Thomas, the Crowning, and the Penitent Saint Jerome (Montserrat) all belonged to a single collector, Giustiniani; each demands prolonged and close-range contemplation on the viewer’s part, an experience then only possible under the conditions of viewing afforded by a private gallery (meaning by the latter term a private exhibition space of any sort). Obviously Giustiniani, like del Monte, Mancini, the Mattei, and other collectors in their elite circle, had a taste for painting of this kind, and obviously too the fact that Caravaggio during these years was not only working for but also living in the palaces of men of their stamp played an enabling role in the development of his art: many if not most of the works that came from his easel were commissioned, and he also could be confident that they would be prized by their possessors for exactly the qualities that, one presumes, mattered most to him. It is important to bear this in mind in view of the persistence of the myth of Caravaggio-as-outlaw. Indeed, another reason for the rejection of the Death of the Virgin by its original commissioners may well have been that it was expressively unreadable as an altarpiece, though not, it turned out, as a large gallery picture, which is what in effect it became when it was

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acquired by the Duke of Mantua. In any case, let me emphasize again that my main concern throughout this book is with Caravaggio’s experimental paintings of the gallery painting type. This is not to deny that many of the altarpieces are in their own way equally remarkable. But the gallery pictures are my principal focus.

Two more sets of remarks before moving on. First, Caravaggio’s absorptive paintings at once demonstrate and rely on the ease with which we imagine others to have minds like ours (to possess our sort of “mindedness”), an ease that we can take both as testimony to our confidence that they do and as something of a challenge to that confidence. The confidence comes from the demonstration that such a view of the matter is so natural, under ordinary circumstances so irresistible that it hardly makes sense to think of it as mistaken. (This is what gives my disagreement with Robb its distinctive tenor.) The challenge involves linking the demonstration of how little it takes to get us responding in this way to the reminder that such ease guarantees nothing—may even be a warning rather than a guarantee—because, after all, there is an equally ordinary sense in which, faced with Caravaggio’s canvases, such responses cannot be taken as veridical: the figures in those canvases, mere representations, manifestly “have” no interiority of the sort actual persons do. It is as if the zero for “Expression” that de Piles brilliantly awarded Caravaggio simultaneously suggests doubts about whether expressions ever actually do reveal anything about the feelings or states of mind they are supposedly expressing and also suggests something about the inevitability of our taking even the lack of expression as revelatory. Another, only slightly different way of framing the problem would be to say that the invention of absorption in Caravaggio’s religious paintings of the late 1590s and early 1600s can be seen as in dialogue with the skeptical doubt that we can ever know with certainty the contents of another person’s mind. (This is often cast in terms of the question as to whether we can ever know beyond a doubt that another person is in pain.) More precisely, by staking everything on eliciting from the viewer spontaneous and unselfconscious acts of projection of imagined inwardness in respect to merely depicted personages, such canvases make the issue of other minds central to the enterprise of painting at the same time as they compel the recognition that knowledge of the contents of those minds is precisely not the point. That is, I can scarcely claim to know with certainty that the Crowning truly portrays Christ’s state of mind as he underwent his torments, or that the man in armor looking on is truly absorbed and moved. Both Christ and the man in armor are truly mere representations, indeed (from a certain point of view) mere patches of dried pigment. Moreover, it is not imaginable that these and other such “material” facts are in any sense not present to my mind as I stand before the painting. But nor would it be right to say that I believe what I claim about those representations—as if further information

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or a superior vantage point or longer looking could yield an improved access to the figures’ states of mind, one that would make my account of what is taking place in the Crowning proof against critique. (What I said, in lecture 3, is “Nor do I have doubts.” Doubts about what exactly, one might wish to ask.) In stating the foregoing, I follow or rather adapt the views of Stanley Cavell, who argues in the introduction to Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare that in settling for the notion of belief “to name our immediate or absolute relation to the world, say our absolute intimacy, a relation no human other could confirm or compromise, the philosopher turns the world into, or puts it into the position of, a speaker, lodging its claims upon us, claims to which, as it turns out, the philosopher cannot listen.” (Nothing could less resemble such a speaker than the patiently enduring figure of Christ in the Crowning. And does not the phrase “absolute intimacy” capture something of the observer’s relationship to Christ as I evoked it toward the end of lecture 3?) This is said by Cavell in the course of propounding the thesis, which the individual essays of his book richly develop, that Shakespearean tragedy—the principal instances of which belong to the first decade of the seventeenth century— “is the working out of a response to skepticism—as I now like to put the matter, that tragedy is an interpretation of what skepticism is an interpretation of; that, for example, Lear’s ‘avoidance’ of Cordelia [i.e., Lear’s fatal, self-destructive refusal to acknowledge her love for him] is an instance of the annihilation [of the world, of others, ultimately of oneself] inherent in the skeptical problematic, that skepticism’s ‘doubt’ is motivated not by (not even where it is expressed as) a (misguided) intellectual scrupulousness but by a (displaced) denial, by a self-consuming disappointment that seeks world-consuming revenge.” That disappointment, Cavell suggests, turns repeatedly on the inability of the tragic protagonist to come to terms with human finitude, which is also to say with the often painful fact of the necessary separateness of persons and their consequent opacity to one another. Thus, for Cavell Othello “plac[es] a finite woman in the place of God,” which makes all the more intolerable his awareness of Desdemona’s capacity for sexual pleasure; Leontes’ inability to recognize his own son as his seems “virtually an exercise out of Descartes’s Meditations”; Coriolanus can scarcely bear to think of himself as a member of a human community (“he hungers,” Cavell writes, “to lack nothing, to be complete, like a sword”); while Hamlet finds it impossible to take the burden of human existence upon himself, “to enact it, as if the basis of human existence is theater, even melodrama. To refuse this burden [as Hamlet does] is to condemn yourself to skepticism—to a denial of the existence, hence of the value, of the world.” (These brief quotations no more than begin to suggest the interest and power of Cavell’s readings of the plays he discusses.) All this in turn has much to do with an inchoate sense of loss of a previous habitation of or at-homeness in the world, owing to historical developments crucial among which Cavell cites the rise of the new science and a consequent shaking or displacement of faith in God:

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My intuition is that the advent of skepticism as manifested in Descartes’s Meditations is already in full existence in Shakespeare, from the time of the great tragedies in the first years of the seventeenth century, in the generation preceding that of Descartes. However strong the presence of Montaigne and Montaigne’s skepticism is in various of Shakespeare’s plays, the skeptical problematic I have in mind is given its philosophical refinement in Descartes’s way of raising the questions of God’s existence and of the immortality of the soul (I assume as, among other things, preparations for, or against, the credibility of the new science of the external world). The issue posed is no longer, or not alone, as with earlier skepticism, how to conduct oneself best in an uncertain world; the issue suggested is how to live at all in a groundless world. Our skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire. In Descartes’s thinking, the ground, one gathers, still exists, in the assurance of God. But Descartes’s very clarity about the necessity of God’s assurance in establishing a rough adequation or collaboration between our everyday judgments and the world (however the matter may stand in natural science) means that if assurance in God will be shaken, the ground of the everyday is thereby shaken.

In Cavell’s account of Shakespeare’s plays, the latter at once “interpret and reinterpret the skeptical problematic—the question whether I know with certainty of the external world and of myself and others in it”—and “find no stable solution to skepticism, in particular no rest in what we know of God.” (Perhaps the most immediately pertinent discussion of the skeptical “position” in Cavell’s writings is the early essay on the problem of other minds, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in some ways a companion piece to the earliest and grandest of the Shakespeare essays, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.”) What the plays stage, he argues, is on the contrary the world’s withdrawal or recession—the loss or, at a minimum, the radical undermining of a previous ground of being (to cast this thought in somewhat Heideggerian language)—in the face of which catastrophic event Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and heroines act out their emblematic destinies. “A metaphysically desperate degree of private bonding, of the wish to become undispossessable, would seem to be an effort to overcome the sense of the individual human being not only as now doubtful in his possessions, as though unconvinced that anything really belongs to him, but doubtful at the same time whether there is any place to which he really belongs,” he writes. Or to put this in the language of Cavell’s major strictly philosophical work, The Claim of Reason, “[T]here is between human existence and existence of the world a standing possibility of death-dealing passion, of a yearning at once unappeasable and unsatisfiable, as for an impossible exclusiveness or completeness”—in denial of both the apartness of the world (i.e., of the other) and the finitude of the self. Another passage from The Claim of Reason concerns the possibility, as Cavell puts it, “that my taking you for, seeing you as, human depends upon nothing more than my capacity for something like empathic projection, and that if this is true then I must

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settle upon the validity of my projection from within my present condition, from within, so to speak, my confinement from you. For there would be no way for me to step outside my projections.” Cavell goes on to test, critique, and finally to discard the notion of empathic projection—along with that of metaphysical confinement—with respect to relations between actual persons, preferring instead a version of his autograph concepts of acknowledgment and finitude (also expression, expressiveness). In other words, we ordinarily see a human being, not someone or something as a human being. But might it not be legitimate, at least heuristically, to think of the invention of absorption in painting as calling for something like a new, more concentrated (more focused, more motivated) form of empathic projection on the part of the viewer, who is of course—who inevitably knows himself or herself to be—“confined from” the merely painted figures in obvious respects? At the same time, the sheer accessibility of the painting as a worked artifact, its entire exposure or, to use a forward-looking term, its presentness to the gaze, would seem on the side of dissolving or at least mitigating the viewer’s sense of such “confinement.” Moreover, precisely because, however realistic they may be, the figures in a painting are understood to be mere depictions, not actual human beings, the viewer’s or indeed the skeptic’s sense of their “confinement” within themselves will inevitably be qualified in important ways. But it is not clear— to me, at any rate—exactly how these and similar considerations bear on the question of our “access” to the figures’ imagined inner states, especially in view of what I have called those figures’ expressive minimalism (the quality that earned Caravaggio a zero in expression from Félibien). In short, our footing here could scarcely be more uncertain. Nevertheless, a notion like empathic projection seems to me to capture something of the feat of viewing, in all its spontaneity and nonreflectiveness, that the invention of absorption called into being. “I might express [Descartes’s] difficulty as follows,” Cavell writes of the Meditations: His sense of himself as composed of his contrary natures (of what he means by mind and body, the one characterized in opposition to the other, each essentially what the other is not) is the idea of a double nature, symbolized centrally in the culture we share with him (but perhaps now only in literature) as the figure of Christ. So the thing of incarnation, the mysterious meeting of heaven and earth, occurs in Descartes’s thought not alone in the inspirer of Christianity but in each individual human being. From here you may conclude that the human problem in recognizing other human beings is the problem of recognizing another to be Christ for oneself.

Recognizing another to be Christ for oneself is, in my account, the very content of the Crowning. Presumably contemporary viewers, or at any rate those most attuned to Caravaggio’s art, took the point as well. But other, as we know, did not. For Cavell, as has emerged, it is not at all coincidental that the skeptical crisis he associates with Shakespearean tragedy occurred when it did, in the generation of

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Galileo and with the calling into question of the role of the Christian God in the maintenance of the world. Unlike Shakespeare in Protestant England, however, Caravaggio lived and worked in a militantly Catholic culture (the Counter-Reformation officially began with the first Council of Trent in 1545), and there is a strong sense in which the exemplary figure of Christ, whether or not present in a given canvas in propria persona, functions in his art as an internal guarantee of fine-grained meaningfulness: thus, it is hard to imagine that some other young woman—not the Magdalen in other words—depicted sitting exactly as Caravaggio’s Magdalen sits in a simple room with jewelry and a flask of wine on the floor beside her would strike the viewer as plunged in grief and remorse; or that just any armored figure’s shadowed profil perdu would at once invite and reward the closest, most searching scrutiny as does—again, in my reading—that of the observer in the Crowning with Thorns. (It matters crucially to my reading that the other recognized by the observer to be Christ for himself in that painting is in fact Christ—just as it matters crucially to Robb’s reading that Caravaggio is known to have employed models, who can be imagined to have suffered from boredom while holding poses.) In that sense, what I earlier called the “spontaneous tendency” of human beings to project inwardness onto or into depicted personages is in specific cases conditioned one way or another by contextual factors. But precisely the nakedness of that dependence on the figure and/or story of Christ for the very possibility of “deep” meaningfulness of an empathic-projective sort bespeaks an intimate relation to the skeptical crisis Cavell understands as subtending—being worked through in and by—Shakespearean tragedy. And, of course, the Catholic culture within which Caravaggio lived and painted, to speak only of the Roman world of the 1590s and early 1600s, was itself multiply and complexly riven by fierce divisions, which often took on a new and charged configuration with the advent of each successive pope; the career of Galileo, as modern scholarship has come to understand it, bears witness to this, as does, in a different key, one of the salient facts of Caravaggio’s Roman years, the repeated rejection of commissioned altarpieces by those for whom the paintings were made. So it is not as if the Catholic content of his religious pictures was always sufficient in itself to secure their intelligibility outside the elite circle where he found consistent support. (None of this is meant to imply that the Protestant context in which Shakespeare lived and worked was not seriously riven: recent scholarship has emphasized the persistence of Catholic forms of thought and worship in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English culture and indeed, it has been persuasively argued, in Shakespeare’s plays.) In sum: already in Caravaggio’s canvases of the 1590s and early 1600s the stakes of painting as an art have become fraught with new significance, at once psychological, epistemological, and ontological, in ways that bear an intimate and complex relation to the stakes of Shakespearean tragedy as understood by Cavell. I shall have just a bit more to say on this score in the conclusion to this book.

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My second set of remarks, briefer than but no less important than the first, concerns what I take to be the foundational role in Caravaggio’s art of the self-portrait and, specifically, of the displaced or disguised portrait of the painter in the act of painting, starting with the Boy Bitten by a Lizard. This topic will come up repeatedly in the remaining lectures, and I do not want to get ahead of myself here. But it is perhaps already evident that such an emphasis supports the notion of a historical crisis, as if Caravaggio from the outset of his career found himself compelled to engage pictorially with, indeed to ground his art in, what was most immediately real (most certain?) to him: I mean his own activity as a painter, which in the pictures we have looked at turns out to have implied not just the bare fact of depicting himself but also the bodily and material basis of his operations (including mirror, canvas, brushes, paint, palette, models, studio, etc.) as well as the two ontologically distinct if inevitably mutually entangled “moments” of the pictorial act (immersion and specularity)—as if his revolutionary realism, his commitment to il vero, as Dempsey puts it, began precisely there, in his dealings with the painting before him, and only by a kind of transferential or “mimetic” dynamic moved out (not that far, as we shall see) to depict the world at large, without ever losing touch with the initial situation. (In relation to Shakespeare, the Sonnets, with its repeated reference to the scene of writing, and its compulsive wordplay on the name “Will,” is of course the relevant text.) If this is right, it means that Caravaggio’s art contains not one but two internal “guarantors” of meaningfulness, the exemplary figure of Christ (understood broadly to include the lives of Mary and the saints) and the act of painting (understood in the far-from-simple terms I have just indicated). It is therefore not altogether surprising that on the single occasion when Christ and Caravaggio turn up in the same canvas—the recently rediscovered Taking of Christ in Dublin (1602; fig. 6.12)—the results are dramatic, and more than usually conflictual.

I now want to change direction—but not really—in a manner that may appear surprising. I want to claim that along with the new emphasis on absorption in the 1590s and early 1600s went an antithetical or polar emphasis on address—the depiction of figures not only facing the viewer but seemingly confronting him (I am using the male pronoun advisedly) with great force and specificity. Obviously, the newness of this development can only be relative: even within the tradition of the medieval icon, as Hans Belting has shown, certain types of images may be understood as implying a strongly “dialogic” relation to their viewers. Moreover, fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury portraits often depict personages who face directly out of the painting; there is also the tradition of relatively small devotional paintings with frontal depictions of Christ, often as the Man of Sorrows, or the Virgin and Child, of which Antonello da Messina and Giovanni Bellini (for example) were absolute masters; and, of course, the conventions of the Renaissance altarpiece include positing, in that

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sense addressing, a devout viewership gathered before it. Indeed, John Shearman has argued vigorously that Renaissance art established a new relation to the viewer. But nothing in previous painting matches the directness and urgency of address—the implied intuition of the viewer’s actual physical existence and psychic availability for potential response—that we find in many paintings by Caravaggio and certain of his contemporaries shortly before and after 1600. One early example is Boy Bitten by a Lizard: although (as we have seen) its underlying structure is that of a particular kind of self-portrait, its manifest or surface content is that of a boy crying out in pain in a way that actively solicits the viewer’s attention (the boy’s lack of “manliness” makes the act of solicitation all the more arresting). Or consider the even earlier Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593–94; fig. 4.2) in the Borghese, which Stephen Bann, building on texts by Roberto Longhi and Michel Butor, describes in terms of a visual poetics of “offering,” a thought that then leads him to characterize a sequence of Caravaggio’s still lifes—key works include the peaches and grapes in the Self-Portrait as Bacchus and the nonpareil Basket of Fruit (1599; fig. 4.3) in the Ambrosiana—as establishing a “new mode of representation—representation as presentation.” This is not the place for a full-scale discussion of the latter, but note the twig with (handlike) leaves that inexplicably enters the painting from the right, as if reaching from off-canvas to touch—or paint?—the basket itself. Precisely how this relates to the right-angle dispositif at work in the early self-portraits is an open question. More pointedly, the Uffizi Bacchus—another painting containing a magnificent still life—features a classically dressed (i.e., half-undressed) protagonist with made-up face and an elaborate wreath of grapes and leaves in his curling black hair who looks insinuatingly at the viewer while holding out a goblet of wine in his elegantly posed left hand. Earlier I suggested that the determining structure is that of a mirror-reversed portrait of the painter in the act of applying paint to canvas; but the effect of the brilliant and sensuous manifest image is to summon and transfix the viewer by means of Bacchus’s subtly provocative gaze and especially his offer of wine, a fictive act that exceeds in directness anything to be found in previous Italian painting of a nonreligious character. Or, to take a picture not yet discussed, the electrifying Saint John the Baptist with a Ram (ca. 1602; fig. 4.4), made for Ciriaco Mattei (for whom Caravaggio also painted the Incredulity of Thomas), gives the impression of exploding into visibility with the arrival before it of the viewer. S. J. Freedberg begins his chapter on Caravaggio with an impassioned account of this painting; it is too long to cite in its entirety, but the following conveys its gist: The artist’s seeing of the model and the action of his hand that records the seeing are absolutely immediate to his brush. His perception has been conveyed to the canvas without the interruption, or the consequent deliberation, of any studies in drawing—in

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4.2 Caravaggio, Boy with a Basket of Fruit, 1593–94. Oil on canvas, 70 × 67 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome, inv. 136

4.3 Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit, 1599. Oil on canvas, 31 × 47 cm. Pinacotheca Ambrosiana, Milan

this he is unlike Annibale Carraci most conspicuously; and his process of recording is as intense as it is direct. There is no precedent for this degree either of intensity or directness in any prior art. The seeing impelled by this intensity grasps its object and experiences it as if at the highest speed, giving the effect of an instantaneous apprehension of the whole. . . . The way in which Caravaggio relates to this seen image—but not only to this particular kind of image, it should be understood—is as if to a love-object. . . . The artist is by nature a voyeur, and here Caravaggio has created a voyeuristic situation into which the spectator, as he takes the painter’s place in front of the completed canvas, necessarily must fall. The meaning of the picture thus depends not only on the presence Caravaggio has evoked in it, but on the situation he has now made. There is no very meaningful action or emotion that occurs within the painting; what is meaningful comes instead from the relationship established initially between the artist and the model and then, as we are the surrogate for the painter, when we look at the picture, between the model-image and ourselves.

I am not happy with the notion of the artist as voyeur (a voyeur is essentially concealed, whereas artist and spectator normally are not), and in this work as throughout Caravaggio’s oeuvre the effect of instantaneousness is the result of a more complex quasi-temporal internal structure, but Freedberg’s insistence on the unprecedented intensity both of the act of depiction and of the painting-viewer relationship seems exactly right. Here I want to call attention to a compelling feature of the Saint John, the hyper-alive, not to say “ecstatic” plant in its lower right-hand corner. Later in this lecture I shall return to my earlier suggestion that the lower right corner of the

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4.4 Caravaggio, Saint John the Baptist with a Ram, ca. 1602. Oil on canvas, 129 × 95 cm. Pinacotheca dei Musei Capitolini, Rome

canvas is often a highly charged zone in Caravaggio’s paintings, for reasons that I shall try to make clear once and for all. A somewhat earlier canvas, the exquisite and piercing Lute Player (ca. 1595–96; fig. 4.5) in St. Petersburg, has been a focal work in several path-breaking articles by Elizabeth Cropper, who has stressed its affinities with a lyric tradition ultimately

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4.5 Caravaggio, The Lute Player, ca. 1595–96. Oil on canvas, 94 × 119 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

rooted in Petrarchan poetry and positing a conventional albeit rhetorically intensely personal relation between an I (io) who addresses a you (tu), both of whom are in effect constructed by the poem (or, in this case, the painting, instigating another form of empathic projection). “In Caravaggio’s . . . early mode, according to the conventions of lyrical address,” Cropper writes, “he establishes a relationship with the viewer such that each one of us, and not only a Cardinal del Monte or a Vincenzo Giustiniani in their princely galleries, can be the tu for the enunciating io in the image, and reflexively, can stand for the io who, like the painter, addresses the tu within the image. Caravaggio’s thematizing of subjectivity in this way . . . goes beyond iconography (half-length musicians), to the very essence of lyricism.” “Such an io/tu relationship,” she adds, “is quite different from the diegetic distance of history in which the narrator is absent, and so it is also in lyrical painting as opposed to the painted storia.” There is more to Cropper’s account of the Lute Player, including a fine discussion of the affinity between Caravaggio’s art and that of the poet Marino, much of whose poetry was inspired by painting (including Caravaggio’s), but the

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bare terms of her analogy with lyric poetry suffice to underscore the Lute Player’s almost magical powers of address. Another work of around the time of the Saint John the Baptist with a Ram, Amor Vincit Omnia or Eros Triumphant, originally Giustiniani’s and today in Berlin (1601–2; fig. 4.6), is doubtless the most provocatively confrontational canvas in all Caravaggio’s oeuvre. (Giustiniani kept it behind a dark green curtain and disclosed it to visitors to his gallery only after all the other paintings had been seen.) What makes it so, of course, is the blatant sexuality of the portrayal of Eros, a quality inseparable from the sharp focus, brightly lit–darkly shadowed optical or mirrorlike realism with which the task of description has been carried out: again, we sense the “original” presence before the artist of a particular model, a facially far from ideally beautiful and no doubt precociously experienced boy of about twelve who has been fitted out with real wings for the occasion and who, somewhat surprisingly, appears to be enjoying the experience of posing—perhaps because the fictive moment the painting represents is one in which the boy, smiling archly at the viewer and reaching behind him with his left arm and hand, impudently breaks a static pose to indicate the source of the pleasure he is offering the viewer. (The sitter has persuasively been identified as Francesco, or Cecco, Boneri, who seems to have spent years living with Caravaggio and was later rumored to have been his bed partner; Boneri went on to become a painter, one of the most original of the Caravaggisti, entering art history under the name Cecco del Caravaggio. It is very likely an older and more serious Cecco who was the model for the thoughtful David in the Borghese David with the Head of Goliath, along with other figures such as the protagonist of Saint John the Baptist with a Ram and the young Isaac in the Sacrifice of Isaac.) On the floor and on the covered bench to the boy’s left (our right) are various objects—armor, musical instruments, a manuscript volume, quill pen, and laurel wreath, a T-square and compass, a blue globe with stars—symbolizing the arts of warfare and of peace, all represented with the dazzling mastery of surface appearances that was one of Caravaggio’s recognized strengths at this point in his career. (Mina Gregori suggests that the globe may be a symbol of Love’s power.) It has also been noted that the musical score begins with the letter V, Vincenzo Giustiniani’s first initial, and it is not unlikely that the painting had its original owner in view in other ways as well, though there seems to be a scholarly consensus to the effect that the homosexual theme was Caravaggio’s doing. (Without going into detail, the historical evidence suggests that Caravaggio’s sexual preferences ran to both women and boys; I am not sure that there is ever going to be much more to say about the topic than that.) In any case, however personalized its iconography may be, the power of the Eros Triumphant to stop viewers in their tracks has never been in question. One last group of paintings by Caravaggio is pertinent to this discussion, starting with the Uffizi Head of Medusa (1596–97; fig. 4.7), commissioned by Del Monte and sent as a gift to the Grand Duke of Florence. I shall have more to say about the topos

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4.6 Caravaggio, Eros Triumphant, 1601–2. Oil on canvas, 156 × 113 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

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4.7 Caravaggio, Head of Medusa, 1596–97. Oil on canvas stretched over a shield of poplar wood, 55 cm. in diameter. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 351

of decapitation in lecture 5, but we are plainly dealing here with an extreme instance of address or confrontation, even if Medusa’s head itself does not look directly at the viewer. Physically, the painting is oil on canvas applied to a round, slightly convex wooden parade shield. It depicts the severed head of the snake-haired Gorgon, Medusa, who according to Greek mythology was beheaded by the hero Perseus with the aid of a simple device, which just happens to have been a kind of mirror—in fact, a shield mirror (to use the term introduced in connection with the Rinaldo and Armida stanzas of Gerusalemme liberata in lecture 2). That is, the Medusa’s gaze turned men to stone, but Perseus avoided that fate, according to Ovid, by “look[ing] upon the image of that dread face reflected from the bright bronze shield his left hand bore”—and cut her head off with the sword in his right. Thereafter the head was placed by Athena on her shield, where it had the apotropaic function of petrifying her enemies. Symbolically, the Medusa’s head connoted the power of a prince to petrify his enemies and thus bring peace to his kingdom—whence the suitability of the shield as a gift to the Duke of Florence. And, of course, a well-known sixteenthcentury sculpture we shall glance at, also in lecture 5, in connection with a painting by Annibale Carracci, Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, stood in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, where it rivaled Michelangelo’s David and an earlier masterpiece depicting the act of decapitation, Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes. Some writers, notably Louis Marin, have proposed that the reflected image in Perseus’s shield petrified Medusa herself, but I see no reason to think this. Instead, I take Medusa’s downward and sideways look in Caravaggio’s painting to be directed

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in shock and dismay at the reflection in Perseus’s shield of the hero’s features at the very instant that (or rather the instant before; more on this below) his sword sliced through her neck, a blow I feel sure was delivered with a backhand stroke, that is, from the left (her right), which is also to say from bright to dark. A brief passage in Cellini’s Memoirs confirms the idea that a backhand blow was the best way to cut off a head. Plus there are Orazio Gentileschi’s David Slaying Goliath (1607–9) in Dublin, in which the youthful hero prepares to deliver the severing blow with such a stroke, and his daughter Artemisia’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612–13) in Naples in which the heroine is depicted slicing through the tyrant’s neck in a backhand direction, among other contemporary images to the same effect (not to mention earlier works such as Correggio’s Martyrdom of Four Saints [1523] in Parma). Interestingly, Caravaggio’s Judith in the Barberini Judith and Holofernes (fig. 5.7) slices the other way, which visibly puts her wrist under great strain. In any case, Medusa’s severed head with its still writhing snakes has been depicted mounted on the shield in highly persuasive relief, and the implication for the viewer is that simply seeing the painting—allowing his gaze to fall upon the head—places him in imminent risk of being turned to stone in his own right. For Marin, again, Caravaggio’s interpretation of the Ovidian narrative implies two moments, the first self-Medusizing, which he calls “sculptural” (presumably because her victims and, in his account, she herself were turned to stone), the second that of the mounting of the head on the shield, which he calls “ornamental or decorative.” I have already said that I do not accept Marin’s suggestion that Caravaggio’s Medusa turned herself into stone (for one thing, the direction of her gaze rules that out; for another, her flesh does not seem at all mineral), but his identification of separate moments in the implied narrative structure of the work itself has something in common with the distinction I have been drawing between “moments” of immersion and specularity. The task for me is to flesh out the notion of immersion with respect to the Ovidian narrative, and my thought is that it may most plausibly be associated with Perseus’s careful approach to the sleeping Medusa (according to Ovid, she was asleep when he surprised her), a protracted “moment” that would in effect have included the instant (no quotation marks) fractionally prior to decapitation when Medusa suddenly became aware of Perseus’s reflected (and presumably fierce, glaring, murderous) features on the mirror shield. The “moment” of immersion would have comprehended that instant in that Perseus had still to commit the act of decapitating her, which I associate with the “moment” of specularity—unless we are to think of the latter “moment” as consolidating around the mounting of the severed head on the shield. Another suggestion that has been made more than once by commentators on the Medusa is that it too is a self-portrait, or at any rate that Caravaggio used his own features, suitably distorted, as his model for the work. This seems far from certain, but the thematic affinity of the Medusa with the earlier Boy Bitten by a Lizard, all but universally regarded as a self-portrait, is undeniable. Moreover, to the extent

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that the Medusa structurally identifies its maker with Perseus (despite the fact that in Ovid’s narrative it is Athena who subsequently places the Gorgon’s head on her shield), we perhaps may think of it as a self-portrait in another sense, the Gorgon having been killed while reacting to, in that sense “reflecting,” Perseus’s imminent assault—and, of course, it would not have been unlikely that Perseus was himself at that very instant “reflecting” the expression of his terrifying prey. The “moment” of immersion would thus also be one of “mimetic” identification with the aggressor (also, I am suggesting, of the aggressor’s “mimetic” identification with his victimto-be), even as the work as we have it portrays Medusa reacting to her oncoming death with fear and shock. In two other major paintings already discussed, David with the Head of Goliath and the London Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist, a severed head is presented as if to the viewer, and although in these canvases too neither the heads themselves nor any figure actually meets the viewer’s gaze, the effect of confrontation is extremely powerful. Of course, the first viewer to experience that effect would have been the painter (the painter-viewer), a point the full implications of which will become clear in lecture 6.

Let all this stand as evidence for my claim that Caravaggio’s paintings of the 1590s and after mark the advent of a new, more presentational or confrontational—one might also say conscriptive—relationship to the viewer. Now the first thing to note is that the claim itself is hardly original, as my quotations from Freedberg and Cropper have already shown. What is perhaps original, however—what I have been working toward in this lecture—is the further claim that in Caravaggio’s art (and not only there, as we are about to see) absorption and address constitute two poles of a single representational or rather pictorial regime. By this I mean not only that what undergirded the new interest in absorption as a resource for painting was in large measure a desire to establish a more urgent and focused empathic-projective connection between viewer and painting. I mean also that throughout the 1590s and first two decades of the 1600s a new type of painting arose that explicitly combined or juxtaposed or wove together motifs of absorption and address in highly sophisticated compositions that for a time enjoyed vast popularity not only in Rome but throughout much of Europe. I shall be turning to Caravaggio in a moment but I want to begin my brief survey of a number of such works by looking at an impressive if relatively uncelebrated painting by his older Bolognese contemporary, Ludovico Carracci, by way of indicating the more than individual scope of the developments I am seeking to chart. (As I remarked in my introduction, the moment of Caravaggio as I understand it comprises more than Caravaggio’s art.) The painting is Ludovico’s The Chess Players in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie (ca. 1590?; fig. 4.8); for purposes of comparison, we may consider an earlier picture of the same subject, also in Berlin, the Venetian painter Paris Bordone’s Chess Players

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of perhaps forty years before (fig. 4.9). For the most part the comparison is arbitrary, but it serves a useful purpose by demonstrating that the subject matter of chess playing is not inherently absorptive and thereby underscoring the focused concentration of Ludovico’s chess players on their game. As Gail Feigenbaum has remarked, the game itself seems near its end; only a few pieces remain on the board, and the bearded player on the left “extends his fingers to slide his bishop slowly—the motion is superbly captured—toward his opponent’s king.” Both men are dressed in black with black hats and white shirt collars; both look intently at the board; the player on the left is viewed ever so slightly from behind and his face, in less than full profile, is in shadow, with a wedge of light striking his neck and ear (cf. the observer in Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns). In contrast, the player on the right has been depicted somewhat from the front, and his face, with downcast eyes and contracted brow, is illuminated by what seems to be sunlight. His right hand rests on the edge of the board, and by a masterstroke of suggestion we are made to feel the liveness of

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4.9 Paris Bordone, The Chess Players, ca. 1550. Oil on canvas, 112 × 181 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. 169 4.8 (facing page) Ludovico Carracci, The Chess Players, ca. 1590? Oil on canvas, 83 × 103 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. 369

that hand and, beyond that, a certain tension in the upper body as the player registers the likelihood of his defeat. Altogether, Ludovico’s canvas infuses its genre subject matter with depth and seriousness by virtue of the impression it conveys of the two men’s psychic inwardness, their habitation of a world of private thoughts and feelings that are nevertheless readable, up to a point, in their not quite impassive facial expressions and all but completely stilled bodily attitudes. This, not the mere fact of being a genre painting, is what makes the Chess Players a possibly epochal work. (As is well known, genre painting—the portrayal of subjects from ordinary life—arose in northern Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; it came later to Italy and became naturalized in Bologna, among other centers, notably in the highly resourceful art of Bartolomeo Passerotti, in the generation before Ludovico’s.) But there is more to Ludovico’s canvas than simply the figures of the chess players, masterly as they are. Equally crucial to its paradigmatic status (equally anticipatory of future developments) is the small brown-and-white dog that sits facing directly

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out of the painting in the left foreground. His function, I suggest, is not just to provide a coloristic counter to the two men or to enliven the lower left corner of the composition, but also, more importantly, to affirm the viewer’s position in front of the canvas, facing the depicted scene at a certain distance from it. More precisely, the dog in its facingness and by virtue of the impression it conveys of looking at someone standing before it at once asserts the viewer’s presence to the painting and underscores his or her noncommunication with the chess players, and yet (to come full circle) it is above all the persuasive evocation of their total concentration on their game that arrests the viewer before the painting and exposes him or her, in a manner of speaking, to the dog’s outward gaze (as well as, shifting attention slightly, to the visual attraction of the dog’s silky-seeming fur). Indeed, that internally contrastive structure is carried further by the way in which the men in black have been framed and isolated by the strongly patterned Turkish rug that covers the table at which they are seated and the tooled, painted, and gilded brown leather backdrop that hangs facing the viewer on the wall behind them. Like the dog, the rug and the backdrop belong to a formal machinery of address (here it is pertinent that the table thrusts up close to the picture plane); as such, they radicalize the painting’s assertion of the viewer’s presence even as the silhouetting of the chess players against a patterned ground almost literally casts into negative relief—hollows out against that ground— the apparent inwardness of their respective states of mind. A similar oppositional structure comes to the fore a century and a half later in Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s glorious genre paintings of the mid- and late 1730s. In the National Gallery of Art’s The Card Castle (ca. 1737; fig. 4.10), for example, the absorption of the young man in his delicate pastime is pointedly juxtaposed to the table drawer in the lower foreground that opens toward the viewer, an arrangement I read as implying that the drawer is perceived by the viewer but not by the young man. In that drawer, moreover, we find two playing cards, one facing the viewer, which I take as standing for the painting itself (i.e., for its painted surface), and the other facing away, which I read as allegorizing the privacy of the young man’s inner state (its “blankness” with respect to the viewer). In the decades that followed—more precisely, starting in the mid-1750s—ambitious painting in France assigned itself the immensely productive if ultimately doomed project of establishing positively, as a matter of unswerving principle, what I have called the supreme fiction or ontological illusion that the beholder did not exist, that there was no one standing before the canvas; the least failure of would-be absorptive or dramatic paintings to achieve that illusion—the least intimation that one or more figures in a painting were not so completely engaged in their actions, feelings, and thoughts as to be wholly oblivious to anything else—was stigmatized as théâtral, “theatrical,” which is to say that absorption and drama were pitted against theatricality, with no possibility of compromise, in principle at any rate. The project was ultimately doomed—in the long run it was bound to fail—because the ineluctable truth of the

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4.10 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Card Castle, ca. 1737. Oil on canvas, 82 × 66 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection

4.11 Edouard Manet, The Old Musician, 1862. Oil on canvas, 187.4 × 248.3 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chester Dale Collection

situation—that easel paintings are made to be beheld—kept making itself felt, calling for new measures to bracket or neutralize or disguise that truth, in short, to hold it at bay, measures that in turn were sooner or later revealed to be inadequate in one way or another. Of course, the other face of that continual “failure” was the production of much of the most significant painting of the next hundred years or more. In my trilogy, Absorption and Theatricality, Courbet’s Realism, and Manet’s Modernism, I track the far from simple path of a central antitheatrical project, which eventually, more than a hundred years after it got under way, reached a critical stage. At that point, the early 1860s, the task of defeating theatricality by one means or another had to be given up as no longer feasible, and in Manet’s revolutionary canvases of the first half of that decade—the Old Musician (1862; fig. 4.11), Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63), and Olympia (1863) are the crucial instances—an attempt was made to refound ambitious painting on the basis of a new acknowledgment of the beholder’s ineluctable presence before the canvas. (The terms of that acknowledgment, not any mere assertion of the painting’s flatness, formed the core of Manet’s modernism.) Among the means by which this was to be accomplished was an embrace of the linked pictorial qualities of “facingness” and “strikingness,” both of which may be thought of as heightened and inflected versions of what I have been calling address. What I want to insist on, thinking still of Ludovico’s Chess Players—and looking forward to Caravaggio—is that absorption and address were not in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Italy imagined as fundamentally at odds

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with one another, as by and large would be the case for absorption and theatricality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France; the structural similarity to Chardin’s Card Castle, while not exactly misleading, therefore fails to acknowledge the very different historical valences of the two pictures and their respective contexts. Another way of putting this is to say that during the period with which the present book is concerned, a pejorative notion of theatricality had no purchase on the practice and evaluation of painting. By the 1630s theatricality of an obvious sort did become a conspicuous strain in what we have come to call baroque art—not only in painting but also, more importantly, in sculpture and architecture (the great exemplar is of course Gian Lorenzo Bernini)—but it remained for a future age, the mid-eighteenth century and after, to criticize that art specifically on those grounds. I shall have more to say about these developments in lecture 5. With Ludovico’s canvas in mind, I now want to turn to several pictures by Caravaggio, starting with his Cardsharps of around 1594–95 (fig. 4.12) at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Giovanni Bellori’s description of this work is well known: “Here [Caravaggio] represented a simple youth holding cards and dressed in a dark suit, his head well drawn from life. Opposite him in profile, a dishonest youth, who leans with one hand on the gaming table while with the other behind him, slips a false card from his belt. A third man near the boy looks at the points on the cards and with three fingers reveals them to his companion, who, as he leans on the table exposes to the light the shoulder of his jacket striped with black bands. There is nothing false in the coloring of this work. These are the first strokes from Michele’s brush in the pure manner of Giorgione with tempered shadows.” The question I want to ask is how this wholly original and spectacularly successful work—bought by Del Monte, it was soon copied repeatedly—relates to the issues I have been analyzing. A first impulse might be to deny that there is anything absorptive about it, and in fact modern commentators have not hesitated to characterize it as theatrical, by which they have meant both that the subject itself bears a relation to the popular theater of the time and that in their view the painting’s designs on the viewer appear all too obvious. But I want to argue that, as a point of historical method, one should avoid the trap of reserving the epithet “absorptive” only for works that strike one personally as convincingly absorptive in a way that the Cardsharps plausibly does not. That is, I understand absorption in the first place in relation to the artist’s inferred intentions—and when examined in that light, the absorptive basis of the Cardsharps is at once apparent. Consider that the well-dressed young man in black, a study in naiveté, is plainly meant to be seen as engrossed in the game; in particular, he appears oblivious both to the older bravo peeking at his cards and flashing a signal to his youthful partner in crime and to the latter’s brazen extraction of a needed card from behind his back. For his part, the young cardsharp is also intended to be viewed as engrossed, not in his cards but in reading the state of mind of the dupe: the cardsharp’s features, seen in profile, appear quiveringly alert as he studies the dupe’s face

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4.12 Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, ca. 1594–95. Oil on canvas, 94.2 × 130.9 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

for the least sign of a dawning consciousness of being cheated. The older bravo too is plainly intent on what he is doing; never mind that he seems excessively so, that the effect of his signaling baldly is comic, that the holes in the fingertips of his glove would have been understood as baring the fingertips themselves so as to be able to detect marked cards, in short that affectively we are in an altogether different world from that of the Penitent Magdalen, Death of the Virgin, Incredulity of Thomas, and Crowning with Thorns, all of which have yet to be painted—and all of which, as we have seen, are organized around the central theme of the life of Christ. Another reason why the thematization of absorption in the Cardsharps is nowhere near as persuasive as in Ludovico’s Chess Players is because it is put somewhat in the shade by multiple addresses to the viewer. The two most conspicuous of these are the older man’s hand signal, ostensibly not meant for us but infallibly attracting our gaze, and the younger cardsharp’s drawing a card from behind his back, a deed that takes place not only before our eyes but in the right near foreground, a privileged spot in Caravaggio’s paintings, as I have said. In addition, the Fort Worth

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canvas everywhere offers the viewer matter to relish visually, from the daintiness of the young dupe’s hairstyle and clothing, to the torn fingertips of the bravo’s glove, to the richly textured and brightly colored damask doublets of both cardsharps, to the marvelously painted pierced blue oversleeve of the younger cardsharp with drifts of white undersleeve showing through, to the feather in his cap, to the dagger at his belt. . . . My further point, a dialectical one, is that these are most effectively offered to view—they most vividly give themselves to be seen—precisely to the extent that the three actors are understood as caught up in their double game; Bellori implies as much when he refers to the young cardsharp as leaning on the table and thereby “expos[ing] to the light the shoulder of his jacket striped with black bands”—as if what set the stage for the young Caravaggio’s descriptive tour de force was above all the fact that he conceived of the figures as absorbed in the situation as a whole. (A closely related work, the exactly contemporary Fortune Teller in the Capitoline Museum [ca. 1594–95; fig. 4.13], would probably strike no one as absorptive but may well have been intended to depict the young gypsy holding her victim spellbound with her gaze while delicately removing a ring from his right hand. Compare Cervantes: “Cortado [a pickpocket] looked [his victim] steadily in the face and did not take his eyes off him. The sexton stared back at him, hanging on his every word. By holding his attention transfixed Cortado was able to conclude his business and very delicately remove the handkerchief from his pocket.”) Another early multifigure painting briefly discussed in connection with issues of self-portraiture in lecture 2, The Musicians (fig. 4.14), is even more instructive. Commissioned by Del Monte and painted by Caravaggio early during his stay in the Palazzo Madama, it emblematizes the central role Del Monte played in the musical culture of his time. (Unlike the Cardsharps, which is in excellent condition, the Musicians has been extensively restored; nevertheless enough of the original survives to allow the following analysis.) In a canvas of just over two and a half feet high by roughly three and a half feet wide the artist has depicted four figures, two of whom look directly at the viewer and two of whom—at the left and the right—can unproblematically be characterized as absorbed (Langdon describes all four as “preparing for a concert in one of the small chambers in the Palazzo Madama”). Indeed, the central figure, a male lutanist tuning his instrument, places the painting as a whole under the sign of address—he looks almost beseechingly directly out of the painting, with tear-filled eyes and open mouth—even as he gives the impression of also being absorbed (with only part of his mind) in the fine adjustment of his instrument (this in itself represents a huge step beyond the cruder representational logic of the Cardsharps). Behind him and to the right, a dark-haired young man oriented to the right and holding a cornetto in his right hand turns his head to look at us. There is common agreement that the young man bears Caravaggio’s features, and in lecture 2 I suggested that he has been portrayed according to the protocols of right-angle mirror representation. To the left and rear, we see a winged figure with downcast gaze, a

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4.13 Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller, ca. 1594–95. Oil on canvas, 115 × 150 cm. Musei Capitolini, Pinacotheca, Rome, inv. 227

Cupid, tearing off a bunch of grapes. And in the right foreground, a seated musician, presumably the violinist (at any rate, a violin and bow rest on a surface at his side), has been depicted mainly from the rear as he studies a musical score. Like the figure with the lute, he wears a gauzy white garment, no doubt a version of classical dress; unlike the lutanist, one shoulder is left uncovered and his back is mostly bare. Once more the lower right-hand corner of the composition is a focus of particular attention: we find there a book of music, more drapery, and the bravura bow in the seated musician’s dark brown sash girding his waist (we intuit with pleasure the panache with which it has been tied). In other words, the structural matrix of the Musicians is again double, but the interplay between absorption and address is much more artful and nuanced than in the Cardsharps, which is also to say that the figures of Cupid and the seated musician appear “realistically” absorbed as none of the figures in the Cardsharps manages to do. Notice, by the way, how the page of music being studied by the seated musician is open to our view (I mean readable by us); in contrast, the book of music in the immediate foreground is turned away, like the musician himself (his profil perdu shows Caravaggio’s increasing mastery of the device). Here the question might be asked, Which of the two books of music “belongs” to absorption and which to address?—a question harder to answer than one might think. For example, the score that the absorbed musician studies faces the viewer, a

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4.14 Caravaggio, The Musicians, ca. 1595–96. Oil on canvas, 92 × 118.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1952 (52.81)

4.15 (facing page) Caravaggio, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, ca. 1596–97. Oil on canvas, 135.5 × 166.5 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome

relation of address, but it also belongs to the musician’s absorptive world, just as the score at the bottom of the canvas is oriented in the same direction as the musician, but precisely because that is the case, it holds the viewer at a distance, which in effect the mode of address does as well. Similarly, the bow in the musician’s sash might be said to face the viewer (anyway to be turned toward him)—but associated as it is with the figure’s back, can it possibly be a token of address? Some further implications of these questions will soon emerge. A third painting from the same period, the exquisite Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1596–97; fig. 4.15) in the Doria-Pamphili Gallery, represents a still higher degree of structural sophistication on the part of the young artist. The Holy Family is taking its rest in the shade of an oak tree (not the usual palm). In the center foreground a largely naked angel with meticulously rendered dark-to-light-gray wings

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and encircled by floating serpentine white drapery has been depicted from the rear serenading the Family on a violin; his head, turned to the left, is visible in profile to the viewer. To the right, the Virgin, in a bright red dress and, across her lap, a dark blue mantle, has fallen asleep cradling the sleeping Christ Child in the crook of her left arm; as has often been noted, the model for the Virgin would seem to have been the same young woman who posed for the Penitent Magdalen. To the left, the seated Joseph in a dark brown robe and bare feet holds up an oblong partbook, of a motet with a text based on the Song of Songs, so that the angel can read the notes (a charming conceit: the angel does not have the music by heart). And close behind Joseph is a donkey, one of whose large, dark, liquid eyes seems to be gazing somewhat indeterminately at the angel and perhaps beyond, in the general direction of the viewer.

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Unlike the Musicians, which makes an initial impression of address, the dominant mood of the Rest on the Flight is strongly absorptive. As was mentioned earlier, sleep may be thought of as an extreme modality of absorption, and the physical repose of the Virgin and Child could hardly be more persuasively depicted; the angel appears wholly caught up in his music making; while Joseph, face mostly in shadow, looks calmly at the angel as the latter plays. Moreover, Caravaggio has at last yielded to the temptation, which one feels had been growing in him, to depict an important figure entirely from the rear, facing into the painting (in this instance with all but his face), an orientation that would seem to “belong” unequivocally to absorption as opposed to address. But the Rest on the Flight as a whole is more complex than these observations imply, in ways that are already familiar to us from the Cardsharps and Musicians. Although the angel faces into the painting, his (its?) back emphatically faces the viewer, by which I mean not simply that it meets one’s gaze but that it offers such ravishing matter to the eye: the sunlit, almost naked body of the youthful creature, with its perfect contours and lower legs virtually caressing one another (echoed or mirrored by Joseph’s feet more crudely doing the same); the freely floating white drapery, as lyrical as any in the artist’s oeuvre; and especially the feathered wings, another dazzling feat of material description, the left one of which appears to protrude almost directly out of the picture. In addition the sleeping Virgin and Child invite close scrutiny of their faces, the sideways slump of the Virgin’s head encouraging the viewer to incline his head to that side as well, the better to take in her features. And beyond them and to the right, also beyond the brambles protecting them, there opens a beautiful twilight landscape, typical of Lombardy rather than of the Middle East. To the left of the angel, the partbook held open by Joseph faces the beholder as if meant for him or her as well as for the violinist. Finally, the large dark eye of the donkey, so close to Joseph’s face, adds a curiously moving visual emphasis to the composition, almost as if the painting itself looks out at the world through that singular optic. (The donkey’s eye also bears a brilliant highlight, making it a sort of convex mirror.) So once again we are dealing with an extraordinarily nuanced and polyvalent amalgam of absorption and address, one that perhaps more than in any work we have looked at so far demonstrates the remarkable flexibility of Caravaggio’s “system” at this moment in his development as well as the power of that “system”—this is perhaps the crucial point—to confer on a gallery painting of relatively modest size (in this case just over four feet high by just over five feet wide) a density of depicted and implied relationships that goes far beyond anything of which I am aware in previous examples of the medium. The relevant comparisons—which mainly point up the specialness of Caravaggio’s achievement—would be with half-length compositions from Venice, such as Giorgione’s Education of the Young Marcus Aurelius (ca. 1505; fig. 4.16) in the Pitti; Titian’s The Concert (ca. 1505; fig. 4.17) in the same museum; or, perhaps more to the point, with certain fascinating, relatively small

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4.16 Giorgione, Education of the Young Marcus Aurelius (also known as The Three Ages of Man), ca. 1505. Oil on panel, 62 × 77 cm. Galleria Palatina di Palazzo Pitti, Florence

4.18 Titian, The Tribute Money, ca. 1516. Oil on panel, 75 × 56 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

4.17 Titian, The Concert, ca. 1505. Oil on canvas, 86.5 × 123.5 cm. Galleria Palatina di Palazzo Pitti, Florence

4.19 Titian, The Bravo, ca. 1515–20. Oil on canvas, 75 × 67 cm. Kunsthisorisches Museum, Vienna

early works by Titian in a vertical format in which two or more figures press close to the picture plane, such as The Tribute Money (ca. 1516; fig. 4.18) in Dresden and The Bravo (ca. 1515–20; fig. 4.19) in Vienna. There is still more to be said about the Rest on the Flight. Briefly, I see the angel, and by implication all personages in Caravaggio’s paintings of these years (and later)

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that are depicted to a greater or lesser degree from the rear, as figures of bodily identification with or surrogacy for the painter himself, by virtue of their congruence with his own bodily orientation before the painting. In the case of the Rest, the analogy between angel and artist is even stronger than this suggests: both violin playing and painting with brush and palette are two-handed operations, and there is a crude sense in which the violinist’s bow, wielded in the angel’s right hand, may be analogized to the painter’s brush. This last point may seem forced but note the conspicuous right-left asymmetry of the composition, despite its centering on the figure of the angel: to the left, the zone of Joseph and the donkey, the composition is dark and spatially blocked, whereas to the right, as has been noted, it brightens and opens up spatially—we see all the way to the horizon—yielding a passage that comes as near as anything in Caravaggio to “pure” landscape. The contrast is confirmed by the opposition between the jaggedly tangible small rocks on the ground in the left extreme foreground and the living foliage on the ground to the right. No doubt the opposition has a Christian content, suggesting, in Langdon’s words, “a movement from the harsh and stony path that leads through this vale of tears to the radiance of the everlasting life promised by the birth of Christ,” but here as elsewhere in Caravaggio religious meaning coexists with very different sorts of determinations. At any rate, I understand the combination of centering plus right-left asymmetry as keyed, first, to the position and orientation of the embodied painter (the painter-viewer) before the canvas and, second, to the difference in position and mode of activity between the painter’s (subordinate, for the most part stationary) left hand holding the palette and his right hand wielding the brush to produce the picture, extending toward and in a sense “into” the latter to do so. It is as if that act of extension finds its truest expression in the opening up of the landscape in the right-hand portion of the composition, which however may also be why the effect of distance in that portion of the canvas is rather tightly framed or hemmed in by nearer elements. Indeed, the privileging of the lower right-hand corner of the canvas in Saint John the Baptist with Ram, Cardsharps, Musicians, Salome, and numerous other works by Caravaggio, to which I have called attention more than once, is also to be understood in these terms, as thematizing the actual location as well as, by means of elements like the bravura bow in the sash in the Musicians and the “ecstatic” plant in the St. John, the sheer physical dexterity of the painter’s active right hand, which in effect the paintings “mirror” in that way. Sword hilts are routinely found there as well, suggesting an equation between swordplay and painting that Caravaggio, incorrigible brawler, could only have approved. In other words, I see the spatial structure of this most poetic of paintings as expressing the “lived” spatiality of its maker in the act of making—or perhaps I should say the “lived” spatiality of its maker as he was immersed in the act of making. At the same time, there are features of the painting that powerfully counter the effect of identification and surrogacy, none more powerfully than the epicene beauty of

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the youthful angel, the ravishingly painted drapery that barely caresses the otherwise naked body it encircles, and the magnificent, almost disturbingly authentic avian wings (Langdon suggests they were copied from the wings of a pigeon). Angel, drapery, and wings combine to separate and distance the viewer from the painting (the jutting of the left wing forces the issue), or to put this more strongly, in the Rest on the Flight the conspicuous beauty and refinement both of that central figure and of the painting’s meticulous but ever-fresh-seeming execution perform the work of specularization that pain and shock accomplish in the Boy Bitten by a Lizard. (All this is consistent with Cropper’s account of the workings of a shared aesthetic of ultra-refined beauty, wonder, and almost Medusizing perfection in Caravaggio’s paintings and Marino’s poems.)

A brief discussion of two paintings of sharply different subjects, one Christian, the other mythological, will bring this lecture to a close. The London Supper at Emmaus (1601; fig. 4.20), another work made for Ciriaco Mattei, rings a further change on the conjunction of absorption and address. In an obvious sense, the scene is one of intensest absorption, as the two disciples abruptly recognize their beardless, downward-gazing companion reciting the blessing over bread as the risen Christ. But the very suddenness that the painting dramatizes—the fact that what is depicted is the precise instant of recognition—produces consequences significantly different from any we have associated with absorption until now (as a comparison with the Incredulity of Thomas, another “instantaneous” scene, suffices to make clear). Thus, the violent, involuntary responses of the astonished disciples—the man wearing a pilgrim’s shell on the right flinging both arms outward (the left arm directly toward us), the dark-haired man at the left half-rising from his chair, which seems to thrust backward—seconded or mimed by the superbly painted basket of fruit thrusting beyond the near edge of the table—have the effect of distancing the viewer, as if physically driving him or her back from the surface of the picture. In addition the too-large outflung right hand of the disciple on the right creates an unignorable disturbance in the otherwise rigorous visual logic of the pictorial field, further unsettling the viewer’s sense of positionality. Distancing of another sort marks the viewer’s relation to the frontally seated, downward- (or inward-)looking figure of Christ, whose soft, unfamiliar, almost adolescent features, strongly yet delicately modeled by the sourceless light, give rise to an instant of cognitive uncertainty, which in the first place corresponds to the disciples’ failure to acknowledge their Master until the present instant and in the second challenges the viewer to acknowledge Him as well, that is, to respond to the beardless man as if he were recognizably the figure of Christ. No wonder, then that the sharp-focus realism with which the scene has been depicted serves largely to reinforce the viewer’s sense of separation from the painting as a whole.

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4.20 Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, 1601. Oil and egg on canvas, 141 × 196.2 cm. National Gallery, London. Presented by the Hon. George Vernon, 1839, inv. 172

Naturally, I am aware that my account of the effect of the disciples’ gestures and the off-the-table-edge fruit basket—and, in a sense Emmaus’s realism—goes against the idea that precisely those devices “seem to destroy the barriers between the world of art and the world of the viewer, and draw him into the drama,” to again quote Langdon, only the latest of many commentators who have made more or less the same claim. Langdon, however, also acutely remarks apropos of the Emmaus, “In the home of a new and sophisticated family of art patrons, Caravaggio set out to create a flamboyant showcase of illusionistic skill. It is a throwback to his earlier work, and to those Lombard and Venetian themes of the varied effects of light on surface and texture, with which he had challenged the idealising traditions of Rome. It also retains a strong sense of the studio, of the artist selecting a fine majolica rug, a twist of startlingly white cloth, a fine oriental rug, such as he might have seen in the collection of Del Monte or Ottavio Costa.” More broadly, the viewer—as patron, collector, amateur—is invited to approach the picture surface in all its artifactuality the

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4.21 Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, detail of bird, etc.

better to appreciate its technical perfection; the still life with its spotted, blemished fruit plays a role in this as well, as do the finely grooved pilgrim’s shell and for that matter the ragged hole in the elbow of the green jacket of the disciple at the left. In other words, Langdon is right to stress those aspects of the Emmaus that make it “a collector’s piece,” as she also calls it, which is not to say that it is not also a work of authentic religious feeling. But there is in the Emmaus a palpable tension, which her account of the painting does not quite acknowledge, between the religious content on the one hand and various techniques of address and specularization on the other (no sharp distinction between the latter pair is possible), so that even when the two have most in common, as in the rendering of the dead bird on the table (fig. 4.21)—obviously symbolizing Christ’s Passion—the fit is in a sense less than perfect. The upthrust rigid legs and claws are hard to look at without experiencing a sense of revulsion, a feeling that goes somewhat beyond the requirements of the painting’s drama of recognition. For his part, David Hockney in his book Secret Knowledge sees in the “wrongness” of the seated disciple’s too-large right hand indisputable evidence that the artist employed an optical device, probably a lens casting an inverted image with extremely limited depth of field, to aid him in capturing the exact appearance of his models on canvas. But this implies either that Caravaggio would not afterward have noticed that the hand was out of scale, which seems improbable, or that, having noticed it, he would have left the hand as it was rather than have taken steps to correct it, which seems odd if one of his main purposes in using the lens or lens-mirror was to make images that looked like pieces of the world. In any case, there can be no comparably technological explanation for a related feature of the painting, the

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placement partly beyond the table edge of the basket of fruit. In general, Hockney’s thesis of the secret or unacknowledged use of optical devices by countless major and minor painters from Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck to Ingres and other nineteenth-century masters cannot, I think, be accepted in the global form in which he casts it. In the case of Caravaggio, in addition to making implausible claims about the means by which particular works were executed, it perpetuates the traditional notion that Caravaggio’s realism was essentially optical in character, whereas I take the London Emmaus to epitomize the intermixing of optical or mirrorlike and bodily modes of realism that I see as having been fundamental to his enterprise throughout his career. Simply put, Caravaggio was never simply—perhaps not even primarily—an optical realist, as stylistic considerations alone might lead one to suppose; in Paul Valéry’s phrase, as cited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he always “took his body with him.” As his paintings invite us to recognize that we take ours with us when we stand before them. Finally, the mental state or mood of the standing host with his face largely in shadow and wearing a yarmulke is hard to specify. In a provocative article, Pamela Askew suggests that he may be “a contemporary host who has been serving his guests when suddenly their gestures and postures evoke in his mind a re-play of the Supper at Emmaus,” transfixing and in effect converting him where he stands. In keeping with this, she notes that Caravaggio has “pictorially joined the figures of the innkeeper and Christ through the large shadow cast on the wall,” a feature of the work that in her view “acts as a pictorial sign of [the innkeeper’s] having become Christ’s shadow, in the sense of his having in this moment become an imperfect imitation of him.” No doubt her overall argument goes too far (Askew proposes that other major paintings by Caravaggio as well be understood not primarily as biblical scenes but rather as contemporary equivalents to such scenes), but it must be granted that the host’s state of mind remains an open question.

The mythological painting I want to conclude this lecture by discussing is the mysterious Narcissus in the Palazzo Barberini (1599–1600; fig. 4.22), first attributed to Caravaggio by Longhi in 1916; although there are doubters, I think it is fair to say that the present scholarly consensus agrees with this view. According to Ovid in the Metamorphoses, Narcissus, a beautiful and prideful youth of sixteen, repulsed all approaches from both sexes (the nymph Echo actually died from unrequited love). To punish Narcissus, Nemesis brought him one day to a woodland pool; as the youth lay down to drink, he saw and fell in love with his own reflected image, which at first he took for another youth who appeared to respond to his solicitations but frustratingly refused to come into his arms. At last Narcissus recognized the truth. In the words Ovid put into his mouth: “Oh, I am he! I have felt it, I know now my own image. I burn with love of my own self; I both kindle the flames and

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suffer them. What shall I do? Shall I be wooed or woo? Why woo at all? What I desire, I have; the very abundance of my riches beggars me. Oh, that I might be parted from my own body! And, strange prayer for a lover, I would that what I love were absent from me! And now grief is sapping my strength; but a brief space of life remains to me and I am cut off in my life’s prime.” Narcissus soon after not only died but disappeared, leaving in his stead only “a flower, its yellow centre girt with white petals.” For Alberti, writing in the 1430s, the myth of Narcissus bore a privileged relation to the art of painting: “Consequently I used to tell my friends that the inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus, who was turned into a flower; for, as painting is the flower of all the arts, so the tale of Narcissus fits our purpose perfectly. What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?” Alberti says nothing more on the topic, and the figure of Narcissus plays a minor role in Italian painting until the late sixteenth century, which makes Caravaggio’s canvas all the more significant both historically and ontologically. In the Barberini canvas, Narcissus has been depicted at close range kneeling by the edge of the pool, which occupies, along with his reflection, the bottom half of the canvas. His two arms are almost symmetrical with one another, though his head is inclined toward his right (our left) so that we are shown his downward-gazing features in exact profile. His light brown hair tumbles over his brow and, at the side of his head, parts to reveal his ear. He wears a metallic blue doublet with a white blouse; darker blue cloth covers what is probably his left knee; but his right knee, just above the center of the canvas, is conspicuously bare. The overall effect of the composition, as Matteo Marangoni put it, is of an “ideal wheel,” comprising Narcissus and his reflection, pivoting on the knee; the inclination of the youth’s head means that nothing interrupts the continuity of the wheel-like circuit. As Stephen Bann remarks: “What is . . . striking is the almost perfect reciprocity between Narcissus and his reflection. In any close-up view of an object and its reflection on a horizontal surface, the aspect of the reflected object is bound to be different from the aspect of the object itself, since the two angles are significantly different from any one viewpoint. Here, however, it is as if the body and its reflection occupied the same plane, and this plane is closely parallel to the picture plane.” What Bann’s observations bring into focus is the elimination of all impression of depth, somewhat as though the whole picture, not just its lower half, has the character of an image in a mirror. With respect to the Ovidian text, the painting depicts the first phase of Narcissus’s fatal adventure: gazing transfixed and with slightly open mouth at his own reflected image. The youth seems not yet to understand that the beautiful apparition in the pool is not an independent being; the action of his left hand breaking the surface of the water toward the right-hand picture edge perhaps indicates that he will soon realize, from the consequences of that action, the true state of affairs. In a chapter of his book The True Vine as well as in a recent essay going on from that chapter (from

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4.22 Caravaggio, Narcissus, ca. 1599–1600. Oil on canvas, 112 × 92 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome

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which the preceding quotation is taken), Bann draws attention to the possible relevance of another ancient text on Narcissus, from the Imagines of the elder Philostratus. Specifically, Bann suggests that Caravaggio’s canvas “betrays, or advertises, its adhesion to the text of Philostratus (as opposed to the modern reference in Alberti) principally by the precision with which it picks up the classical author’s concluding description of the young huntsman’s hair arrangement. (Philostratus claims to be describing a painting of Narcissus at the pool, one of a number of works that decorated the porticoes of a villa in Naples.) In the Loeb translation: ‘For it is very abundant and of a golden hue; and some of it clings to the neck, some is parted by the ears, some tumbles over the forehead, and some falls in ripples to the beard.’ ” (Bann adds that “there is no reason to suppose from the Greek text that a full beard would have been implied.”) The deeper interest of Philostratus’s text emerges toward the end of Bann’s essay, where he proposes that Caravaggio might have found inspiration for his painting’s “remarkable unity of effect” in a passage in which the author directly addresses the painted figure of Narcissus: As for you, however, Narcissus, it is no painting that has deceived you, nor are you engrossed in a thing of pigments and wax; but you do not realize that the water represents you exactly as you are when you gaze upon it, nor do you see through the artifice of the pool, though to do so you have only to nod your head or change your expression or slightly move your hand, instead of standing in the same attitude; but acting as though you had met a companion, you wait for some move on his part. Do you then expect the pool to enter into conversation with you? Nay, this youth does not hear anything we say, but he is immersed, eyes and ears alike, in the water and we must interpret the painting for ourselves.

For Bann, this passage “seems to epitomise the mood of frozen contemplation that Caravaggio’s painting makes visible.” He continues: “If I do not immediately use the word ‘absorption’ in this context, it is not to deny the application of this term to Caravaggio’s Narcissus, in precisely the same way as Michael Fried has applied it in a series of . . . works beginning with Absorption and Theatricality, and currently continuing with studies of the work of Caravaggio. Philostratus’ commentary . . . may thus provide a foretaste of the proposition that Caravaggio would find compelling, not merely as an authoritative message from classical antiquity, but as an incentive to developing his own, distinctively modern concept of pictorial engagement.” Not surprisingly, I find Bann’s speculations attractive and would add that in the Narcissus the theme of absorption appears motivated in such a way as to raise inescapably the idea of immersion (as I have been using the term) as a state at once continuous with absorption—as a more intense form of the latter—and in crucial respects exceeding or going “beyond” it—as the image in the pond lies “beyond” the

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grasp of the kneeling youth. (Going “beyond” but also, in a crucial sense, “preceding” it: as if the notion of absorption has in view a particular relationship between a subject and an object, whereas in what I have been calling immersion there is no distinction [yet] to be made between the two—not that it will be possible to adhere rigorously to this distinction throughout the remainder of these lectures.) In this connection it is suggestive that still another ancient version of the Narcissus myth, Plotinus’s in the Enneads, has him die by drowning—that is, by physical immersion. Although the pool into which Caravaggio’s Narcissus longingly gazes conveys no impression of depth, the structure of the image, along with the bareness of the setting, leads one to imagine such an outcome of the scene as we behold it. Understood in this light, the desire of Ovid’s protagonist for separation from his own body, for an impossible distance from his own image, might almost be read as defining a “moment” of immersion in extremis, unable to achieve release in a “moment” of specularity that would establish the reflected image as an independent entity. In this respect, as in others, the Narcissus is the antithesis of the Medusa of a few years before. Put slightly differently, to the extent that the “moments” of immersion and— by implication, via the reference to Ovid—specularity may be seen as thematized in this work, the latter “moment” turns out to involve a kind of splitting or selfdivision on the part of the protagonist—a splitting or self-division of which we have already found various expressions in Caravaggio’s art, where it is often associated with death-dealing violence of a sort that is sublimated in the Narcissus. (The direst instances of this will be discussed in lectures 5 and 6.) The action of Narcissus’s left hand, “reflecting” the artist-viewer’s right hand, might possibly signify the act of painting, but in a distinctly minor key, without the least hint of an “ecstatic” flourish. A different sort of specular “moment” is evoked by Hubert Damisch, who finds in the “rigorous closure of the narcissistic circle an almost ‘repulsing’ aspect,” while Bann, having cited Damisch, goes on to remark that “the wheel formed by the body and its reflection is unbroken, and the spectator is cast off by the internal dynamic of the self-contained, self-sufficient gaze.” (Bann also comments on the way in which the painting both seduces and excludes the viewer, “cutting” or, say, severing the latter from a painted scene he cannot enter.) And then there is that central knee, more brightly lit than Narcissus’s face and almost obscene in its photogenic nakedness, to which the viewer’s gaze continually returns. Damisch at one point remarks that the knee occupies the position of the phallus, and while this has no place in my analysis, it nevertheless acknowledges the modern viewer’s sense of the knee’s resistance to being wholly comprehended in and by the strictly representational logic of the image as a whole. To sum up: we have in the Narcissus a virtual allegory of the “moment” of immersion, or perhaps I should say of absorption becoming immersion, conjoined with the strongest possible statement of the specular separation of the viewer—originally the painter-viewer—from the painting. There is in it also the strongest imaginable

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thematization of mirroring as distinct from painting, another of the basic polarities that, in varying ratios and combinations, structure much of Caravaggio’s art. And, of course, it is a scene of hyperbolic self-portraiture, the core practice of his lifelong endeavor. No wonder scholars since Longhi have been reluctant to withhold it from Caravaggio’s oeuvre; whether or not it is from his hand—after long hesitation I share the view that it is—it belongs inalienably to his pictorial universe.

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Detail from figure 5.7

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Severed Representations In lecture 4, in my discussion of two works by Caravaggio of around 1595–97, the Musicians and Rest on the Flight into Egypt, I put forward the notion that structurally those and other paintings from the same period are based in part on a combination or juxtaposition of motifs of what I have been calling absorption and address. The London Supper at Emmaus I saw as both confirming and transforming that structure in important respects; the Narcissus I described as going “beyond” absorption in the direction of immersion, with address being pretty much a missing term. (But the repulsing or severing of the beholder from the painted image implies a relation to the latter of a very particular sort.) As my account of the Musicians and the Rest on the Flight made clear, I take those pictures, or rather their underlying structure of absorption-plus-address, to have been a brilliant and influential invention on Caravaggio’s part, which is not to say that in all respects it was something absolutely new. For example, in countless Renaissance altarpieces various saints and often the Virgin as well might be loosely described as absorbed in contemplation of the Child, while a subsidiary figure, typically an angel but sometimes an individual saint or a donor, gazes outward toward the viewer. But there is more than that to the structure I have been analyzing. Then there is Leon Battista Alberti, who famously writes in his treatise on painting of 1435–36: “Then, I like there to be someone in the ‘historia’ [a narrative or historical painting] who tells the spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look, or with ferocious expression and forbidding glance challenges them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, or by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them. Everything the people in the painting do among themselves, or perform in relation to the spectators, must fit together to represent and explain the ‘historia.’ ” But Alberti’s stress on the “historia”—or, to put this slightly differently, his subordination of the “commentator”-figure to the “historia”—implies a different set of priorities from those I have been tracking, not only because in pictures like the Cardsharps, Musicians, and Rest on the Flight absorption and address are structural equals (though what this means varies from work to work) but also because absorption as such cannot be equated with Alberti’s

“historia.” Indeed, the primacy of absorption in Caravaggio’s art, along with his use of studio models, goes a long way toward accounting for what later seventeenthcentury critics like Baglione and Bellori regarded as his deficiencies as a painter of history and action. Another place to look for precedents would be sixteenth-century Venetian painting, in particular that of Giorgione and Titian (and Giorgionesque painting generally), which Caravaggio is plausibly held to have admired. But nothing quite like the structure of the Musicians or Rest on the Flight can be found there or anywhere else in previous pictorial art, with the qualified exception of certain works by the Carracci, in the first instance Ludovico Carracci’s Chess Players of around 1590 (the date is conjectural). In short, we are dealing with something substantially new, a simple but highly sophisticated principle or system of motivating and orchestrating the various personages in a painting relative to the presence and orientation of the painter, hence also of the viewer, that yields what I have characterized as an unprecedented density—a key term in what follows—of depicted and intuited relationships. And what I now want to suggest is that that structural principle or system has for its ultimate rationale the provision of a new basis for the self-sufficiency or autonomy of the emerging gallery picture. That is, the density and multiplicity of those relationships, augmented by a deep-hued Venetian-Lombard colorism and given immense authority, indeed partly actuated, by a new, mirrorlike realistic or naturalistic style, uniquely enabled such a picture, hanging as it often did in close and competitive proximity to numerous other works, not only to command its place on the gallery wall but also to invite and reward intense visual and intellectual contemplation, which in the actual exhibition spaces of the period often also meant prolonged and judgmental conversation among highly cultivated lovers of the art. I have also tried to show that paintings such as the ones we have been discussing are simultaneously optical and bodily with respect to their mode of realism. Optical because, as has always been recognized, Caravaggio’s realism, especially during his Roman period, represented a major stride forward in the veristic and particularistic depiction of the world as actually perceived. As Charles Dempsey observes in an article I have quoted more than once, Caravaggio’s realist style sought to counterfeit “the effects of a new and radically conceived vero [truth], one that directly mirrored the raw data of experiential reality.” And bodily because the orientation of individual figures, such as the violinist in the Musicians and the angel in the Rest on the Flight, is to a greater or lesser degree congruent with the painter’s—also the viewer’s—actual bodily orientation before the canvas. These modes in turn are often keyed to considerations of distance and nearness: roughly, we may associate opticality with distance and bodiliness (or embodiment, a term I prefer) with nearness, though in this regard as in others Caravaggio never hesitates to scramble the terms. So for example in the Rest on the Flight, in the immediate vicinity of the open partbook, which faces the viewer and by implication holds him at a distance, there are exquisite

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details (fig. 4.15)—for example, tangled, dangling violin strings near the angel’s left hand and leafy green shoots on which perhaps the mule is to be seen as feeding, not to mention the detailed notation of the musical score itself—that can be appreciated visually only at extremely close range. By the same token, in the London Supper at Emmaus distancing and embodiment go hand in hand, the sudden responses of the two disciples to the revelation of Christ’s identity tending almost physically to repel the viewer from the painted scene. By and large, though, the association of opticality with distance, or perhaps simply the strength and originality of Caravaggio’s optical realistic mode, has had the consequence of masking or at least drawing attention away from the bodily aspect of his paintings, which has gone largely unacknowledged until now. A somewhat less intense version of the same dialectic is in play in the Musicians, where we also find the implication of “moments” of immersion and specularity in the portrayal of the cornetto player, the model for whom was Caravaggio himself. No such self-portrait exists in the Rest on the Flight, but toward the end of lecture 4 I associated the violin-playing angel with the artist at work on his canvas, and I also noted the severing or specularizing effect of the sheer sensuous beauty of the angel’s back and wings, an effect, I went on to remark, not unlike those discussed by Elizabeth Cropper in her articles on the affinity between Caravaggio’s paintings and his friend Marino’s poetry. A further dimension of the issue of embodiment in these canvases might be framed as a question, one that was implicit in the previous lecture: which way does a painting face? It might seem that the answer is obvious, beyond all question: it faces out from the wall on which it hangs, directly toward the viewer; more precisely, easel paintings do that. (I am here using the term “easel painting” in its most general acceptation.) But the opposite may also be true. To the extent that a representational or, for that matter, an abstract painting evokes a space that opens up toward an illusionistic distance—to the extent that the depicted or virtual space is felt to be an extension of the lived spatiality of the painter (and viewer)—the painting in question may be felt also to face away from the painter (and viewer). And of course the more strongly or pointedly an easel painting is felt to address or confront the viewer, the more the viewer’s own complementary orientation is at least potentially activated in response. In Caravaggio’s art of the mid- and late 1590s the answer to the question of the painting’s orientation is often double, not only in the Musicians and the Rest on the Flight, in both of which a prominent figure is seen largely or wholly from the rear, but also in a canvas that seems on the face of it unequivocally and provocatively committed to address, Giustiniani’s Eros Triumphant. In that work, as I earlier noted, the young boy’s left arm and hand reach behind him to indicate the source of pleasure on offer; my point now is that that implied gesture, in addition to being sexually provocative, directs attention to the other side of the boy’s naked body, which so to speak faces into the painting. This would also seem to be the implication of a minor detail, the tip of a long wing-feather resting against his left thigh; we are made

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5.1 Annibale Carracci, Venus and Satyr with Two Cupids, ca. 1589–90. Oil on canvas, 109 × 139 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

to feel that it is the back of that feather that actually makes contact with the boy’s flesh, and this too calls attention to the backward-facing conformation of the wings as a whole. Or consider two works by Caravaggio’s rival and peer, Annibale Carracci. In Annibale’s gorgeous Venus and Satyr with Two Cupids (ca. 1589–90; fig. 5.1), the goddess of love and beauty has been depicted from behind, half-reclining on a grassy bank over which has been spread a red ground cloth. A satyr bearing a bowl of fruit in his right hand tugs at a covering drape as she seems to draw around her a flimsy white cloth in a less than wholehearted effort to conceal her otherwise naked front (we sense this more than perceive it). Her profile, with her shadowed left eye looking off to the left as if past her aggressor, is exquisite, a ne plus ultra of sensuous perfection, and her right elbow rests on a sumptuous burgundy and gold pillow that will soon be put to another use. Above all, the painting offers us the fullest imaginable

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view—more than that, the most lovingly rendered treatment—of Venus’s impossibly extensive back and the slightly rosy upper portions of her buttocks as a means of intimating the opulence and perfection, not to say the sensuous availability, of the rest of her body. (According to Carlo Cesare Malvasia, the Carraccis’ earliest historian, it was Ludovico who offered his own naked back as a model to his supremely gifted nephew!) As in the case of various Caravaggios, the inspiration clearly comes from Venice, but the end result has no equivalent there. In a very different work, the realistic, and utterly compelling Bean Eater in the Galleria Colonna (ca. 1583–85; fig. 5.2), a first impression is that the sitter, a peasant in a straw hat eating a simple meal, simply looks directly out of the painting, and in fact the painting’s power of interpellation, to use an anachronistic term, could hardly be more authoritative. But of course the bean eater’s whole demeanor declares that he understands himself to be under the painter’s close-range, scrutinizing gaze: hence his air of distraction, the spoon with its load of beans suspended near his mouth, as if he were both eating and posing, indeed as if in the fractional moment ostensibly depicted by Annibale the sitter were awaiting further instructions from the artist—and therefore not noticing the bit of sauce dripping from the spoon. This too is something out of the ordinary, as is the placement of the jug and wineglass half-full of wine in the lower right corner of the canvas: nothing could be plainer than that the bean eater himself would not in the normal course of events have put them there (the handle of the jug extends toward the right, and the wineglass “this” side of the jug is literally inaccessible to him). Both jug and wineglass belong, I want to say, to the world of the painter, or at any rate their placement seems designed to acknowledge Annibale’s active bodily presence at the scene of representation. So perhaps does, viewed in this light, the bean eater’s left hand, resting as if protectively on his chunk of roll. In any case, the Venus and Satyr and Bean Eater together suggest that as regards the issue of orientation, as in other respects, Caravaggio and Annibale have much in common. One further thought apropos of the Bean Eater and his left hand grasping the roll follows on directly from Malvasia’s extraordinary account in his Life of the Carracci (1678) of the Carraccis’ unquenchable devotion to their studies. “Whether they were eating, drinking, resting, or going about,” he writes, “every operation, every motion, every act, every gesture would compel them to take charcoal-holder in hand to record the experience, thus interrupting, with almost excessive gusto, the normal duties of conversation no less than the ones necessary to the conservation of health. While eating, they would draw, with bread in one hand and chalk or charcoal in the other, just like Epicurus with his food in his mouth and the sayings of Democritus in his head, or Caesar, with his Commentary in his left hand, and his sword in his right hand, or Alexander, in the thick of battle, with a sword clenched in his fist and Homer deep within his breast.” Or, to come full circle, like the watchful bean eater with his roll in his left hand and the spoonful of beans in his right.

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5.2 Annibale Carracci, The Bean Eater, ca. 1583–85. Oil on canvas, 78 × 95 cm. Galleria Colonna, Rome, inv. 1783, n. 124

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I should add that the absorption-plus-address system soon begins to disappear from Caravaggio’s art, at least in its classic, mid-1590s form, a process that has already begun in the London Emmaus (even if, as we have seen, it is still present in modified form in the Borghese David with the Head of Goliath and the London Salome), in favor of a more strictly lateral disposition of figures, as in the Incredulity of Thomas and the Crowning with Thorns. But a palpable relation to the painter’s bodily orientation and more broadly to his incarnate presence before the canvas persists throughout his career, as does something else characteristic of those canvases— a refusal to completely expose their contents to the viewer or, say, an emphasis on what, owing to basic conditions of visibility, cannot be exposed, because it is turned away from us, or blocked from view, or excluded from the field of vision, or obscured by dark shadow, or simply devoured by the unprecedented blackness of Caravaggio’s painted grounds (a later development than any considered so far). Instances of these include the faces lost in shadow or otherwise hidden from view in the Death of the Virgin, the overlapping bodies in the Thomas, the extreme profil perdu and bodily orientation of the “observer” in the Crowning with Thorns, and the partial blocking of the right-hand thug’s face by his own right fist in the Crowning, a fateful motif, variations of which recur frequently in Caravaggesque art throughout the decades that follow. Absorption, too—I mean the evocation of absorbed states of mind—by emphasizing the realm of barely externalized “inner” experience shifts a painting’s center of gravity toward what in an important sense cannot be shown, which is not at all to say—this has been my point—that the contents of that realm escape being expressed (as though Caravaggian absorption positively courts the appearance of impassiveness in the interest of a new form and reach of expressive intensity). Another sort of nonvisibility comes into play in my account of the “moment” of immersion, specifically in the claim that it is structurally “prior” to specularity as such. Finally, working backward as it were, the right-angle dispositif I have associated with the Boy Bitten by a Lizard and other works characteristically features an implied but undepicted canvas just off picture to the left or right; that that implied or undepicted canvas “coincides” with the finished self-portrait only makes the realm of the off-picture that much more highly charged. All this contributes to the unexampled density of implication of Caravaggio’s gallery pictures as well as to their matchless allure, which I see as arising from that density to a significant degree. Originally I had hoped to find a place in these lectures to engage properly with two famous works by Caravaggio in which a preoccupation with embodiment comes to the fore in terms somewhat different from anything we have considered until now. But no such place quite exists, so I am going to speak briefly about them here before moving on. I refer to the pair of pictures on the side walls of the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, the Crucifixion of Saint Peter and the Conversion of Saint Paul (both 1601; figs. 5.3 and 5.4), in both of which a somewhat massive body—that

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of the bare-armed man almost kneeling on the ground as he takes the weight of the cross largely on his shoulder in the Crucifixion, that of the piebald horse raising its foreleg in the Conversion—not only plays an unusually conspicuous role but also blocks or rebuts any impulse toward “identification,” in effect keeping the viewer almost forcibly “outside” the scene. This is related to an equally striking fact about these pictures, namely that both were conceived as compositions with the viewer’s position in front of the chapel, hence viewing both canvases at a fairly sharp angle, in mind (fig. 5.5), a point established more than a half century ago by Leo Steinberg in a classic article. To this I want to add the possibility that the viewer was imagined by the artist as possessing binocular vision, as human beings naturally do, which in an obvious sense would have been compositionally still more destabilizing in that the sight from each of the viewer’s two eyes of one or other painting on its respective side wall would have been understood to be different from that of the other, but which in another sense offers the possibility of a pictorial “solution” to these difficulties. That is to say, might it not be productive to think of the strangely “incorrect” treatment of the horse in the Conversion as responding in part to the fact of binocularism, as if the viewer’s two eyes’ differing perceptions of it could somehow add up, sheerly empirically or impressionistically, to something more convincing? And might not that also apply to the men raising Peter’s cross in the Crucifixion, especially the two most prominent figures, neither of whose actions (shouldering the cross from below, pulling on the rope) is entirely plausible in its own right? All this could not be more speculative on my part, and may be sheer interpretive fantasy. But it just might help explain why photographs of those canvases, even when taken from in front of the chapel, give so little idea of what it is like to encounter the actual works in situ. And it may also be why the contrast between Caravaggio’s pair of canvases and Annibale’s ostensibly dynamic but in that context absolutely stable Assumption of the Virgin (1601) feels so extreme. A further implication is that the Crucifixion and Conversion would thus largely undo the distinction between optical and bodily with which I have been working by reconceiving the first in bodily terms, binocular vision being a bodily, not just an ocular, affair. Viewed in this light, the unforgettable figure of the stricken Paul—eyes at once closed and blank-seeming, arms stretched wide as if embracing the inexplicable event that will transform his life—may be taken as allegorizing some such state of affairs—the embracing arms performing the office of vision—even as he also exemplifies the motif of the limitations of seeing that I have just suggested runs throughout Caravaggio’s oeuvre.

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5.3 Caravaggio, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1601. Oil on canvas, 230 × 175 cm. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome

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5.4 Caravaggio, Conversion of Saint Paul, 1601. Oil on canvas, 230 × 175 cm. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome

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5.5 Caravaggio, Cerasi Chapel, view from in front of the chapel. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome

There is more to say about Caravaggio’s engagement with the aesthetics of the emerging gallery picture. In an important book, published in 1993 in French under the title L’Instauration du tableau: Métapeinture à l’aube des temps modernes (roughly “The Establishing of the Tableau: Meta-Painting at the Dawn of the Modern Age”) and in English translation as The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern MetaPainting, Victor I. Stoichita attempts to show that throughout much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, northern and to a lesser extent Spanish painters produced numerous works that in a wide variety of ways may be seen as calling attention to or, to use a term that Stoichita employs frequently, thematizing, different features and aspects of the largely new kind of painting they were, or were on their way to becoming—the kind Stoichita calls the “tableau” and which in English, which has no direct translation of the French word, is usually called the easel picture. (The German would be Gemalde and the Italian quaddro. “Tableau” I regard as a misnomer, for reasons that will become clear further on.) The time frame of Stoichita’s book

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5.6 Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, The Reverse of a Framed Painting, ca. 1670–75. Oil on canvas, 66 × 86.5 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, inv. KMS 1989

runs from 1522, the year of the iconoclastic revolt in Wittenberg, to 1675, when the Dutch painter Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts produced a canvas that represented the back of a painting (fig. 5.6)—a metapainting if there ever was one. “The year 1522,” Stoichita explains, “marks the (symbolic) death of the old [strictly devotional] image and the (also symbolic) birth of the new [relatively autonomous and independent] image, and Gijsbrechts’ innovative [liminaire] experiment was a radical discourse on the status of the painting as a figurative object. The whole agenda of the object labeled ‘painting’ unfolds between these two—needless to say—arbitrarily chosen boundaries.” He goes on to remark: “The main aim of this book is to demonstrate how the metapictorial act forged the modern state of art. The ‘painting in itself’ of which [Claude] Perrault spoke in 1688 is not its central theme so much as the delineation of its horizon—a horizon that in reality remains inaccessible. This is because the perception of the painting, the birth of the ‘modern’ conception of the image and, finally, the appearance of the artist’s image, peremptorily demonstrate that before it embodied a dream of purity the painting was invented out of a blazing confrontation between the new image and its own status, its own boundaries.”

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Among the features of (mainly) northern paintings made between 1522 and 1675 that Stoichita singles out for analysis are the “doubled images” of Pieter Aertsen and early Velásquez; the development of elaborate internal framing structures in still lifes and elsewhere; the use of fictive windows and doors in landscapes and domestic interiors respectively; the rise of the modern picture frame, with its suggestion of arbitrariness in relation to the work it frames, hence the further suggestion of the work’s essential freedom of location; a new recognition of the importance of the frame for easel painting generally; scenes of collectors’ cabinets with multiple paintings and other objects of curiosity; the rise in Holland of an optically “methodical” mode of painting based implicitly on the image produced by the camera obscura; the presence as shaping metaphors of depicted maps and mirrors; the emergence in force of the self-portrait, with special emphasis on the portrait of the artist in the act of making a painting (among the examples Stoichita examines are several discussed in lecture 1); and, finally, Gijsbrechts’s trompe-l’oeil image of the reverse of a painting. This is not the place for a detailed summary of Stoichita’s arguments, which are many, varied, and subtle. Let me say that I regard his book as an essential contribution to our understanding of the advent of a new epoch in painting, one that, in my view of the matter, is in crucial respects still our own. (My recent book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, makes the case for that view with respect to recent art photography.) Now I want to propose that certain important aspects of Caravaggio’s art ought also to be seen in that light, as thematizing what I think of, in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Roman context, as the violent birth or rather—the word “birth” being perhaps too melodramatic, implying or seeming to imply that nothing of the kind previously existed—the decisive and irrevocable emergence or coming into prominence of the full-blown gallery picture. One figure, indeed the principal figure, for that emergence or coming into prominence in Caravaggio’s art is beheading—decapitation—as in the Medusa, David with the Head of Goliath (and there are other, different versions of that subject besides the masterpiece in the Borghese), and the Madrid and the London versions of Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist, all paintings discussed at some length in previous lectures, or as in the first of several canvases in Caravaggio’s oeuvre that invite being read as multifigure scenes of pictorial representation (and in that sense as metapaintings in Stoichita’s sense of the term)—I mean his Judith and Holofernes (ca. 1599; fig. 5.7) in the Barberini. The story of the Judith comes from the Old Testament. In Keith Christiansen’s summary: “The city of Bethulia was on the verge of surrendering to the Assyrians when [the Jewish widow] Judith proposed a subterfuge. Decked out in her finery, she and her servant Abra went unaccompanied to the enemy’s camp. . . . Captivated by her beauty, Holofernes invited her to feast in his tent at night. When he drank himself into a stupor, Judith cut off his head with his own sword and carried it back to Bethulia in triumph.”

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5.7 Caravaggio, Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1599. Oil on canvas, 145 × 195 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome

By and large, recent responses to the Judith have drawn attention to the unnaturalness—the awkwardness and unpersuasiveness—of Judith’s stance and action, and more broadly to the impression the painting conveys of having been based on studio models painted one at a time as they held stationary poses in a dark room with an overhead light source. I do not dispute this view of how the painting was made, or for that matter the judgment that it therefore falls short of persuasively (i.e., realistically, dynamically) representing the action it ostensibly depicts. But I want to call attention to the risk that the recent emphasis on Caravaggio’s dependence on models at this stage of his career (a point stressed by his earliest critics) may keep us from observing equally salient and fundamental aspects of his art: in this case the possibility, to put it no more strongly than that, that there exists a meaningful affinity between the actions of the figure of the youthful Jewish widow wielding her sword (with her right hand) and grasping the tyrant Holofernes’ head by the hair (with her left) and those of the painter himself, brush in right hand and palette in left, as he stood working on his painting.

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Recent commentators have also emphasized the unusual distance Judith maintains between herself and Holofernes, an impression reinforced by the backward lean of her upper body and the upward curving sweep of the folds in her skirt; and they have been struck by Judith’s facial expression, which appears not detached, because she is obviously determined to accomplish her aim, but let us say vexed (fig. 5.8), as if she were experiencing discomfort or a sense of aversion instead of whatever more extreme feelings might be considered appropriate to her bloody deed (Holofernes, after all, is still struggling violently under her blade). Again, those faults, if that is what they are—I am by no means convinced that that is how we should think of them—are usually attributed to the problematic dynamics of posing (imagining the model for Judith holding a difficult static pose, possibly involving a heavy sword, for long stretches of time), a perfectly plausible explanation as far as it goes, but I suggest that we may also be dealing here with a version of the specular “moment” in the production of the painting, which in my account consists precisely in the distancing and separating—I have also said the severing—of the painter from the work being realized under his brush. (That in this instance the painter-surrogate is a beautiful young woman would itself belong to the “moment” of specularity.) This in turn suggests that the old woman at the right—in the biblical story, Judith’s maid Abra—who clutches in her hands a piece of cloth in which Holofernes’ head will presently be wrapped and who gazes at the decapitation-in-progress with an indescribable look of intense fascination mingled with disgust or perhaps simply resolve (fig. 5.9) may perhaps be read as a figure for the “moment” of immersion, which as I explained in lecture 2 is not simply or chronologically succeeded by that of specularity but rather is best thought of as inextricably intertwined with the latter, and in any case the two women together may be seen as enacting a compound drama of pictorial production and reception. (Richard Spear has suggested that the old woman’s head was inspired by a Roman portrait bust, but that does not prevent her facial expression, in its riveted and riveting intensity, from marking a date in Italian painting.) I have just alluded to the specular “moment” as one of severing the painter from his painting, and of course in the Judith the theme of severing is spelled out, made gruesomely explicit, by the principal action, Holofernes’ beheading. Here for the first time I want to raise the question as to whether that action and the motif of decapitation generally are not in fact hyperbolic or excessive relative to the issue of specularity—the question, that is, as to whether something more than specularity is at stake in all that gore and violence. I have already proposed an answer, namely, that what we see figured in the Judith more plainly than in any work we have so far considered is not just the specular “moment” in all its aversiveness and fascination but also what, extrapolating from Stoichita, I have characterized as the decisive emergence or coming into prominence of a new artistic and artifactual entity (a new medium of painting), the independent and autonomous gallery picture, such as the Judith itself was intended by its maker to be. Other factors contributing to the sense

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5.8 Caravaggio, Judith and Holofernes, detail of Judith’s face

5.9 Caravaggio, Judith and Holofernes, detail of Judith’s maid’s face

of excessiveness are, as I have implied, the posed quality of the figures, which here as elsewhere in Caravaggio’s art far from being an artistic fault seems to me arguably intrinsic to the painting’s meaning (as in the case of the thugs in the Vienna Crowning, I cannot imagine that the painting would be better if Judith’s actions appeared more “natural”); the congealed, raylike jets of blood that project from the gaping wound in Holofernes’ throat (does anyone seriously imagine that Caravaggio could not have depicted them more veristically had he wanted to?); perhaps also Judith’s erect nipples, which commentators have associated with sexual excitement triggered by her violent act; and the red curtain, modest precursor of the one in the Death of the Virgin, with its folds that seem to repeat or mirror, as if by “mimetic” contagion (from now on I shall forgo the quotation marks), the action taking place before it. By these last remarks I have in mind the downward plunge of the curtain above and beyond Holfernes’ head (significantly, the folds in question disappear behind his head just where Judith’s right hand grips the handle of the sword) as well as the naturalistically unmotivated cluster of “excited” folds to the left of Judith’s head and above her shoulder: the folds may be seen as miming both her aroused mental state and the not inconsiderable effort being put forth by her shoulder and arm.

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For what it is worth, I think of the folds’ mimetism as quintessentially immersive with the proviso that here too the immersive “moment” must be understood as having been succeeded by the specular one, which fixed or froze the mimetic movements and offered them to be seen (bearing in mind that the past tense here is a makeshift for a distinction that is not exactly temporal). In general the phenomenon of mimesis—more precisely, auto-mimesis—in Caravaggio’s art is one of the hallmarks of immersion, no doubt because the latter condition promotes a flouting of boundaries in the interest of continuity both between the painter and the painting and, as here, between individual forms within the painting. A particularly revealing work in this connection is the late, or rather post-Roman, Crucifixion of Saint Andrew (ca. 1607; fig. 5.10), which depicts the unusual subject of the saint’s death. “The Proconsul of Patra, upset at his wife having been baptized by Saint Andrew, ordered that the apostle should be bound to a cross,” Christiansen writes. “For two days Saint Andrew continued to preach from the cross to the gathered crowds, who pressed the proconsul to have him taken down. Remarkably, the attempted rescue of the apostle was thwarted when the soldiers who tried to untie him found their arms paralyzed, for the saint had prayed to be allowed to die on the cross; he was surrounded by a dazzling light before expiring.” It is not at all clear that a viewer unfamiliar with the narrative would in fact see the man on the ladder in those terms. But there is no question as to the painting’s subject, and what I want to call attention to is, first, the way in which the bit of drapery around the saint’s genitals appears to continue the folds and thrust of the drapery clothing the thighs and hips of the man on the ladder, an unnatural arrangement I associate with the overriding of boundaries characteristic of the “moment” of immersion (also of mimesis). And, second, the sense in which the theme of a sudden onset of paralysis—halting the unbinding of the saint as the latter realizes his desire—bears an extremely complex relation to the immersion-specularity dyad, the notion of unbinding seeming on the face of it to align with the second term (the painter becoming “unbound” from his painting), which would mean that the onset of paralysis that prevents the unbinding from taking place would be on the side of immersion (or reimmersion). But, of course, the freezing of action that is implicit in that onset also serves as a natural metaphor for the “moment” of specularity (also of the antimimetic pole within the mimetic rapport, even as that freezing is in another sense mimetic with regard to the cross, that is, to the imitation of Christ). No wonder, perhaps, that the precise subject of the painting is less than wholly perspicuous. I will only add that the opposite bodily orientations of the closely juxtaposed saint and the man on the ladder recall similar structures in Caravaggio’s paintings of the second half of the 1590s and that the man in armor, certainly the proconsul Aegeas, at the base of the cross bears an obvious resemblance to the “observer” figure in the Vienna Crowning.

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5.10 Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, ca. 1607. Oil on canvas, 202.5 × 152.7 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund 1976.2

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At this point I shall leave Caravaggio for the remainder of this lecture in order to pursue two aims. First, I want briefly to consider a selection of paintings by some of Caravaggio’s early followers, notably Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia and several of the artists often classed together as Caravaggisti—Bartolomeo Manfredi (deviser of the “Manfrediana Methodus,” supposedly a formula for making Caravaggesque paintings that enjoyed great popularity throughout Europe for roughly twenty years), Nicolas Régnier, Giovanni Serodine, and Valentin de Boulogne. (Other Caravaggisti of particular relevance to my concerns in this book include Cecco del Caravaggio, Orazio Borgianni, Gerrit van Honthorst, Hendrick Ter Bruggen, Nicolas Tournier, and the young Simon Vouet.) Second, starting with a further look at Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures, I want to draw attention to certain aspects of the art of the Carracci, with special emphasis on the 1580s and 1590s in Bologna—a body of work that, as already has emerged, invites comparison with Caravaggio’s paintings of the 1590s and early 1600s. I shall then return to Caravaggio in lecture 6. In Orazio Gentileschi’s three-quarter-length Judith and Her Maidservant (ca. 1608–9; fig. 5.11) in Oslo, Judith’s maid Abra is depicted from the rear (a Caravaggian trope, as we have seen) holding the basket with the severed head, but what is even more striking is the ingenious structural device of having both women look and hearken off canvas toward the right, thereby implying that the source of danger that claims their attention lies out there, beyond the physical limits of the painting. What makes that ingenious in the present context is that by calling attention to those limits it promotes an awareness of the fact that a gallery picture is by its very nature discontinuous with or, put more strongly, cut off from its surroundings, the gallery or room or corridor in which it hangs, and of course there is also an analogy, already suggested by me, between that cutting off and the subject matter of beheading. The same device is worked even harder in Orazio’s Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (ca. 1621–24; fig. 5.12) in Hartford, in which Judith and Abra look in different directions, and Lot and His Daughters (ca. 1621–22; fig. 5.13) in the Getty, in the latter of which the engrossment of the two women in the off-canvas vista of the destruction of Sodom is complemented by the powerfully absorptive evocation of Lot’s drunken sleep. (On the strength of his several versions of Lot and His Daughters and the equally impressive Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Orazio ranks as one of the foremost masters of the depiction of sleep in European painting.)1

1. The role of sleep as a modality of absorption becomes all but explicit in mid-eighteenth-century France, the key work being Joseph-Marie Vien’s Sleeping Hermit, a sensation in the Salon of 1753. See my discussion of that and related works in the light of contemporary art criticism in Absorption and Theatricality, pp. 28–35. As it happens, however, sleep is also the topic of a fascinating ekphrastic text of the early 1600s, the Bolognese theorist Giovanni Batista Agucchi’s “Description of Annibale Carracci’s Sleeping Venus,” published in full by Malvasia in his Life of the Carracci. (The wonderful Sleeping Venus

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5.11 Orazio Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant, 1608–9. Oil on canvas, 136 × 160 cm. Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, Olso

5.12 Orazio Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, ca. 1621–24. Oil on canvas, 136.5 × 159 cm. Wadsworth Athenenum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund

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5.13 Orazio Gentileschi, Lot and His Daughters, ca. 1621–22. Oil on canvas, 151.8 × 189.2 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

5.14 Annibale Carracci, Sleeping Venus, ca. 1602. Oil on canvas, 190 × 328 cm. Musée Condé, Chantilly

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The limits of the canvas are differently thematized in works by other early Caravaggisti—Valentin de Boulogne’s Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple (1618; fig. 5.15), with its strong thrust toward the right and piling up of figures along the right-hand framing edge, and Serodine’s The Tribute Money (1625–26; fig. 5.16), with its similar if less intense overall movement, are exemplary in this regard, as is the latter’s The Parting of Saints Peter and Paul Being Conducted to Their Martyrdoms (1625–26; fig. 5.17), in which two groups of figures moving in opposed directions collide in the middle of the canvas with a forcefulness that suggests that each has just entered the picture field from off canvas and in a moment will be gone. There are even paintings of the period by artists whom we are unaccustomed to think of in a Caravaggesque light that fit such a description, such as the young Pietro da Cortona’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (ca. 1625–26; fig. 5.18), with its implied dramatic focus—Christ’s mysterious writing on the ground—lying well below the bottom of the canvas. (Probably da Cortona’s treatment of the subject was influenced by Valentin’s more ambitious picture of 1620–22 in the Getty; more on Valentin shortly.) The two Serodines and the Pietro da Cortona originally hung in the Galleria Mattei, presumably not far from Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ (fig. 6.12), in which the figure of a man, either a disciple or the nameless follower of Christ mentioned in the gospel of Saint Mark, rushes out of the canvas to the left. (I shall discuss the Taking of Christ in lecture 6.) In still another work in that collection, Alessandro Turchi’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (ca. 1620–25), a rectilinear wellhead, implying a plunging depth that is not actually shown, occupies

[ca. 1602, fig. 5.14] is today in the Musée Condé, Chantilly.) Unfortunately this is not the place for a detailed analysis of Agucchi’s text, though I cannot resist remarking that along with its minutely admiring evocation of Annibale’s treatment of the sleeping goddess goes a sustained encomium on the seeming depth of absorption of her attendant cupids in their respective activities (keeping the sun off Venus’s face, dressing one’s own hair with the aid of a mirror, playing a pipe in a state of reverie, throwing apples at each other, climbing a tree, shooting an arrow at a target, etc.), depth of absorption being associated by Agucchi with obliviousness to everything else. And not only that: Agucchi concludes his discussion of the cupids by saying that he will “now leave [them] to their own devices, and since I am not able to consider others who were not playing that day in the part of the green meadow embraced by the picture, but were surely to be found wandering in large numbers beyond its borders . . . I shall instead turn to recording the spacious and very lovely expanse of meadow that is spread before my eyes by the well-conceived and judicious perspective. . . .” (Anne Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci: Commentary and Translation [University Park, Pa., 2000], p. 351, emphasis added; for Agucchi’s text in its entirety, see pp. 344–55). In other words, Agucchi links sleep, absorption, mirroring, and the physical limits of the gallery picture in a single virtuoso piece of writing. Cf. Malvasia’s praise of a fresco by Ludovico of “Saint Gregory, who is represented asleep, a representation, they say, that is so real, so effortless, and so formidable that it will never be equaled, this one figure being proof that Ludovico had surpassed every other painter who had attempted to depict with flying brush such an action in a fresco” (ibid., p. 128). The reference is to Ludovico’s The Dream of Saint Gregory on a lateral wall of a chapel in the church of the Convertite nuns in Bologna (the chapel was destroyed in World War II).

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5.15 Valentin de Boulogne, Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, 1618. Oil on canvas, 196 × 260 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome

5.16 Giovanni Serodine, The Tribute Money, 1625–26. Oil on canvas, 145 × 227 cm. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

the right foreground of the picture. Is it possible that the common stance toward the role of the off-canvas in no less than five Mattei canvases was the result of something other than coincidence? Finally, one work not by one of Caravaggio’s followers but nevertheless spectacularly taking up the same strategy must be mentioned—Ludovico Carracci’s Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima (1612; fig. 5.19) at the Getty. In this ambitious picture, the almost naked pale body of the martyred saint is shown

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5.17 Giovanni Serodine, The Parting of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, 1625–26. Oil on canvas, 144 × 220 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini, Rome

5.18 Pietro Berretini da Cortona, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, ca. 1625–26. Oil on canvas, 132 × 226 cm. Mr. A. Alfred Taubman

on the brink of being toppled into the Roman sewer, which we understand to run somewhere below the bottom framing edge of the canvas, as several soldiers peer downward as if anticipating the body’s fall. Exemplifying the uncertain boundaries between altarpieces and gallery pictures during these years, the Saint Sebastian seems originally to have been commissioned for a subterranean chapel in Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome but to have been retained by Maffeo Barberini, whose idea it was, for his own collection.

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(No doubt the compositional openness at one side of Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew and Martyrdom of Saint Matthew [figs. 6.1 and 6.2], both of which will be discussed in lecture 6, also contributed to these developments. More broadly, Caravaggio’s compositions often give the impression that the figures they comprise, or indeed the models for those figures, had been brought together just a few moments before in order to set up the scene that the painter then proceeded to depict, which is also to say—this goes back to the discussion of the right-angle self-portrait dispositif in lectures 1 and 2—that a certain implied “outside” or “beyond” of the painting is somehow required for its successful operation. The Vienna Crowning with Thorns is a case in point, as is a smaller, almost programmatically “assembled” canvas that has not yet been mentioned, The Sacrifice of Isaac [ca. 1603; fig. 5.20]. Note, too, in the latter the emphatic yoking of absorption and address.) Artemisia as well depicts figures conspicuously gazing beyond the limits of the canvas, as in Judith and Her Maidservant (ca. 1618–19; fig. 5.21) in the Pitti and Saint Cecilia (ca. 1620; fig. 5.22), two characteristic works. But the paintings by her I want especially to call attention to—because they bear so compellingly upon the issues tackled in the first two lectures—are the intense Self-Portrait as Female Martyr (ca. 1615; fig. 5.23), which I see as based on the right-angle dispositif, the shoulders and right hand “correcting” the reversed image in the mirror; the strangely vigorous Lucretia (ca. 1612–13; fig. 5.24) in the Etro Collection, Milan, in which the half-naked protagonist grips the dagger with which she is about to kill herself in her left hand, a detail that, as Christiansen has remarked, suggestively alludes to a mirror image of the painter (following Elizabeth Cropper’s lead, he assumes she served as her own model); and one of Artemisia’s most remarkable canvases, The Conversion of the Magdalen (ca. 1615–16; fig. 5.25) in the Pitti. The last of these, also modeled for by the artist (I too follow Cropper in asserting this), acknowledges the right-angle dispositif by virtue of the Magdalen’s bodily orientation and the position of her left hand, while the image itself repudiates the very idea of mirroring—the beautiful protagonist pushes away the mirror, a token of her previous life—which makes unanswerable within the terms of the painting the question of the artist’s access to her own richly sensuous physical appearance. Note, however, the persistence with which the mirror thrust away by the Magdalen’s left hand continues to reflect her ear, earring, and disheveled hair, as if reluctant to let her, or her sensuous beauty, wholly go. And she herself all but grasps her left breast, as if rejecting the mirror is accompanied by a more directly physical apprehension of her embodied being. But how exactly, as regards the actual making of the painting, would that have worked? A similar if wholly structural rejection of mirroring distinguishes Artemisia’s more famous Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) (1638–39; fig. 5.26) in Hampton Court, another strongly bodily work that—as already mentioned—has something of the feeling of Courbet’s self-portraits of the 1840s and 1850s.

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5.19 Ludovico Carracci, Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, 1612. Oil on canvas, 167 × 233 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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5.20 Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac, ca. 1603. Oil on canvas, 104 × 135 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

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5.21 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant, ca. 1618–19. Oil on canvas, 114 × 93.5 cm. Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence

5.23 Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as Female Martyr, ca. 1615. Oil on canvas, 31.75 × 24.76 cm. Private collector

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5.22 Artemisia Gentileschi, Saint Cecilia, ca. 1620. Oil on canvas, 108 × 78.5 cm. Galleria Spada, Rome

5.24 Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucretia, ca. 1612–13 (Christensen), ca. 1623–25 (Mann). Oil on canvas, 100 × 77 cm. Gerolamo and Roberta Etro

5.25 Artemisia Gentileschi, The Conversion of the Magdalen, ca. 1615–16. Oil on canvas, 146.5 × 108 cm. Galleria Palatina di Palazzo Pitti, Florence

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5.26 Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), 1638–39. Oil on canvas, 98.6 × 75.2 cm. The Royal Collection

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As for Manfredi and company, I shall let three pictures, Manfredi’s A Reunion of Drinkers (ca. 1612–14; fig. 5.27) in London, Valentin de Boulogne’s Concert with Bas-Relief (1624; fig. 5.28) in the Louvre, and Nicolas Régnier’s masterpiece, Cardplayers with Fortune Teller (ca. 1620–22; fig. 5.29) in Budapest, stand for a shared pictorial poetics, which to the best of my knowledge has never been recognized as such by students of the period. Basic elements of that poetics include: 1. A commitment to Caravaggesque chiaroscuro. 2. A deliberate if not quite systematic juxtaposition of motifs of absorption and address, epitomized in the Manfredi by the two figures at the right, in the Valentin by (for example) the man looking at a partbook over the young boy’s shoulder and the boy himself, and in the Régnier by the expensively dressed young cardplayer in yellow and black and with crossed legs in tights who gazes distractedly out of the picture toward the right and his opposite number, the woman cardsharp in red at the left who turns toward the viewer to display her hand (note too the woman absorbed in stealing a look at the young man’s cards, an operation that points up the extent of his absorption or distraction). In other words, although what I have called the absorption-plus-address system largely disappeared from Caravaggio’s art after the early 1600s, it subsequently became fundamental to that of some of his closest followers. 3. A similarly deliberate juxtaposition of figures depicted frontally and from the rear, often in close proximity to one another, sometimes virtually twinned (as in Manfredi’s Bacchus and a Drinker [ca. 1608–10; fig. 5.30] in the Barberini). 4. The construction of a shallow interior space that nevertheless permits rhythmic interplay between relations of lateral distribution and of near and somewhat further away, often syncopated with relations of facing and facing away. 5. An avoidance of Albertian action and affetti in favor of the depiction of a proliferation of smaller, for the most part manual operations, including card sharping, dice throwing, fortune-telling, pocket picking, music making, wine pouring, morsel eating, pipe lighting, drinking, and the like. Such paintings typically comprise a multiplicity of mostly active hands, each of which provides a momentary focus for the viewer’s attention. 6. The placing, almost always in the center of the composition, of a blocklike table or indeed a carved marble block serving as a table. Often, as in all three paintings mentioned above (most impressively in the Concert with Bas-Relief), the table or block is set at an angle to the picture plane, a surprising arrangement that inevitably reinforces one’s sense of the former’s physical obtrusiveness (its brute thereness). 7. Finally, an emphasis on the mutual proximity of realistically depicted and powerfully embodied persons both to each other and to the picture plane, which in tandem with the other elements I have cited gives rise to an overall impression of sheer density of figural “presence,” which in effect literalizes, one might almost say acts out, the more relational mode of pictorial density I have associated with

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5.27 Bartolomeo Manfredi, A Reunion of Drinkers, ca. 1612–14. Oil on canvas, 129.5 × 190.5 cm. Private collection

5.28 Valentin de Boulogne, Concert with Bas-Relief, ca. 1624. Oil on canvas, 173 × 214 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

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5.29 Nicolas Régnier, Cardplayers with a Fortune Teller, ca. 1620–22. Oil on canvas, 174 × 228 cm. Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest

5.30 Bartolomeo Manfredi, Bacchus and a Drinker, ca. 1608–10. Oil on canvas, 132 × 96 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome

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Caravaggio. The angled tables or marble blocks are especially important here, bestowing massiveness and a certain disruptiveness relative to the picture plane on the heart of the picture, while the recurrent motif of music making—of the sustained simultaneity of different sounds and voices—evokes still another form of density to complement the visual and tactile. All this amounts to something far more coherent and artistically serious than a taste for colorful anecdote, genre subject matter, and Caravaggesque pastiche, which all too frequently is how the work of these artists has been understood. Simply put, I interpret the efforts of Manfredi, Valentin, Régnier, and the others as a collective effort to formulate a new paradigm for gallery painting, one extrapolated from Caravaggio’s canvases of the 1590s and early 1600s but not, in the most developed instances, parasitic on them. One watchword of the new paradigm I think of as autonomy without unity, a notion that seems to me to capture perhaps the guiding impulse behind some of the most ambitious painting in Rome during the first decades of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the evident lack of concern for pictorial unity on the part of many of the Caravaggisti has been a factor in the collective tendency of modern scholars to underestimate the significance of their artistic project. The one exception in this regard among those painters is the strongest of them, Valentin, who repeatedly composed his pictures on the basis of corner-to-corner diagonals that cross at or near the center of the canvas and thereby counteract the multiplicity of “actional” foci in a strictly surface-structural way. This too has been hard to recognize for what it is, though Bellori astutely commented, “[Valentin] advanced further than any other naturalist in the disposition of figures.” Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple and Concert with Bas-Relief exemplify this approach. Let me mention one additional point, to be developed on a future occasion (i.e., not in this book). In certain characteristic paintings by artists such as Valentin and Régnier, individual male figures seem possessed by what might be described as an excessive mode of embodied subjectivity, as if their own physicality were not quite transparent to them, or, to put this slightly differently, as if their consciousness of their own bodily being were a burden to be dealt with through drink or gambling or music making or simple distraction. The young man being gulled in Régnier’s Cardplayers is a case in point, as are, in a different register, the music makers in Valentin’s Concert with Bas-Relief, though if I had to choose a single work to represent this tendency, it would be the same painter’s Samson (ca. 1630; fig. 5.31) in Cleveland, with its haunted, muscular protagonist thrust into the closest imaginable proximity to the picture plane and staring off as if into his own troubled thoughts. Whatever else such figures signify, their distracted, troubled, or otherwise opaque states of mind may perhaps be taken as an immanent reflection upon the physicality-plus-“inwardness” or physicality-plus-“subjectivity” of the newly emerging gallery picture as such.

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5.31 Valentin de Boulogne, Samson, ca. 1630. Oil on canvas, 135.6 × 102.8 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1972.50

The new paradigm, to the extent that it was one, enjoyed considerable success across much of Europe for roughly two decades, until starting around 1630 it was eclipsed by various developments, including the rise of a fundamentally different, essentially dramatic conception of painting that revived the Albertian values of action and the affetti along with the ideas of unity that Caravaggio had displaced. (In fact, those values had been differently displaced much earlier by the decorative elaborations of mannerism, a large topic I cannot go into here.) The decisive figure in the new developments was of course Nicolas Poussin, who famously detested Caravaggio and his art, going so far as to say that the latter had come into the world “to destroy painting”—a statement that testifies to the radicalism of Caravaggio’s achievement. An early key work in this vein is Poussin’s magisterial Death of Germanicus (1626; fig. 5.32), which Dempsey has suggested should be seen as the first true tableau in the French tradition. (As I show in Absorption and Theatricality, the French concept of the tableau carries certain specific connotations, above all that of an achieved unity, which is why I do not wish to endorse Stoichita’s annexation of the term for his somewhat different purposes.) I find Dempsey’s suggestion attractive, and would add that the Germanicus, for all its reduced figural scale relative to Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti, absence of strong chiaroscuro, clarity of mise-en-scène, respect for

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5.32 Nicolas Poussin, The Death of Germanicus, 1626. Oil on canvas, 148 × 198 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund

the primacy of the picture plane, and overriding concern with dramatic coherence, remains marked by the taste for multiple overlapping bodies, persons seen from the rear, obscuring of faces, and density of figural “presence” that I have been tracking both in Caravaggio’s painting of the 1590s and early 1600s and in the art of various of his followers. Note too the suggestive resemblance between the two standing, sorrowing soldiers at the left of the Germanicus and the two grieving disciples toward the right of the Death of the Virgin. Indeed, it seems within the realm of possibility that the figure of Agrippina with her hidden face may have been intended as a gloss on—and “classical” correction of—the grieving Magdalen in Caravaggio’s canvas. The later painting by Poussin that turned out to be talismanic for Denis Diderot as well as for numerous French painters of the 1750s and after—the moment of the rise of the antitheatrical tradition that eventually, by a dialectically circuitous route, would lead to Manet’s modernism—is the Testament of Eudamidas (1643– 44; fig. 5.33), a radically stripped down (five figures instead of sixteen, as in the

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5.33 Nicolas Poussin, The Testament of Eudamidas, 1643–44. Oil on canvas, 110.5 × 138.5 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, inv. KMS 3889

Germanicus), architecturally and coloristically spare, compositionally rigorous, and intensely absorptive work. (Eudamidas, a soldier of Corinth fallen into poverty and dying, dictates his last will and testament in which he leaves his mother and daughter to the care of two wealthy friends. A doctor standing at his side places a hand on the dying man’s chest to track his heartbeat; a notary seated by his pallet transcribes his last words. To general surprise, his friends will carry out his request.) Simply put, the Eudamidas more than any other painting by an earlier master epitomized the tableau for Diderot and like-minded contemporaries, including a much younger man who came into contact with Diderot at a formative period in his own life, the foremost French painter of the late eighteenth century, Jacques-Louis David. I refer here not only to David’s Poussin-scale Death of Socrates (1787), whose adaptation—whose virtual citation—of the Eudamidas is indisputable, but also to its monumental predecessor, the epoch-making Oath of the Horatii (1784; fig. 5.34), which, although not resembling Poussin’s painting in obvious respects, amounts in my view to a

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brilliant reinterpretation of the latter’s division of its dramatis personae into two seemingly disconnected but in fact intimately related groups, one male, the other female, in both of which intense absorption reigns—on the part of the men in swearing a mortal oath, on that of the women in anticipatory grief. My larger claim at this juncture is that the chronological span that I suggested near the beginning of these lectures finally comes to a climax with Manet should be understood as having opened not with Chardin, Greuze, and David (with Diderot as master theorist and critic), though it is only in the 1750s and 1760s that the issue of antitheatricality—decisive for subsequent developments—came fully to the fore, or even with the Eudamidas, Diderot’s great exemplar of a dramatically effective, because persuasively absorptive, tableau, but rather with Caravaggio and the Carracci and their thematization of absorption and address as well as their—especially Caravaggio’s—radical reimagining of the emerging gallery painting. Of course, the very notion of “opened” here is problematic, if only because of various sixteenthcentury initiatives in the direction of what would later be called easel painting, though it is also the case that it is mainly the later developments I have just summarized that have made those initiatives interpretable as such. In any case, I am persuaded that something momentous in this regard took place in Bologna and Rome starting in the late sixteenth century.2 2. In an important essay, “Rome 1630: L’Entrée au scène du spectateur,” Marc Fumaroli identifies a key moment in the evolution of painting in Rome and associates it both with the “maturation” of a new class of spectator—the informed, experienced, pictorially erudite amateur (Giustiniani, Mancini, Marino, and Cassiano del Pozzo are some examples he names), “as artistic in his area of competence as the artist can be in his own”—and with the emergence of new conditions of viewing, above all the rise of private galleries of the sort I have been alluding to throughout these lectures (in Roma 1630: Il trionfo del pennello, exh. cat. [Rome, 1994], pp. 53–82, esp. pp. 54–55; translations mine). (He also speaks of “the spectator ‘engaged’ in the arts by vocation, the connoisseur who knows how to enter into the professional confidence of the artists” [p. 58].) Fumaroli is aware that the developments in question belong also to the 1620s if not before. But he sees the early 1630s as marking a decisive moment in their consolidation, which indeed seems to have been the case; my point in citing him in this connection is to underscore the point that by 1630, more or less, the “moment of Caravaggio,” during which the violent coming into being—the cutting-out and autonomization—of the full-blown gallery picture became the central preoccupation of an entire school of ambitious painters, was effectively over. Another point Fumaroli makes is that the prominence of the new spectator in the 1630s “brought with it the risk of a priority of spectacle, of its shallowness and its exteriority. It could lead, in the best of cases, to the refinement of a Marino-like dilettantism. But it could also mean (Poussin was aware of the peril, against which he protected himself with an admirable prudence) that painting was forced to submit to the spectator’s self-regard, to his contentment with his own views. . . . The sophisticated spectator had a giant shadow: namely the spectator tout court, with his all too human passions” (pp. 69–70). The risk, in other words, was of a turn toward what Fumaroli does not hesitate to call the theatricalization of the world, and not simply in the arts. “Inevitably,” he writes, “the entrance upon the scene of the spectator was not limited in Rome to a handful of exceptional ‘virtuosi’ who merited the confidence of the greatest artists. It coincided with a general theatricalization of the religious and

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5.34 Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784. Oil on canvas, 330 × 425 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 3692

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public life of a capital which knew itself to be observed by all of Europe, and where were developed those artistic models of persuasion, indeed of emotional seduction, destined to be reproduced and diffused throughout all the courts and parishes of the Catholic universe. We are on the threshold of that ‘baroque’ age which would make of the theater, of ‘l’optique théâtrale,’ calculated to exercise the most powerful and often the most facile effect on the ordinary spectator, the dominant framework and the principle of the synthesis of the arts” (p. 71). The artist who knew best how to resist this turn of events was, Fumaroli repeats, Poussin. In Fumaroli’s words, referring to the Landscape with a Snake and Landscape with Diogenes (both 1648), “Only a gaze sharpened [or purged, disenchanted: déniaisé] by an awareness of the world as theater can escape the ‘society of the spectacle’ and return toward the great spiritual spaces” (p. 70). In other words, in Fumaroli’s account a radical theatricalization of art and world begins in Rome around 1630, along with a reaction against it at least on Poussin’s part by the following decade. This may be, but it is only considerably later, in the 1750s and 1760s (and after), that the struggle against theatricality comes to take the form of an imperative to suspend or neutralize or undo the very condition of spectatordom, the radical move that distinguishes the art of French modernity from what had gone before. By the same token, it speaks volumes about Poussin’s significance for the later eighteenth century that his Eudamidas emerged in retrospect as the paradigm of a truly absorptive, hence antitheatrical history painting.

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In this connection I want to look again at a work first encountered in lecture 1, Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures in the Brera, most likely of the later 1580s (fig. 5.35). As we saw, it is a classic instance of right-angle mirror representation and is also one of the extremely few self-portraits before 1860 that are mirror-reversed, which is to say that Annibale, a right-handed painter, has portrayed himself wielding his brush with his left hand and gripping his palette in his right. Now I want to add that Annibale’s picture self-evidently combines absorption and address, which makes it, along with Ludovico’s Chess Players of around the same moment, a precocious instance of a structure that would soon play a major role in the art of Caravaggio and his followers. More precisely, the depicted painter (the artist-sitter) gazes directly out of the painting while the three other personages (or at least two of the three) appear to be caught up in a transaction that I have proposed may be understood as the man at the right handing the painter a piece of leather or metal with black pigment on it while the older man at the left looks on. (The usual description has the younger man handing the article in question to the boy.) In an engaging study Roberto Zapperi argues that the man at the right is probably Agostino Carracci, the older man at the left his and Annibale’s father Antonio, and the boy some young member of the studio. Whatever the identity of the figures, however, that the mental states of the two men are marked by absorption is beyond question. The older man, “Antonio,” seems lost in thought or reverie (as Zapperi remarks), while the younger “Agostino” appears concentrated on what he is doing, an effect heightened, made especially acute, by the conspicuous elision of the lower part of his face and all of his body except his left hand (in actuality his right) by the edge of the canvas on which Annibale is shown working (in close proximity to the edge of the actual canvas). That is, the force of that elision—a nonviolent or not obviously violent cutting—is such as to give “Agostino’s” downturned, only partly visible expression and his almost formal gesture of donation immense pictorial weight, with the result that his largely occluded presence fully rivals in psychological authority if it does not exceed that of Annibale himself. And because what does the eliding is Annibale’s canvas, I suggest that the act of elision may be understood as linked with and expressive of the powers of painting as distinct from the automatic and nonselective process of mirror reflection—a process with which, in a brilliant, nominally self-effacing conceit, Annibale on this interpretation associated his portrayal of his own image. I suggest, in other words, that Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures, like Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard and related canvases, implies a distinction between mirroring and painting. But whereas the nature of Caravaggio’s realism is such that the terms of that distinction remain unfixable and to all intents and purposes infinite, Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures privileges painting, whose faculty of selective inclusion, which is to say of cutting out the pictorial artifact from its surroundings—the founding gesture of the gallery or easel picture, at least in Bologna and Rome—enables it to engage both mind and emotions with a force no merely “mechanical” process like mirroring could ever hope to match.

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5.35 Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait with Figures, ca. 1585–90. Oil on canvas, 60 × 48 cm. Pinacotheca di Brera, Milan

It is in this light that I see the famous pictorial riddles (divinarelli pittorici) that Malvasia reports the Carracci delighted in (fig. 5.36): from left to right, the four instances he reproduces represent a stonemason with trowel behind a wall; a capuchin preacher taking a nap in the pulpit; a knight in the lists; and a blind man coming around a corner (the last two are structurally the same but turned in different directions). All depend for their effect on a schematic form of elision (or, to use the proper rhetorical term, ellipsis), the occluding of most of the figures in question by a straight edge, and thus are intimately related to the use of ellipsis to thematize painting in Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures. The affinity between the latter painting and the structure of the riddles is striking, as Zapperi has remarked, but what to my knowledge has not been fully recognized is the relation of both the eliding picture edge in the self-portrait and the divinarelli pittorici to other instances of the trope of ellipsis in the art of all three Carracci.

5.36 Divinarelli pittorici, from Malvasia, Life of the Carracci

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Consider, for example, a scene from a frescoed frieze (so called) of the story of Jason painted by the Carracci and their students in the Palazzo Fava in Bologna in the early 1580s (the frieze was completed in 1584). In the scene in question (fig. 5.37), Malvasia writes in his Life of the Carracci, “the relatives of the young Jason . . . rescue him from the death to which [the usurper] King Peliashas destined him; by pretending that he is already dead, they feign a mock funeral and carry him in a closed coffin in the deep of night not to his place of burial, but to Chiron [the centaur, shown standing in front of his cave at the upper right], who is to feed and educate him.” Modern scholarship attributes this particular scene to Annibale, but what I want to emphasize is the eliding of the lower halves of the bodies of the children leading the funeral procession by the bottom edge of the “picture” as well as by the rocks toward the lower right. In Malvasia’s words: “Remarkable in such a small space is the extensive landscape through which the funeral procession winds its way, led by those young boys and girls in white gowns . . . all these figures being placed near the lower margin of the picture, which cuts and hides as much of the lower half of the figures.” Malvasia, a brilliant critic, goes on to discuss the operation of the same device, ellipsis, in other scenes in the frieze, finally recounting how from a mounted scaffold he was able to “satisfy my curiosity and make a general study of Annibale’s device of indicating more in his paintings than is actually seen in them by hiding a great many figures in crowds and by suggesting that the figures extend beyond the picture frame, thus giving more breadth to the ground plane and acquiring more space.” Of a scene of battling men (fig. 5.38), he adds that Annibale at one side of the scene “lets us see only a pair of feet of one of the slain warriors, which we take to belong to a soldier who is lying prostrate and supine on the ground, and poised above him the sword held in the hand of his assailant, and round about a large quantity of half-spears, which makes us believe that following behind are many more armed men, cut off and hidden from us by the picture frame.” Consider, too, from the Carracci’s next decorative project, scenes from the lives of Romulus and Remus at the Palazzo Magnani, also in Bologna, two analogous “pictures,” the flight of the two brothers after the murder of Amulio, given by Malvasia to Agostino (fig. 5.39), and the magnificent rape of the Sabines, probably by Ludovico (fig. 5.40), in both of which ellipsis plays a crucial role. Finally, the most beautiful scene in the frieze, Annibale’s “picture” of the two infant brothers being suckled by a she-wolf (fig. 5.41), gives pride of place to another kind of ellipsis: I mean the masterly foreshortening of the two infant bodies and in particular the angling of the rightmost infant’s head so as to give the viewer no glimpse whatever of any of his facial features—and yet the impression of a closely observed infant avidly sucking milk from a teat could not be more powerful. The depiction of the goddess’s profile in Annibale’s Venus and Satyr with Two Cupids, already praised by me, is a ravishing instance of ellipsis in still another vein. As is the virtuoso elision of the upper right arm and shoulder of the protagonist in

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5.37 Annibale Carracci, scene from the Jason cycle, 1583–84. Fresco. Palazzo Fava, Bologna

5.38 Annibale Carracci, scene from the Jason cycle, 1583–84. Fresco. Palazzo Fava, Bologna

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5.39 Agostino Carracci, Flight of Romulus and Remus, 1589–90. Fresco. Palazzo Magnani, Bologna. UniCredit Group Collection

5.40 Ludovico Carracci, The Rape of the Sabines, 1589–90. Fresco. Palazzo Magnani, Bologna. UniCredit Group Collection

Annibale’s great Saint Margaret in Santa Caterina dei Funari (1599; fig. 5.42), the work that, as Dempsey has stressed, is reported to have overwhelmed Caravaggio when he first saw it. And then there is Ludovico’s wonderfully original and beautifully preserved Lamentation in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 5.43), which Christiansen places as early as 1582, the moment of the formation of the Carracci academy. The format of the painting, which appears to have been made for a private collector in Bologna, is a horizontal rectangle of just over three feet by more than five and a half feet; almost the entire width of the canvas is occupied by the dead body of Christ, which lies on a white linen winding sheet and is lamented by five figures: four women, including the Virgin and Mary Magdalen, and the youthful Saint John, whose painfully absorbed gaze at Christ’s body, perhaps at the wound in his side or his grotesquely twisted right hand, is an expressive masterstroke that anticipates by almost fifteen years Caravaggio’s later successes along similar lines (think of Judith’s servant Abra in his Judith and Holofernes looking on in horrified fascination as she holds a piece of cloth in both hands much as John grips and raises the end of the winding sheet). But what I want to stress is the fierceness or indeed violence of

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5.41 Annibale Carracci, Romulus and Remus Suckled by a She-Wolf, 1589–90. Fresco. Palazzo Magnani, Bologna. UniCredit Group Collection

the foreshortening with which the contours of Christ’s dead and broken body have been depicted, a fierceness or violence that reaches its apogee in the delineation of Christ’s right hand (which subtly makes visual contact with the Virgin’s limp left hand very near the center of the canvas). Also to the point—equally characteristic of the Carracci’s new pictorial poetics—is the conspicuously blank forehead of the otherwise facially occluded dark-haired woman on the left behind Mary (so like the featureless infant’s face in the Palazzo Magnani fresco), which I see as compelling the recognition that foreshortening, especially when as perspicuous as it is here, is itself a form of ellipsis—the use of deliberate omission to evoke what is not actually shown. (Another stunning work of roughly the same moment, Annibale’s The Dead Christ in Stuttgart, operates formally in much the same way. Also to the point is the conspicuous eliding of the upper half of the central soldier’s face by his own right forearm in Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, briefly discussed earlier in this lecture.) In an obvious sense, the cultivation of ellipsis by the Carracci in the 1580s and early 1590s belongs to their systematic exploration of pictorial illusionism and its

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5.42 Annibale Carracci, Saint Margaret, 1599. Oil on canvas, 239 × 134 cm. Church of Santa Caterina dei Funari, Rome

5.43 Ludovico Carracci, The Lamentation, ca. 1582. Oil on canvas, 95.3 × 172.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace and the Annenberg Foundation Gifts; Harris Brisbane Dick, and Gwynne Andrews Funds; Pat and John Rosenwald, Mr. and Mrs. Mark Fisch, and Jon and Barbara Landau Gifts; Gift of Mortimer D. Sackler, Theresa Sackler and Family; and Victor Wilbour Memorial, Marquand, The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment, and Charles B. Curtis Funds, 2000

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capacity for implying more than can be shown. I am suggesting, however, that too automatic a resort to the concept of illusionism on the part of historians can tend to obscure some of the most important devices by which Ludovico and Annibale achieved their characteristic effects. By the same token, baroque illusionism as it went on to develop in the decades after 1630 might be said to have had for its hyperbolic ideal an impression of total and seamless visibility that was at the farthest pole from the Carracci’s stress on the inherent limits of the pictorial. Carraccian ellipsis, both as foreshortening and as elision, was thus left to wither on the vine, which doubtless is why it has not been recognized, except by Malvasia, as the major operative principle in their early work it manifestly is. Nor does Annibale make obvious use of it in the Galleria Farnese, though his reliance on the decorative convention of quadri riportati—fictive paintings within fictive frames—may be understood as retaining a connection to the gallery painting ideal. It also occurs to me that the virtual cutting that is implicit in the Carracci’s practices of elision and ellipsis is given literal expression in Annibale’s early Butcher Shop pictures in Oxford and Fort Worth, which have persuasively been read as only somewhat disguised portrayals of the Carracci themselves.3 A brief look at another painting by Annibale will at once bring this lecture to a close and prepare for a return to Caravaggio: the much-restored but still magical Venus Adorned by the Graces in the National Gallery of Art, most likely painted circa 1590–95 (fig. 5.45), shortly before Annibale’s departure from Bologna for Rome. The scene takes place on the isle of Cyprus, where Venus has retired after being snared in sexual congress with Mars by her husband Vulcan, to be bathed and adorned by the Graces. As Donald Posner puts it: “Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, is traditionally understood, along with the Graces, to be a guardian deity of marriage; Mars and Vulcan [probably seen in the background] symbolize generative

3. Not that ellipsis as a device was restricted to the Carracci. To take just one example, Orazio Gentileschi’s Lute Player (ca. 1612–15; fig. 5.44) in Washington, D.C., depicts a beautiful young woman absorbedly bending her head to her instrument. Her back is turned toward us, and by a brilliant stroke of pictorial implication, we are shown nothing at all of her right arm and hand, which nevertheless we intensely imagine (we virtually hear) plucking the equally undisclosed strings. The elision of arm and hand together with the asymmetry of the composition recall analogous features of Caravaggio’s Eros Triumphant, above all the boy’s elided lower left leg, a tour de force of deadpan naturalism that tends to go unnoticed unless it is pointed out, just as the untied lace that dangles from the lute player’s loosened bodice recalls (for example) the small tear in the shoulder of Thomas’s jacket in the Incredulity of Thomas, and anticipates similar indices of self-abandonment revealed to the viewer but excluded from the consciousness of the absorbed protagonist in Chardin’s genre paintings of the 1730s. (There is, however, no equivalent in Chardin for Orazio’s evocation of the lute-player’s sheerly physical being: the lacing still in place expresses the pressure exerted on her body by her bodice, as do the thin straps that seem almost to bite into her blouse at her shoulders.) Meanwhile the violin lying on the unusually high table covered with a green cloth extends toward the viewer, as if asserting the latter’s presence before the canvas.

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5.44 Orazio Gentileschi, Lute Player, ca. 1612–15. Oil on canvas, 143.5 × 129 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

heat; and Bacchus—the fountain statue in the middle distance—is a god of fertility. The picture may well have been commissioned on the occasion of a marriage, in imitation of ancient practices, since it was reported that in antiquity pictures of Venus with cupids and the Graces, because they signify the pleasures of love, were made as gifts for new brides.” All this is fine, even important, as far as it goes. What interests me, however, is precisely what a learned and intelligent iconological reading such as Posner’s leaves unsaid and perhaps unseen. For example: 1. Venus, seated on a sumptuous pillow, with her legs supported by further pillows placed on a carpet, is being groomed and adorned by the Graces with the help of several cupids as she gazes into a mirror which she holds extended before her in her left hand. Beneath the carpet is a marble floor, and behind Venus and her attendants toward the left falls a red curtain or drape, suggesting the possibility of privacy. (Basically the composition divides into two halves.) The mirror is partly supported from behind by a putto, probably her son, Cupid; note the artful elision of most of

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5.45 Annibale Carracci, Venus Adorned by the Graces, ca. 1590–95. Oil transferred from wood to canvas, 133 × 170.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection

his face by his upraised left arm. Both the Graces and the cupids assisting them are plainly absorbed in their respective tasks, as is Venus in her self-contemplation; I am particularly struck by the quiet engrossment of the Grace curling Venus’s golden hair. At the same time, the extension of Venus’s left arm has something decidedly formal about it, and the mirror itself, rectangular and framed in black, is positioned almost but not quite at right angles to the surface of the painting. This is not to suggest that the dispositif of right-angle mirror representation is covertly at stake in this picture. But the alignment of the mirror very nearly on the central axis of the composition and the geometry of its relation both to Venus and to the picture surface makes it the focus of the painting fully as much as the head and upper body of Venus herself. Indeed, whenever our gaze falls on Venus’s face, it is at once directed by her gaze to the (ever so slightly tilted and angled) mirror. 2. Because the mirror is not precisely at a right angle to the picture surface, we are given a glimpse of the reflection of Venus’s left hand—more precisely, of her thumb

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5.46 Annibale Carracci, Venus Adorned by the Graces, detail of Venus’s hand and mirror

5.47 Titian, Venus at Her Toilet with Two Cupids, ca. 1552–55. Oil on canvas, 124.5 × 104.1 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection

and by implication the heel of her hand—and naturally that reflection is reversed relative to her actual hand (fig. 5.46). This may seem innocuous, but I do not think it is: in previous paintings of Venus with a mirror—for example, the splendid Titian also at the National Gallery of Art (ca. 1552–55; fig. 5.47)—the mirror reflects the goddess’s body and perhaps part of her head, often from the side or rear in a paragone-like fashion. But Annibale has foregone such an arrangement in order to show us just enough of Venus’s cut-off reflected hand to make the point of mirror reversal, which as we have seen he had earlier embraced in the Brera Self-Portrait with Figures. 3. The point is underscored by the statue of Bacchus in the right middle distance, specifically by the way in which the standing figure’s extended right arm holding

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5.48 Annibale Carracci, Venus Adorned by the Graces, detail of statue of Bacchus

a bunch of grapes “mirrors” Venus’s left arm holding the mirror (fig. 5.48); by the same token, Bacchus’s right arm and hand are aligned with the reversed reflection of Venus’s hand, which further links the actions of goddess and statue. I am not sure exactly what to make of this, but the affinity between the two actions is too strong to be accidental, and by now I need hardly insist that both actions are closely analogous to the painter’s act of applying paint to canvas. Note too that the marble floor in the foreground reflects the objects placed on it (this is perhaps best seen in relation to the pearl necklace), a detail that confirms one’s sense of the stake this painting has in a thematics of reflection. 4. Finally, as Posner was the first to remark, Bacchus’s pose is based on Benvenuto Cellini’s electrifying statue of Perseus and Medusa in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence

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5.49 Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus and Medusa, 1545–54. Bronze, 320 cm. high. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

5.50 Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, 1455–60. Bronze, 236 cm. high. Palazzo della Signoria, Florence

(1545–54; fig. 5.49). Moreover, a closer look at the Bacchus reveals that, although a statue, it is in the act of squeezing the bunch of grapes with its right hand so as to produce a visible downpour of “wine,” which of course makes all the stronger the analogy with a severed head dripping blood. (Michael Cole in a brilliant chapter on the Perseus and Medusa in Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture emphasizes the importance of Cellini’s rendering of gushing blood in his bronze masterpiece.) This means that not only does Annibale’s painting conflate Bacchus and the theme of decapitation in a way that anticipates Caravaggio (cf. the association drawn in lecture 2 between Caravaggio’s Bacchus and David with the Head of Goliath); it also invites us to understand that conflation in the double context of mirroring, including mirror reversal, and of allegorizing the act of painting, Caravaggian tropes as well. (Blood = wine = paint.) That the beautiful, half-naked Venus should be drawn into this network of issues, indeed that she should be represented at its heart, recalls my suggestion in lecture 4 that in Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight the sensuous, largely naked

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beauty of the violin-playing angel functions as an agent of distancing and severing (of specularization). Naturally, Venus’s view of herself in the mirror can only be of her “decapitated” head, the mirror image being in effect her self-portrait. It is worth noting, too, that Cellini’s Perseus was from the first understood as being in dialogue with the greatest sculpture then in the Piazza della Signoria, another masterpiece of decapitation, Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes (1455–60; fig. 5.50). Does all this add up to interpreting Annibale’s canvas as what Stoichita calls a metapainting? In a way it does, though in another, more immediate sense—one that matters more within the framework of these lectures—my observations direct attention to the multiple and unexpected affinities among seemingly diverse paintings by Caravaggio, Annibale, Artemisia, and others that together make it irresistible—so I want to claim—to interpret Venus Adorned by the Graces in the terms just outlined. In all those works, as in others by Caravaggio we have still to consider, a profound albeit unprogrammatic exploration of the relations among painting, mirroring, severing (including decapitation), and self-representation seems to have been the order of the day.

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Detail from figure 6.12

6

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L ELEC CTU RR EE TU

The Internal Structure of the Pictorial Act In July 1599 Caravaggio, then twenty-eight, signed a contract to paint two large side pictures for a chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, the French national church in Rome; the subjects were to be The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (figs. 6.1 and 6.2). The commission was arranged by the Cardinal Del Monte, in whose household the painter had been living since the autumn of 1595. The pictures were unveiled one year later, in July 1600, and remain in the Contarelli Chapel, as it is called, to this day. One must imagine the two canvases facing each other, with the Calling on the left and the Martyrdom on the right from the point of view of the worshiper. As anyone who has visited San Luigi dei Francesi is aware, the chapel is today quite dark, but recent research has established that that would not have been the case in the early seventeenth century, which explains how both paintings were able to have an extraordinary impact on other painters as soon as they were placed on view. We know more than we usually do in Caravaggio’s case about the actual making of the paintings, thanks to x-ray photographs that suggest that he began by working on the Martyrdom, then broke off to turn to the Calling, and only after completing the latter returned to the Martyrdom. This scenario is based on the fact that the figures that have been revealed beneath the surface of the Martyrdom are considerably smaller than those in the final version, which in turn mesh comfortably with those in the Calling. So it seems likely that the scale of the figures in the Calling determined the scale of those in the Martyrdom as we see it today. In any case, there is a sharp contrast between the two works: the Calling comprises only seven figures and appears at first glance simple, lucid, calm, while the Martyrdom comprises more figures than one can easily count (thirteen in all), and the composition gives the impression of exploding outward before one’s eyes. But the Calling is not without its problematic features, of which I mention three. First, not only is the figure of Christ at the extreme right mostly obscured by that of Peter, who has been depicted largely from the rear, but Christ’s bodily orientation verges on the impossible: while his head is turned toward the figures around the table and his right arm reaches out to summon one of them, his feet are already turning

6.1 Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600. Oil on canvas, 322 × 340 cm. Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

to the right, toward what presumably is a street beyond. (The nature of the setting is not entirely clear but it is surely outside, perhaps in an alleyway.) This has the effect of heightening the momentary character of the event, which is known only from a single sentence in the gospel of Matthew (9:9): “Jesus saw a man called Matthew at his seat in the custom-house, and said to him, ‘Follow me’; and Matthew rose and followed him.” Second, Christ’s summoning gesture with his extended right arm is curiously unenergetic, not exactly limp but almost so. Walter Friedlaender associated the gesture with that of God the Father in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the

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6.2 Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600. Oil on canvas, 323 × 343 cm. Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

Sistine Ceiling (fig. 6.3), but Hibbard noted that in its semi-limpness it bore a closer resemblance to that of Adam, adding that Christ was known as “the new Adam” (not an explanation I find compelling). Third, there turns out to be a question as to which of the figures around the table is Matthew. Until recently it was universally agreed that Matthew is the bearded man who has turned his head toward Christ and Peter and gestures toward himself as if asking, “Do you mean me?” Indeed, that view still has many supporters, including recent biographers Helen Langdon and Peter Robb, and Irving Lavin, who have written in defense of the traditional identification.

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6.3 Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, ca. 1511. Fresco. Sistine Chapel, Rome. Detail of hands. Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City, Italy

Within the past twenty years, however, a half-dozen art historians, Thomas Puttfarken and Salvatore Settis among them, have called it into question, opting instead for the much younger man at the extreme left who appears wholly absorbed in the mundane activity of counting coins and who therefore gives no indication of being aware of the two intruders. The bearded man would in that case be a taxpayer, not a tax collector; this, Puttfarken argues, would explain his being accompanied by two youthful retainers, and his pointing gesture would perhaps be directed toward the younger man (“Do you mean him?”), which visually is possible. (Or, if it is to be understood as directed toward himself, the answer to “Do you mean me?” would be “No.”) For Settis the initial ambiguity as to the identity of Matthew amounts to a further development of similar strategies of delayed recognition in certain paintings by Giorgione of almost a hundred years before; this in turn helps explain what the older mannerist painter Federico Zuccaro might have meant when he said of the Contarelli Chapel paintings that he saw in them only “the idea of Giorgione.” For a moment I was unsure where I stood on this question, but repeated viewings of the Calling have led me to decide in favor of the traditional interpretation, above all on the strength of a single telling detail: the bearded man’s right knee is raised and his right foot has already left the ground, which I take to mean that Caravaggio wished to signal that without being aware of what he is doing or even that he is doing anything at all, the bearded man has already begun to follow Christ. More precisely, he points to himself as if unsure of Christ’s meaning; at the same time, his right hand holding a coin is still engaged in his official task, a point underscored by the characteristic doubling or mirroring of that hand with the right hand of the young man at the end of the table (fig. 6.4), who remains bent over the coins, blind and deaf to the momentous occurrence just then coming to pass in his presence. (The hair fallen forward over the young man’s eyes is a natural metaphor for this.) And the bearded man has begun to leave. So that in effect we see conjoined in the figure of the bearded man three distinct but also in a sense simultaneous moments in the implied narrative: a first moment of sunkenness or immersion in the mundane, a second of surprise and uncertainty, and a third—the least obvious of the three but

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6.4 Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, detail of hands

6.5 Ludovico Carracci, The Calling of Saint Matthew, ca. 1607–10. Oil on canvas, 449 × 265 cm. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna

unmistakable once the raising of the bearded man’s leg is perceived—of spontaneous, unreflective obedience to Christ’s summons. It is in this context that the full meaning of Christ’s bodily orientation becomes intelligible: what Caravaggio sought to indicate by the position of Christ’s feet is not merely that the Calling took place in passing but also, more important, that Christ’s summons and Matthew’s “conversion,” being virtually simultaneous, cannot be understood in terms of ordinary relations of cause and effect. The Gospel’s “and Matthew rose and followed him” has something of the same import. As for Christ’s right hand, I read it not as reprising Adam’s left hand in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam so much as revising God’s right hand, as if in the Calling as in the Vienna Crowning with Thorns Christ’s exemplariness is associated with a determined renunciation of physical force or even command; the hand’s extraordinary efficacy functions in quite another register—a mimetic register, I am inclined to say, mimesis in this context bearing connotations of something like hypnotic rapport between Christ and Matthew. Ludovico Carracci’s version of the same subject (ca. 1607–10; fig. 6.5), a response to Caravaggio’s painting, emphasizes to the point of exaggeration this aspect of the relationship between Christ and Matthew, the originality of which he plainly recognized.

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6.6 Girolamo Savoldo, Tobias and the Angel, mid-1520s. Oil on canvas, 96 × 124 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome

In this light let me offer another, previously unrecognized source for the summons and its efficacy: the gesture of the angel holding out his right hand so as magnetically to draw a fish from the water in Girolamo Savoldo’s Tobias and the Angel (mid1520s; fig. 6.6) in the Borghese Gallery. The lifting of Matthew’s right leg would thus be equivalent to the quietly miraculous emergence from the water of the fish; the presence alongside Christ of Peter, “fisher of men,” would take on added significance in this context. A further possibility: Peter is shown unambiguously pointing at Matthew, I mean his gesture is unambiguously one of pointing, as if it were he who selected Matthew and Christ who summoned him. Such a reimagining of the original narrative would be typical of Caravaggio. All this while—but no time at all has gone by—a mysterious source of light sends its beams into the otherwise dark alleyway from the upper right, and a lesser source of illumination—also unexplained—lights up Peter’s back and Christ’s neck, cheek, and hand. (That Savoldo has long been considered one of Caravaggio’s major Lombard predecessors goes without saying. Of course, one would like to know for certain that Caravaggio could have seen Savoldo’s canvas or a reasonable copy. So I welcome Creighton Gilbert’s suggestion in his pioneering dissertation on the artist that the Tobias was one of the

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four unnamed paintings by Savoldo seen by Vasari in the Milan Mint, Milan being no distance from the town of Caravaggio where Michelangelo Merisi grew up and moreover the city where the young artist was apprenticed to Peterzano.) Finally, something should be said about the Calling’s composition, specifically about its implied openness at the right. (Remember, the right-hand edge of the painting is farthest from the viewer as he or she stands facing into the chapel.) In a plain sense, this is another instance of Caravaggio’s lack of concern with compositional closure, and more broadly with pictorial unity as distinct from self-sufficiency or autonomy, evident from the start in works like Boy Bitten by a Lizard and other disguised right-angle self-portraits with their intimation of a reflected image of the “original” canvas just beyond the right-hand framing edge. But in the Calling there is the added suggestion that the depicted scene is on the verge of dissolution: in another moment Christ and Peter will be gone (Christ is as good as gone, the painting implies) and Matthew, gesturing toward himself, his life transformed, will have left with them (he is on his way). His right hand’s lingering preoccupation with the coins on the table—also its isomorphism with the right hand of the young man sunk in mere dailiness—in what, anachronistically, might be called the “bad” everyday— delays that outcome, as perhaps does, on a different level of experience, the viewer’s momentary uncertainty as to his identity. And we are left to wonder too about the probable reaction of the charming liveried youth at his side, who seems to rest his right arm on the back of Matthew’s chair in a gesture of casual intimacy, should the latter in fact rise and leave. But the outcome is not only certain; it has in a sense already occurred. (The youth, we might say, emblematizes in his sheer attractiveness everything that Matthew is in the act of giving up. We should not think of the “bad” everyday as unappealing.)

It may be that the invention of that open structure in the Calling gave Caravaggio the idea for a similar feature in the Martyrdom, the implied openness of the picture especially to the left, where we see four figures in contemporary costume, paired two and two, rushing away from the scene of martyrdom. (Notice, by the way, how in each pair one figure has been depicted from the rear, the other, looking back, more or less from the front; the two pairs might be said to mirror each other at a slight distance, just as within each pair the same might be said about the two figures it comprises. Glancing again at the Calling, we find there not just the pairing of Christ and Peter and of Matthew’s and the oblivious young man’s hands, but that of the two youths in feathered hats who sit across the table from each other.) Other figures recoil in shock and horror from Matthew’s murder, none more dramatically than the young acolyte who rushes gesturing toward the right while looking back and down over his right shoulder and seemingly crying out in fear. In the middle of the canvas we find the brightly lit, largely stripped assassin wielding a rapier in his right hand and

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6.7 Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, detail of acolytes at lower right

6.8 Martino Rota after Titian, Death of Saint Peter Martyr, ca. 1560 (after an altarpiece of ca. 1526–30). Engraving, 40 × 26.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1917 (17.50.16-155)

gripping with his left the fallen Matthew’s right wrist at the same time as, toward the upper right, a winged angel whose features are obscured from view leans down from a rather too palpable incense-like cloud to extend toward Matthew’s open right hand a martyr’s palm, which the saint may or may not be attempting to grasp. (The assassin’s mouth is open, as if he too, not just the acolyte, were crying out—in his case not in fear but in something like rage.) Finally, the lower right-hand corner of the canvas holds another twinned pair of figures (fig. 6.7), both almost naked, depicted from the rear, cut off below the waist, and seemingly transfixed by the central event; the one nearer us appears to recoil, the one farther away appears absorbed in what is taking place, though because their profiles are all but lost to view their exact responses can only be a matter of surmise. For all intents and purposes they share a single body, as will, almost ten years later, Salome and her maid in the Madrid and London versions of Salome with the Head of John the Baptist. And they are nearer the viewer than is anyone else in the painting (as Howard Hibbard remarks), which once again confers on the lower right corner of the painting a special significance

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6.9 Diagram based on x-ray photographs of The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. Copyright © 1985 Howard Hibbard, Shirley G. Hibbard. Reprinted by permission of Westview Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group

that I have associated with the location of the painter’s—the artist-viewer’s—active right hand and by extension with his bodily orientation as he worked on the canvas. Another point Hibbard makes is that the final version of the Martyrdom owes much to Titian’s Death of Saint Peter Martyr (1530; fig. 6.8), which Caravaggio could have known through an engraving: the killer, the saint, and the fleeing acolyte all have close equivalents in that image. The connection, far from determining Caravaggio’s composition, throws into relief the idiosyncratic nature of his vision. If we now compare the finished painting with a diagram made on the basis of x-ray photographs of its underlayers (fig. 6.9), we notice two points in particular: first, as mentioned, the scale of the figures was considerably smaller than in the final version; and, second, of special interest for my argument, the center foreground was occupied by a standing figure apparently wearing a helmet—doubtless one of the killers—depicted from the rear and significantly larger, hence nearer to the viewer, than any other in the scene. From a structural point of view such a figure appears to be a near repetition of that of the angel in Rest on the Flight, a figure I suggested

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6.10 Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, detail of self-portrait as fleeing man

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invites being seen first as a surrogate for the painter immersed in work on the painting and then (or also) as an agent of what I called specularization, the repelling or distancing of the painter from the painting, which thereby was made present to him as a painted image, an artifact the end and purpose of which was precisely to be seen. It seems likely that something comparable was in preparation in the early version of the Martyrdom but that the obscuring of the middle of the painting by the standing soldier came to strike the artist as problematic, along with other aspects of the composition. In the final version the soldier, imagined as a surrogate for the painter, has been replaced by the twinned figures at the lower right who in comparison with the soldier appear relatively marginalized and restricted to an observing function but at the same time, by virtue of their strategic location, nearness to the viewer, bodily orientation, and subtly different responses to the murder of the saint, play a far more active role than one is likely to attribute to them at first glance. Moreover, the Martyrdom, as has long been recognized, includes an indubitable self-portrait (fig. 6.10): the most distant figure in the scene, the farther of the second pair of rapidly departing bravos, looks back with an expression of dismay, or bitterness, or regret, as if—here one’s powers of description become uncertain—he were reluctant to depart? Or as if he regretted his participation, assuming it was such, in the murder? Or, indeed, as if he wished he might have interceded to save Matthew? As Peter Robb observes, the exiting Caravaggio’s legs and haunches appear naked, as if he had just slipped on his shoes and thrown his black cloak over his shoulders in his haste to get away; as Robb also notes, it is possible he may be wearing flesh-colored tights, but the impression of nakedness remains and links him visually with the mostly unclothed assassin. In any case, as an iconic surrogate for the painting’s maker, the fleeing bravo’s implication in the murder is undeniable. So what are we to make of his imminent departure from the scene of the crime? Early in lecture 5 I briefly summarized Victor Stoichita’s argument in L’Instauration du tableau to the effect that in northern painting between 1522 and 1675 (the dates being somewhat arbitrary but not without historical significance) artists found a range of ways of thematizing in their canvases the new kind of artifact, the modern “tableau” (as he called it) that was beginning to dominate pictorial production in that part of the world. I went on to suggest that Caravaggio’s paintings, in particular his gallery pictures, took part in an analogous development, which is to say that in various respects they too may be understood as metapaintings in Stoichita’s sense of the term. Let me now add that I have no stake in the notion of metapainting as such, which in the first place has somewhat too abstract or intellectual a cast for what I see happening in Caravaggio’s art, and in the second—really the same point—risks implying that it stands for a distinct class of paintings down to the present. The same holds for the related notion of self-reference; neither concept precisely fits what I have been trying to get at in these lectures. These caveats notwithstanding, Stoichita’s book bears closely on my argument.

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To begin with the obvious, the Martyrdom focuses on a scene of extreme violence, while the actions of all the subsidiary figures, most graphically the screaming acolyte—who recalls the protagonist of Boy Bitten by a Lizard—express horrified albeit fascinated responses to the central event. I have just suggested that as the painting’s maker Caravaggio is implicated in the violence, though here too I hasten to add that I mean this not as a universal platitude about painters of violent subjects at all times and under all historical circumstances but rather as an attempt to capture an implicit thematic in this particular painting as in others by this painter. Caravaggio’s depicted presence at the scene of the crime through the figure of the fleeing bravo is obviously to the point. And is there not something peculiar—in excess of or perhaps falling short of the requirements of effective representation—about the interplay between the figures of the principal assassin, the fallen saint, and the downward-reaching angel? Specifically, assuming as we surely may that Caravaggio painted the Martyrdom with the aid of living models, can we not imagine him positioning the “saint”’s right hand by grasping his wrist and showing him exactly what he wanted—in effect taking the place of the assassin? (We earlier observed something of the sort in Orazio Gentileschi’s Christ Crowned with Thorns in Braunschweig.) In fact, is it not conceivable that two models, for the assassin and for Matthew, posed together for the painter, and that the one gripped and all but held aloft the other’s wrist and arm? And how are we to understand the quasi-competition between the assassin and the angel, the latter appearing almost to seek to force the martyr’s palm into the saint’s raised right hand—as one of the thugs in the Vienna Crowning with Thorns will soon seek to insert the reed-scepter into Christ’s all but completely passive right hand? In any case, the interplay of hands and palm frond is the central focus of the composition, and my thought is that its curiously literal character—also the sense it conveys of momentary stasis—inevitably calls up the scene of representation itself. What I am proposing, in other words, is that the Martyrdom invites us to understand it not simply as a precocious masterpiece of early seventeenth-century Catholic art, or as a monument of a new, revolutionary style of pictorial realism, or even as both together, but also, I would like to say equally importantly, as an investigation into the internal—that is, psychic, physical, procedural—dynamic that went into its making, a dynamic I have tried throughout these lectures to evoke with the aid of concepts like immersion and specularity, absorption and address, painting and mirroring, and optical and bodily modes of realism. (Also severing, understood as an extreme form of specularity. And with reference to the painting’s “beyond”—the painter, his equipment, his models, his studio.) To summarize all this in a phrase that expresses my deepest concerns in these lectures, the Martyrdom, like other paintings we have considered, investigates—which is to say thematizes, makes available for theoretical reflection—what I think of as the internal structure of the pictorial act. Viewed in that light, how exactly are we to understand Caravaggio’s portrayal of himself at once fleeing from and looking back toward the scene of Matthew’s murder?

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6.11 Caravaggio, Judith and Holofernes, detail of Judith

We have already considered an earlier and simpler painting of a scene of violent death, the Judith and Holofernes. But whereas in the Judith no more than three figures are involved (with the mimetic curtain thrown in for good measure), the Martyrdom presents a far more difficult problem if only because of its more numerous and diverse dramatis personae. Nevertheless, the two paintings have an important feature in common, apart from the death-dealing violence at their respective hearts: I mean the similarity between the expressions on the faces of Judith (fig. 6.11) and the fleeing Caravaggio, expressions that I now want to characterize as ones of aversion. Let me try to state as simply as possible what I mean. In my commentary on the Judith I noted what I took to be the painter’s implied identification with the figure of Judith wielding her sword and grasping Holofernes’ hair; the extraordinary expression of Judith’s maid, who gazes intently at the decapitation-in-progress and who I suggested is perhaps to be read as a figure for the “moment” of immersion (in that reading, Judith, partly recoiling from her bloody act, would represent the “moment” of specularity); and the excessive or hyperbolic violence of the scene as a whole, which I took to indicate or allegorize not just the specular “moment” of separation and recoil but, going beyond that, the violent emergence or coming into prominence of a new material and artistic entity, a new medium of painting, the self-sufficient and autonomous gallery picture. I now want to put forward a proposal that may seem surprising in view of my emphasis throughout this book on the centrality of the self-portrait to Caravaggio’s art. (And not only to Caravaggio’s: think of Annibale’s superb Self-Portrait with Figures, one of no less than three remarkable self-portraits

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from his hand, and of the three paintings by Artemisia glanced at in lecture 5 in each of which the protagonist is, explicitly or implicitly, the painter herself—in the case of her Magdalen a high-risk venture, one might think. Not to mention the many self-portraits by Borgianni, Cigoli, Cristofano Allori, Carlo Dolci, and others briefly surveyed in lecture 1.) Specifically, I want to suggest that for Caravaggio, not always but often enough for it to be one of the characteristic features of his art, the act of painting involved an attempt to establish the final self-sufficiency and autonomy of the work on his easel by cutting the work free not only from its surroundings, its immediate and indeed its prospective environment, but also—much more painfully and problematically—from himself as its creator, an attempt to make the work selfsufficient and autonomous in that respect also—to launch it into the world independently of him. We might think of that attempt as a radicalization of certain remarks by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks of roughly a century before, to the effect that the worst fault a painter could have was involuntarily to reproduce himself in his paintings. In a somewhat different register, my account in lecture 2 of Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard posits in the imagined production of that work two polar “moments” of immersion and specularity, the second of which, keyed to the shock and violence of the lizard’s bite (scarcely violence compared to what was to come), inevitably disrupts the self-portrait character of the finished work. Something not dissimilar takes place in the Uffizi Bacchus. That is, I argued in the same lecture that although the model for Bacchus cannot have been Caravaggio himself, Bacchus’s gesture of holding out the glass of wine to the viewer may nevertheless be understood as a mirror image of the painter’s act of applying paint to canvas (which in that respect makes the painting a kind of self-portrait after all). At the same time, the treatment of the subject, including the androgynous beauty of the protagonist, is such as to make the self-portrait aspect of the painting all but unreadable other than by virtue of a strong, some will feel somewhat violent, act of interpretation—which is also to say that the painting as we have it has mostly been cut off from the “moment” of immersion, of the painter’s presence not to the work (i.e., the “moment” of specularity) but so to speak in it. And yet, to come full circle, in both cases, Boy Bitten by a Lizard and the Bacchus, the paintings are in the end interpretable as selfportraits of the artist immersed in their production (it has been the aim of my readings to establish that point), and in the Bacchus there is the further evidence of the minuscule reflection of the painter at his easel on the surface of the carafe of wine. In other words, what I have just described as a project of self-removal or selfexcision from the painting taking form under his brush turns out continually to fall short of complete success: as if the representational and other means by which Caravaggio sought to realize that project had the inevitable consequence of reinscribing or indeed reimmersing him in the painting by the time it was done. (One might prefer the term reimmersion to that of immersion as a way of describing figures such as Judith’s maid in the Judith and Holofernes or Salome’s maid in the London Salome

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with the Head of John the Baptist—not that any practical distinction between those terms can be drawn.) To generalize this further, Caravaggio’s appearance in his canvases in propria persona is thus most profoundly to be understood not as the expression of a desire to positively declare his “presence” in his art—though such a desire cannot in principle be excluded—but rather as indicating that despite all attempts to sever the painting from himself, to establish its independence and autonomy with respect even to his activity as a painter, a certain “personal” relationship to the work proved inescapable or, perhaps more accurately, was reinstituted by the very steps he took to realize that aim. (We might think of this as an immersion-specularityreimmersion nexus.) This would be one way of construing the not quite explicit self-portrait aura of the Uffizi Medusa. And it would allow us to understand the Bacchus’s violent “double,” the Borghese David with the Head of Goliath, as nothing less than an allegory of the “failure” of the project of severing, the proffered head—a figure for the finished painting—bearing for all time the tormented features of its maker. (The inward, less aversive than intensely thoughtful expression on David’s face—as if accepting with something like regret all the consequences of his act— would be an instance of this as well.) Not surprisingly, then, I view the dialectic I have just described as virtually acted out in the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, in which a Caravaggio semblable at once rushes to leave the painting and looks back in evident distress, thereby enabling the viewer to recognize his characteristic features on the far threshold of the depicted space.1

Early in lecture 4 I mentioned that in only one painting by Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ (1602; fig. 6.12), do we find both the figure of Christ and that of the painter. 1. This is an ideal spot, I think, to acknowledge a masterly study with which the present book is implicitly in dialogue, Joseph Leo Koerner’s The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago and London, 1993). (The title of the present book derives in part from that of his.) The central point of the first half of Koerner’s study, devoted to Albrecht Dürer and largely focused on the great, frontal Self-Portrait of 1500 in Munich, is that for German Renaissance art to reach a crucial stage of maturity, an artist’s oeuvre had to come to “be read as the product of a person. Such a reading is not natural, but historical. And for northern art this history begins with Dürer and the moment of selfportraiture. The 1500 Self-Portrait,” Koerner goes on to suggest, “is a statement less about Dürer’s person than about his art. It proclaims that art and artist are consubstantial; that the value and meaning of an image derives from its being by someone; that the artist paints, as Dürer himself writes, to ‘make himself seen in his works’; and that every signed picture is in some sense a self-portrait” (p. xviii, emphasis in the original). Or, as Koerner also writes, Dürer’s self-portraits “are a means by which art symbolizes its tasks; and what they say is that art is an image of its maker” (p. 55, emphasis in the original). In other words, the overarching self-portrait structure of Dürer’s art is exactly antithetical to the project of severing painting from maker that I have claimed to discover in Caravaggio’s. But of course, as with Caravaggio and Courbet, to say that two projects are antithetical is also to propose a significant affinity between them. See also Koerner, Dürer’s Hands, Council of The Frick Collection Lecture Series (New York, 2006).

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We are now in a position to deal with that extremely challenging work, which was rediscovered in Dublin as recently as 1998; in fact, inferior copies had been known for a long time, but it was only with the reappearance of the original that attention began to be paid to a composition that is among the most extraordinary in Caravaggio’s oeuvre. The Taking of Christ appears to have been commissioned by Ciriaco Mattei, a leading patron of the artist along with Giustiniani and Del Monte. Along with the Incredulity of Thomas and the Vienna Crowning with Thorns, the Taking of Christ is a striking instance of the use by Caravaggio of the gallery picture format for profoundly innovative works of religious art. The subject, however, is traditional and, in its outlines, would have been instantly readable: Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane being taken prisoner by a group of soldiers who have been led to him by his treacherous disciple, Judas. For thirty pieces of silver Judas had agreed to identify Christ by kissing him, and that is what is happening here. For his part, Christ submits to the kiss with impeccable passivity; his hands are clasped and he looks down or inward with a pained expression on his face. True, he sways slightly to the left under the impact of Judas’s and the soldiers’ onrush; but he stands his ground and does not recoil. At the same time, as I suggested apropos the Vienna Crowning with Thorns, we are to understand his passivity as expressing an inner determination to see his sufferings through to their preordained end. Although the Taking of Christ does not compare with the Crowning as a study in what might be called active or willed passivity, the gesture of the deliberately clasped, downturned hands as an expression of precisely that is a brilliant invention, as is the position of the hands somewhat to Christ’s left (our right), as if in themselves they expressed a determination to remain unmoved (no pun intended) by the sudden turn of events. Judas is depicted in profile, his brow furrowed, a hard-to-read expression on his face; the impression conveyed is of a man acting under inner compulsion and perhaps already aware of his fate—not just his suicide and damnation but his place in history. It is not clear whether the kiss has just been given or is about to be given; a slight distance remains between Judas’s lips and Christ’s cheek, but Judas has grasped Christ’s upper right arm with his own left arm and hand, and of course the soldiers have understood that Christ is the man they are looking for. There are in all three armored and helmeted soldiers, the third barely visible in the right background. The soldier nearest to Judas (also to the viewer) seconds Judas’s action by reaching out with his steel-clad left arm to seize Christ as well. For all the beauty of the armor and the perfection of its rendering, there is something strongly aversive, indeed reptilian about it in this context, which is why the gauntleted fingers touching Christ’s upper chest and throat are chilling to behold. Because of the soldier’s helmet, we see almost nothing of his face. A second soldier behind and to the right effectively doubles the first; although more of his face is revealed, in neither case are we shown the eyes, which gives both men’s actions an impersonal, even inhuman cast. To the right another man, neither helmeted nor in armor, holds

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6.12 Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, 1602. Oil on canvas, 133.5 × 169.5 cm. Society of Jesus of Ireland, on loan to the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, inv. 14,072. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland and the Jesuit Community, Leeson St., Dublin, who acknowledge the generosity of the late Dr. Marie Lea-Wilson

up a lantern with his right hand while apparently making an effort to witness the encounter between Judas and Christ (fig. 6.13). Whether from that lantern or from some other, mysterious source, light illuminates the upper half of his face, leaving no doubt, once again, that we are dealing with a self-portrait (as Roberto Longhi was the first to recognize). Just beyond that figure we glimpse the helmet and the merest slice of a face belonging to the third soldier. And at the other side of the canvas a seventh figure, either a disciple or the unknown man who, Mark tells us, “followed Christ,” rushes gesticulating out of the painting to the left, a look of fear or horror on his face and his mouth open as though crying aloud. I see the fleeing man as a more developed version of the young acolyte rushing toward the right in the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (who in turn echoed the cry of the boy bitten by a lizard), though his actions also imply a relationship to the four men in the Martyrdom, Caravaggio

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6.13 Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, detail of man with lantern (self-portrait)

among them, who are shown hastening away from the scene of the murder or, for that matter, to the figure of Christ in the Calling of Saint Matthew who, even as he beckons one of the seated figures to follow him, is already turning to go. (The Contarelli Chapel pictures predate the Taking of Christ by only a year.) Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, in an interpretively adventurous book entitled Caravaggio’s Secrets, suggest that the fleeing man’s arms might be raised “to stop some other violent movement about to invade the painting from the outside left. [The fleeing man] raises the possibility of a symmetrical invisible violence moving toward the right, a kind of double of the represented violence.” This is an interesting idea but I see no basis in the painting for thinking it might be so. On the contrary, all implied movement in the composition goes from right to left, and by the time we reach the gesticulating man the sense of unimpeded flight toward the left—beyond the edge of the canvas—could hardly be more palpable. (I will grant that the fleeing

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man’s right hand with its outspread fingers draws and in a sense stops one’s gaze, at least momentarily. But it implies no countermovement to the right.) Coloristically, the Taking of Christ is in the vein of the Contarelli Chapel canvases only more so, extreme chiaroscuro yielding an effect of maximum figural presence against an almost black ground. Almost black: although the scene takes place at night, looked at closely the background shows olive branches and leaves. The cold, bright reflective highlights on the soldiers’ armor suggest that the light there comes from the moon; but neither the moon nor the upraised lantern can account for the illumination falling on the figures of Christ, Judas, and the disciple, and altogether the play of light and shadow has an arbitrariness that is matched only by the oddness, the irrealism, of the relations among the figures. In the first place, to start this time at the painting’s left, the fleeing man bears an intimate relationship to the figure of Christ: not only is most of his body obscured from view by Christ’s, but their respective heads appear almost physically connected, as if the fleeing man’s grew out of Christ’s (first observed by Sergio Benedetti, who identified the Dublin canvas). Obviously we are not to take this literally, but it serves immediate notice that we are confronted in the Taking of Christ with something other than a simple dramatic scene. Christ and Judas make a pair of a different sort, but just in case we are inclined to think of them as in every respect opposed to one another (including formally, frontal view versus profile view), there is, to complicate matters, the length of wine-red cloth or drapery that seems to issue from the fleeing man and to be gripped at its other end by two bare (i.e., ungauntleted) hands that presumably belong to the second of the three soldiers, or possibly to the third, least visible one. (The implication is that the drapery was grabbed hold of by one of the soldiers as the man on the left began to run away.) In any case, the drapery arches above Christ and Judas in a manner that pictorially emphasizes their mutual intimacy by framing them under a kind of canopy. Then there is the doubling, more or less, of the two arms apprehending Christ, Judas’s and the nearest soldier’s, and the doubling or twinning also of the nearest soldier and his bearded colleague. I have commented several times on Caravaggio’s propensity for doubled or twinned or divided or mutually reflecting figures or motifs (in this lecture, the two right hands near the coins on the table in the Calling, the two onlookers at the lower right of the Martyrdom), but the Taking of Christ seems positively to make a point of doubling in spite of whatever confusion it turns out to generate: for example, the armored and gauntleted arm of the nearest soldier cannot help giving at least a fleeting impression of belonging to the second soldier as well, hence of being impossibly long (and snakelike). Finally, Bersani and Dutoit call attention to the suggestive affinity between the profiled heads of Judas and the lantern bearer—“both in profile, staring intently toward Jesus, both ‘lighting up’ the figure of Christ”—as well as to the “even more surprising” similarity between the heads of Christ and the lantern bearer in that both

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are brightly and mysteriously illuminated. To this I would add that there is still another kind of affinity in force between the lantern bearer and the fleeing man at opposite sides of the painting, as if the presence of the first were structurally linked to the clamorous departure, the imminent absence, of the second—indeed, as if, to put this more starkly, there were room in the painting for only one of them. It should be clear—Bersani and Dutoit make the same point—that doubling, mirroring, or otherwise complementary relationships of the sorts we have been noting immensely complicate, and to a degree undermine, the conviction of instantaneousness the painting also invokes; it is hard to be persuaded that we are being shown a single, causally coherent, naturalistically consistent moment in the history of the world when our gaze continually slides from one armored soldier to another, as if they represented two phases of a single movement, or continually leaps from Judas’s profile to that of the peering lantern bearer at the right (and back again), as if they too were bound together in an occult relationship that no merely causal or temporal logic could adequately explain. Put slightly differently, it is as though the Taking of Christ at once represents a particular instant in the biblical narrative and evokes a multiplicity of relationships that redirect attention away from the events in the garden of Gethsemane toward a very different “narrative,” not declarable in any straightforward way, of the painting’s production. Not that the two “narratives” are wholly disparate. On the contrary, it matters greatly for the second “narrative”—in my reading, not Bersani and Dutoit’s—that the painting’s subject is the taking of Christ and that, at the heart of the events it depicts, we find both the violent seizing of Christ and, crucially important, Judas’s kiss. Toward the end of my discussion of the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, I suggested that for Caravaggio the act of painting typically involved an attempt to establish the final self-sufficiency and autonomy of the work on his easel by cutting the work free from himself as its creator, an attempt I described as aiming to make the work self-sufficient and autonomous in that respect also, to launch it into the world (into history) independently of him. I also linked this to what I described as the expression of aversion on the faces of both Judith in Judith and Holofernes and the fleeing Caravaggio in the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, the link being that the extreme violence represented in both paintings is to be understood as visibly repulsing but also at the same time fascinating, even reimmersing, the two painter-surrogates in the contemplation of the murderous act (the motif of reimmersion being in the Judith chiefly carried by the maid). Viewed in that context, the special genius of the Taking of Christ is that it has at its center the most aversive event or entity in all Christian history: Judas’s kiss, a much less violent motif in obvious respects than many we have seen in Caravaggio’s art but one whose consequences were, in all but the ultimate theological sense, far more dreadful than any mere murder or decapitation. The link between Christ and the disciple (if that is who he is) rushing out of the picture to the left may itself be understood in these terms. That is, Christ’s expression, for all its

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restraint, is precisely one of aversion (the resemblance to Judith’s is striking), while the disciple’s flight may be understood as motivated not simply by fear, as in the ostensible, biblical narrative, but by an aversion of an extreme or unrestrained form, as in the second, pictorially allegorical “narrative.” In that sense, both Christ and the fleeing man are, if not quite surrogates for the painter, at any rate personifications of one strain or impulse or “moment”—in the case of the fleeing man, specular with a vengeance—in the pictorial act, as we find the latter thematized not only in this remarkable canvas but throughout Caravaggio’s oeuvre. But probably we go wrong if we try to distinguish too sharply among the different personages in the Taking of Christ with respect to that second “narrative,” if only because the inner logic of the painting stresses the physical cramming together, verging on bodily continuity, of the seven figures (soon to become six) in a spatial arena barely long and deep enough to contain them—a cramming together, a near continuity, I interpret as a further expression, first, of the intensely bodily nature of Caravaggio’s project and, second, of the inseparableness from one another of—the quasi-continuity between—the different strains or impulses or “moments” that his project comprises. For Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s painting is a prime example of the way in which “[a]rt alone initiates the visibility of pure relationality, of being as relationality.” Of the picture under discussion, they write: “[The Taking of Christ] makes visible a certain kind of relationality, one in which only a receptive passivity can give direction to and identify a violent onslaught. Christ is the object of a destructive rush. Even in fleeing from himself [their reading of the relationship between Christ and the fleeing man], he is menaced by a symmetrical onslaught from the left, outside the painting, one that risks crushing him back into himself. The aggression can only be repeated, even where we can’t see it, because this is the configuration of being the painting represents. We are not in historical time, where there is always a possible or at least imaginable escape from what threatens to crush us. Here there is no escape because what is illuminated is space as crushing movement—and nothing else.” I have already said that I see no reason to hold with Bersani and Dutoit that the actions of the fleeing man suggest “a symmetrical onslaught from the left,” and I need hardly add that in my view a great deal more is at stake in the Taking of Christ than an evocation of “space as crushing movement—and nothing else.” More broadly, I believe that there is more to art and in particular to the art of painting than the revelation of “being as relationality,” a suggestive but extremely abstract notion. Differently put, I share with Bersani and Dutoit the view that Caravaggio’s paintings positively invite us to interpret them against their ostensible narrative grain in ways that are bound to strike many readers as going far beyond the bounds of legitimate art-historical interpretation. But not only do I give considerably more weight than they do to the paintings’ manifest narratives; what most sharply sets our approaches apart is my constant, not to say relentless focus on a specific set of issues belonging

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to the enterprise of painting as the latter was pursued in a particular milieu, or pair of milieux, at a particular historical moment—in Bologna and Rome between the early 1580s and 1630, with special emphasis on the 1590s and the first decade of the seventeenth century. In contrast, their approach is resolutely ahistorical, Caravaggio being for them a spectacular instance of a general aesthetic and ontological phenomenon that they seek to elucidate. Of course, the avowedly historical character of my readings in no way guarantees their persuasiveness or, for that matter, their superiority to Bersani and Dutoit’s. It is in any case a bit surprising that they say nothing about one of the most salient features of the Taking of Christ, the gleaming highlights on the soldiers’ armor. As we have seen, reflections, often in highly polished armor, are a recurrent motif in Caravaggio’s work; together with an implied thematics of reflection in the self-portraits, this has led me to propose that a distinction between painting and mirroring, which is also to say a mutual entangling of painting and mirroring, is endlessly at work in his art; and I have cited more than once an essay by Charles Dempsey that characterizes Caravaggio’s naturalist or realist style as in decisive respects mirrorlike. In the Taking of Christ, however, the reflections from the armor are more prominent than is usual; I am tempted to relate this to the fact that the painting’s shallow spatial arena is uncommonly dense, with bodies pressing up against and in some cases seemingly almost merging with one another, my idea being that that density of bodies somehow called forth the conspicuous reflections as an optical counteremphasis. If there is truth in this, it would be an especially vivid instance of the way in which bodily and optical modes of realism are correlated to one another in Caravaggio’s art. There is also, I want to propose, a certain rough affinity between Judas’s kiss and a crucial feature of the act of painting. Whereas in other pictures we have looked at the act of painting is analogized to acts of murder or decapitation, in part a consequence of the intuition that sword and paintbrush are similarly aggressive instruments, here there may be in play a comparable albeit antithetical analogy between Judas’s kiss and the caressing nature of the application of paint to canvas, to adapt a term, “caress,” from Poussin, who would be astonished to see it taken up in this context. Indeed, there is a sense in which the painter of the Taking of Christ, through the mediation of his paintbrush, would have been in far more intimate and sustained contact with Christ’s face than is Judas in the painting. (He would also, I need hardly add, have been in intimate and continuous contact with Judas’s face, a disconcerting idea when framed in those terms.) Finally, there is the lantern bearer with Caravaggio’s features. As Bersani and Dutoit note, his upraised hand “might just as well be extending a brush as a lantern”; their conclusion is that “Caravaggio puts himself within the painting not in order to get closer to his historical subject but rather in order to see himself both illuminating and experiencing congested space.” (They also speak of the lantern bearer as looking with “a physical curiosity . . . about the space of betrayal.”) Again, I attach much less significance to the topic of congested space

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than they do, and I take Caravaggio’s “presence” in the painting to express far more than curiosity, physical or otherwise. Earlier I said that I understood that “presence” to be structurally linked to the departure of the fleeing man. Now I would add that we can think of that link in one of two ways: Caravaggio’s “presence” either caused that departure or itself was caused (i.e., summoned, precipitated) by it. The first way would be to imagine the painter immersed in work on the painting and then expelled from it in a “moment” of specularity that was to all intents and purposes the aim and purpose of that work (the establishing of the painting as a painting, as an artifact to be looked at); this would be consistent with the role Caravaggio gives “himself” in the painting, that of bearing a lantern, thereby at least notionally throwing light on Christ. The second would be to imagine the painter being reimmersed or at least reabsorbed in the painting owing precisely to the fascination of the aversive event, Judas’s kiss, that drove the fleeing man, a surrogate for the artist, out of the painting in the first place. Once again, however, the painting itself provides no basis on which to choose between these alternative readings, and it may be—how could it be otherwise?—that both are in play. But is the fleeing man not also a surrogate for or at least intimately linked with Christ? I said in a previous lecture that Christ and Caravaggio apparently found it difficult to inhabit the same space in person, as it were. As if they represented two rival systems of pictorial meaning that were compatible, more or less, just so long as one or the other remained mostly implicit. (In suggesting this, I am conscious of operating at or near the limit of what can meaningfully be said.) The crucial point, on which I am prepared to insist, is that in the Taking of Christ as in the other pictures we have examined, including Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Bacchus, Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, and David with the Head of Goliath, the “presence” of the artist within the depicted scene is the outcome of forces far more complex and conflictual than a desire for self-representation.2

I am now ready to bring these lectures to a close by briefly discussing two stupendous paintings from the years following the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni (May 28, 1606) and Caravaggio’s flight not just from Rome but, several months later, from papal territory where, had he been taken, he would have been subject to the severest penalty. These paintings are The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in the Co-Cathedral of St. John in Valletta, on the island of Malta, and—in all likelihood his final work—The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula in the collection of the Banca Intesa in Naples.

2. Here is another point of contrast with Koerner’s Dürer, who precisely conflates his own image and that of Christ not only in the 1500 Self-Portrait but in other works as well. See Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture, esp. pp. 63–186.

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In mid-July 1607 Caravaggio, who had been working in Naples, arrived on the island of Malta, where he aspired to be accepted into the prestigious Order of St. John, the so-called Knights of Malta. This is not the place to retell even summarily the story of his brief and all too typical career there. Suffice it to say, first, that—having won the support of the grand master of the order, Alof de Wignacourt—he succeeded in his aim; second, that in lieu of a passagio, the considerable sum of money prospective knights were expected to pay the order, he painted the Beheading for the Oratory of St. John, a building adjacent to the cathedral where sacraments were administered, other religious ceremonies took place, and—this will become pertinent in a moment—criminal trials were held; and, third, that on August 27, 1608, he was arrested for having taken part in a brawl that had occurred nine days earlier and was imprisoned in an “underground cell at the Castel Sant’Angelo, a deep, bell-shaped hole, eleven feet deep, and hewn out of solid rock, from which escape would seem impossible.” On October 6, though, he managed to escape, whether or not with assistance will probably never be known, and on December 1 a public assembly was held in the oratory to officially separate him from the order. As Langdon writes, “A unanimous vote to deprive him of his habit was passed, and Caravaggio, in the words of the Statute, was ‘deprived of his habit, and expelled and thrust forth like a rotten and fetid limb from our Order and Community.’ ” The Malta Beheading (1607–8; fig. 6.14), the largest work in Caravaggio’s oeuvre—almost twelve feet high by more than seventeen wide—bears on the argument of this and the previous lecture in several respects. In the first place, it is still another scene of decapitation, one that like the Judith and Holofernes draws attention to the sheer physical difficulty of the act. But unlike the Judith it explicitly depicts that act as involving distinct stages: the Baptist has already had his neck largely severed by the sword whose gleaming blade lies on the ground to his left, but something still evidently remains to be done as we are shown the muscular executioner grasping the fallen saint by his hair and reaching behind his own back to withdraw from his belt a dagger with which, at the closest possible range, he will complete the job. May we therefore associate the work of the sword with the “moment” of immersion and the work of the dagger—still to reach fruition—with that of specularity? Or alternatively the work of the sword, the principal instrument of severing, with specularity and the work of the dagger with reimmersion in the pictorial task? Both formulations are doubtless too neat, but the thematization of separate stages in the act of decapitation is indeed suggestive, as is the painting’s emphasis on the executioner’s front-back embodiment at this decisive phase of the narrative. (The gleaming sword adds a note of mirroring to the above.) Another notable feature of the Beheading is its provision of observers—surrogates for the viewer?—in the persons of the two (twinlike?) prisoners watching the execution of the saint from the barred window of their cell (fig. 6.15): as if at once confirming the giving over of the painting to

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6.14 Caravaggio, The Beheading of John the Baptist, 1607–8. Oil on canvas, 361 × 520 cm. Cathedral of Saint John, La Valletta, Malta

6.15 Caravaggio, The Beheading of Saint John, detail of prisoners

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6.16 Caravaggio, The Beheading of Saint John, detail of blood and signature

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specularity and qualifying that giving over by their incarceration within the depicted scene (also, perhaps, by the sheer effort of viewing they are called upon to make). The old woman clasping her head in her hands in horror as she nevertheless looks on in fascination would be still another figure for immersion or reimmersion, along lines familiar to us from the Judith and other pictures. Finally, though, what gives the Beheading its special significance for my argument is the fact that the Baptist’s blood flowing from the wound in his neck spells out the artist’s name (fig. 6.16): “f. michel,” which, as Langdon remarks, “almost certainly stands for ‘fra’ (frater or brother) ‘Michelangelo’ (da Caravaggio).” “This signature,” she adds, “at the very centre of a painting before which young Knights received the sacrament, conveyed his pride in being received into the Order, in receiving the passionately desired knighthood.” Langdon is surely correct in stating this. But in view of my claim that decapitation in Caravaggio’s art is inextricably involved in the project of cutting the painting free from his own activity as a painter (from his own life, so to speak), the fact that the blood describes his signature—even before the Baptist’s head is fully severed—amounts to the plainest possible statement of the ultimate impossibility of that project, on which I have also been insisting. Understood in that light, Caravaggio’s subsequent expulsion from the order, “like a rotten and fetid limb,” in front of this very painting reads almost like the realization of a fantasy of severing that could be accomplished by no less radical means. The ropes to the right, which have no clear function in the scene, loom then as the artist-prisoner’s means of escape. I am aware, how could I not be, that these last remarks are likely to strike some readers as outlandish. But paintings like the ones we have been considering defy the ability of more conventional discourses even to begin to do them imaginative justice. In any case, I would like to think that my acknowledging the extremity of my own account stops short of restoring the Beheading to its pre-interpreted state.

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6.17 Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610. Oil on canvas, 143 × 180 cm. Palazzo Zevallos, Collection of Banca Intesa, Naples

From Malta Caravaggio fled to Sicily, where he lived briefly in Syracuse and then Messina. In the late summer of 1609 he returned to Naples, where in October of that year he barely survived a vicious attack in which his face was so badly slashed that he was afterward described as unrecognizable. Nevertheless, between his arrival back in Naples and his departure for Rome the following July, he produced a considerable body of work, including the Madrid and London Salomes and a lost Resurrection of Christ—some would say the David with the Head of Goliath as well—all the while hoping, perhaps with better reason than ever before, of being granted a papal pardon and being allowed to return to Rome. Throughout this period, too, commissions continued to arrive, among them one from the Genoese Marcantonio Doria, Prince of Angri and Duke of Eboli, for a painting of Saint Ursula. The result of the commission is a painting widely considered to be Caravaggio’s last, a work of overwhelming power and unequaled intellectual and emotional

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density—also one that makes a fascinating pair with the Taking of Christ—The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610; fig. 6.17). According to The Golden Legend, the saint, following the martyrdom of her companions, was killed by the king of the Huns when she refused to marry him. What makes Caravaggio’s treatment of the story altogether unusual is that the execution by bow and arrow takes place at point-blank range. (The text reads that the king, “seeing that she despised him, transfixed her with an arrow and so consummated her martyrdom.”) The painting appears to capture the instant immediately following the release of the arrow, which has just pierced the saint’s body. The bowstring, one feels, has not ceased vibrating, as Ursula looks down at her mortal injury in grave surprise. (It is all but impossible to put a name to the expression of any of the figures in the painting; by now Caravaggio has largely passed beyond the range of recognizable modes of human feeling.) Three other persons crowd the right-hand half of the composition: a soldier in armor at the right whose profile is turned away from the viewer and besides is partly cut off by his helmet; a man in a hat who stands partly between the king of the Huns and Ursula, whose left hand grips the staff of a standard, and whose open right hand—recovered by a recent cleaning—seeks in a spontaneous but futile gesture to intervene between the king of the Huns and his victim (we saw a version of that gesture much earlier, in the Death of the Virgin); and, finally, all but embracing Ursula from behind and craning his head to peer past her as if to witness the very instant of the release of the arrow, a third man whom we recognize at once as still another self-portrait (fig. 6.18). The resemblance to the similarly placed lantern holder in the Taking of Christ is unmistakable, as is the brutalization of the model that has taken place in the intervening eight years. I think of the excruciatingly short distance between the king—I shall call him the executioner—and Ursula as painting distance, by which I mean to evoke both the making and viewing of the picture; and I see the composition as a whole as exploring, seeking to give pictorial expression to, the vertiginous, continually ramifying, in the end unstoppable and unstabilizable flow and counterflow, projection and reflection, of violent affect or feeling within the act of painting as I have evoked the latter in these lectures (the flow and counterflow, projection and reflection, of identification and counteridentification, of mimesis and countermimesis, with no end in sight). Put just a bit differently, in the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula the distinction between “moments” of immersion and specularity is at once multiplied and dissolved. If we take the executioner as a stand-in for the painter—as we are encouraged to do not only by his being the initiator of the depicted action but also by the similarity between his left hand gripping the bow and the “proffering” gestures of analogous figures in the Uffizi Bacchus, the Borghese David with Head of Goliath, and the London Salome— and Ursula as a figure, a synecdoche, for the painting, the portrayal of Caravaggio “himself” behind Ursula presents him as straining to witness the initiatory pictorial act, though of course he is also seeing the unreadable but plainly distressed mirroring

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6.18 Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, detail of man behind Ursula (self-portrait)

6.19 Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, detail of executioner

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response of the open-mouthed executioner-painter—that is, his own response—to the consequences of that act: the arrow penetrating Ursula’s body, and by metonymy his as well, her absorbed(?) or immersed(?) response to that penetration, and so on. Presumably he cannot quite see the hatted man’s sudden protective gesture, which at first is possible to overlook but which, as one stands before the painting, comes to seem more and more significant, in part because it imparts a sense of instantaneousness to the composition as a whole, in part because it can also be taken as directed toward the viewer. This would make it an expression not just of a futile impulse to forestall the execution but also—distancing the viewer—of the “moment” of specularity. Finally, as a closer look at the executioner makes clear (fig. 6.19), the play of reflected light on his armored breastplate posits reflection, mirroring, at the very origin of the initiatory act, just as the embossed lion’s head on that breastplate symbolizes the sun, hence light itself, the condition of possibility for vision, in the absence of which the enterprise of painting would not be conceivable. At the same time, the scene is framed by, all the actors are embedded in, a tarlike blackness that seems the negation not just of light but also of sight (ordinary chiaroscuro too has been left far behind), as though for Caravaggio at this climactic moment in his career the ground of painting, of what painting had become in his hands, were not only prior to vision, as in a sense is true of immersion, but fundamentally inimical to it.

In mid-July 1610 Caravaggio left Naples by sea for Rome, where he apparently hoped a pardon would be waiting for him. What then happened remains obscure,

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and foul play of one sort or another cannot be ruled out. According to Langdon, making the best of fragmentary evidence, the felucca in which he was traveling touched down at Palo, a tiny port near Civitavecchia, where he was put into prison, perhaps by mistake. By the time he was released the felucca was gone along with his possessions, the most important of which were paintings he hoped would smooth his welcome in Rome, and Caravaggio set off after it. It was midsummer, the stretch of shore he had to traverse would have been infested with mosquitoes, and he contracted a fever from which he died, probably in the infirmary in the town of Porto Ercole. He was thirty-nine. Fortunately, in late May 1610 The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was shipped from Naples to Marcantonio Doria in Genoa; it arrived in good condition on June 18. No final work, if that is indeed what it is, has ever seemed more emphatically to mark the farthest limit of an oeuvre, and of a life.

A brief postscript. In Edouard Manet’s Execution of Maximilian of 1868–69 in Mannheim (fig. 6.20), as in Caravaggio’s Saint Ursula, violent death is dealt to a victim—one of Maximilian’s generals (his own turn will come in a moment)—at disturbingly point-blank range. And although this obviously is not the place to summarize my thoughts on the Maximilian, I can at least say that in my book Manet’s Modernism I end up characterizing the Mannheim canvas as “a field of multiple, labile, and conflictual identifications and counter-identifications, with Manet himself—Manet as painter-beholder—at once everywhere and nowhere.” Those words alone suggest both the profound affinity and some of the differences to be apprehended between the two paintings. I referred to identification and counteridentification a page or so back in connection with the Saint Ursula, but it cannot be said of Caravaggio that he is at once everywhere and nowhere in that picture; he is plainly there, virtually embracing the martyred saint from behind, striving to observe not just the shooting of the arrow into her body but also the complex network of responses that I have interpreted as dramatizing—one might say anatomizing—the internal structure of the pictorial act. And, of course, the respective emotional registers of the two works could not be more opposite: Caravaggio’s tragic passion in the one case and Manet’s notorious detachment and “indifference” in the other. Despite these differences, however, the thematic, structural, and ontological affiliation between the Saint Ursula and the Maximilian, unique masterpieces by absolutely decisive figures in the history of European painting, is unmistakable.

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6.20 Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1868–69. Oil on canvas, 252 × 302 cm. Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim, inv. M281

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Detail from figure 2.15

Conclusion My sense is that there is no need to go over point by point the argument of these lectures. Or even to offer a brief summary of the relations I have identified between the polarities immersion-specularity, mirroring-painting, and absorption-address and indeed between all of these and a problematic of severing or decapitation keyed to the making autonomous of the emerging gallery picture in a historical context, mainly Rome in the 1590s and early 1600s, in which the decisive works of the recent past in that part of the world—the canonical achievements of Michelangelo and Raphael and their successors—were for the most part site-specific works in fresco. (Venice, of course, was another story. And in lecture 5 we saw how the Carracci’s Bolognese fresco projects of the 1580s and 1590s themselves brilliantly exploit compositional ellipsis in ways that in effect turn many of their scenes into autonomous gallery pictures.) Another crucial set of relationships turns on the primacy of self-portraiture for a new, revolutionary realism—a new art of the vero, Dempsey would say—both the self-portraiture and the realism or naturalism being conceivable only in terms both of the gallery picture as such and of the workplace in which it came into being—the painter’s studio. Probably the issues are too complex and unsystematic in their working out to lend themselves readily to a retrospective summing up. Instead, I want to bring this book to a close by making five brief sets of observations that arc off in different directions from what has gone before, the first four of which are keyed to specific paintings by Caravaggio and other seventeenth-century painters and the fifth, it may seem anachronistically, to two closely linked texts by later writers. 1. In the first half of lecture 4 I said something about the relationship I saw between Caravaggio’s invention of absorption and the problematic of skepticism that Stanley Cavell has discovered in Shakespearean tragedy. Briefly, I suggested that the mobilization of often minimally demonstrative but, seen a certain way, maximally expressive absorptive motifs in Caravaggio’s religious paintings of the early 1600s can be understood as in dialogue with the traditional question of our knowledge of other minds, which in this context specifically means with Cavell’s understanding of Shakespearean tragedy as largely a response to skepticism—or as he prefers to put it, as “an interpretation of what skepticism is an interpretation of,” namely

C.1 Caravaggio, The Toothpuller, ca. 1608–9. Oil on canvas, 139.5 × 194.5 cm. Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence

our separateness from one another, our incapacity for perfect communication (not to say communion), in short our human finitude, all made seemingly more dire by the recognition circa 1600 of living in—inhabiting—a “groundless world.” In this connection, an additional painting makes fascinating viewing: The Toothpuller (ca. 1608–9; fig. C.1) in the Palazzo Pitti, a work given to Caravaggio in early inventories, contested by various scholars, but championed as genuine by others such as Mina Gregori and Keith Christiansen (the latter of whom has called attention to its underlying structure of guiding compositional marks, which he takes to be a sign of Caravaggio’s practice). From my point of view, the question of genuineness, as in the case of the Narcissus, is almost beside the point: both canvases belong to Caravaggio’s art in an extended sense in that they are inconceivable apart from his example, even as they represent two complementary extremes—the Narcissus a condition of perceptual and emotional solipsism, the Toothpuller an exactly opposite condition of publicity and spectacle—with respect to the larger structure of his achievement. That is, in the Toothpuller a simple action, the extraction of a tooth, gives the impression of having literally called forth a passel of observers: three men and a small boy at the

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left, crowding forward so as not to miss anything, and to the right an old woman (of a type familiar from the Milan Supper at Emmaus and the Cleveland Crucifixion of Saint Andrew) as well as, in my reading the key figure in the painting, a seated man, absorbed in contemplation of the scene taking place before his eyes, leaning forward with his left hand supporting his cheek and his left arm and shoulder bare as if he were wearing a toga, like some ancient philosopher. (To my eye, his interest in the scene is markedly different from that of the other witnesses—not necessarily deeper or more immersive but more “intellectual,” let us say.) Much of the discussion of the Toothpuller has turned on the question of whether Caravaggio at this relatively late moment in his career is plausibly to be imagined painting a plebeian genre subject, but the question takes on a far more interesting inflection when it is recognized that at the heart of Caravaggio’s treatment of that subject is the depiction of pain, or rather the epistemological issue—basic to what has been called “Cartesian” skepticism—of the relation of the viewers to the “inner” state of the man whose tooth ostensibly is being extracted. As James Conant frames that issue: “The person before me is acting for all the world as if he were in pain, but how can I know that he is in pain. Is he pretending? Or is he really in pain? . . . The Cartesian problematic here is focused on the problem of how to underwrite the testimony of the human body. This version of the Cartesian skeptic asks: how can I penetrate the screen of the other’s body and attain a view of what is really happening inside the other himself?” Put slightly differently, it is as if the concentrated attention of the five ordinary observers, along with the reflective scrutiny of the “philosopher,” were required in order to ascertain definitively that the “patient” really is in pain; or, alternatively, as if even under such scrutiny and in the face of such reflection the issue remains in doubt, either on sheerly skeptical grounds (no quantity of sustained observation or depth of thought can resolve the question) or because toothpullers were notorious charlatans (so, for example, an actual situation of this sort might well have included one or more pickpockets taking advantage of the observers’ oubli de soi). Needless to say, the two grounds are not mutually exclusive. In the latter regard, especially, the toothpuller’s beholder-addressing, almost confiding-seeming look directly out of the painting takes on a special edge—or does it? Might it not equally well be a sign of his absorption in a difficult operation, impersonally taking us in as incidental beholders of his effort? Plainly we are on uncertain ground here. But the juxtaposition of the act of toothpulling (if that is what is really going on; does the trickle of blood from the patient’s mouth resolve the question or not?) and the proliferation of observers (one can imagine more of them turning up) in a work by the painter who most invites comparison, albeit of a dialectical sort, with Shakespeare, is, in the present context, immensely suggestive. Here, for purposes of comparison, are two additional works: Annibale’s Saint Sebastian (ca. 1583; fig. C.2), as harrowing a depiction of a human being in terrible pain as any with which I am familiar (no room for skepticism either within or in

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C.2 Annibale Carracci, Saint Sebastian, ca. 1583. Oil on canvas, 189 × 107 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

C.3 Gerritt van Honthorst, The Toothpuller, 1622. Oil on canvas, 147 × 219 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

front of this canvas, in other words)—the larger, historical point being that for Annibale too the depiction of pain was a pictorial issue; and Gerrit van Honthorst’s The Toothpuller (1622; fig. C.3), a work undoubtedly influenced by the Pitti canvas but without the least shred of epistemological interest. 2. One of my main claims throughout these lectures has concerned the foundational role played by the self-portrait in Caravaggio’s enterprise, as well as by the polarities first developed in relation to his Boy Bitten by a Lizard and related canvases of the second half of the 1590s. Traditionally—this has already emerged—there has been no starker contrast as regards art in Rome in the first thirty years or so of the seventeenth century than between Caravaggio and the French painter Nicolas Poussin. So it is a matter of considerable interest that as recently as 2004 a young art historian, Jonathan Unglaub, revealed the presence of what seems to be a partial selfportrait reflected in the shining armor of a kneeling warrior in one of Poussin’s most admired canvases, Tancred and Erminia (ca. 1630–31; fig. C.4) in Saint Petersburg. As Unglaub explains, the canvas depicts a scene from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, a poem that has already figured in this book. Tancred, a Christian knight and one of the heroes of the poem, has just killed the Saracen champion Agrante in single combat but has suffered grievous wounds doing so. Erminia, a Saracen women who has long been in love with Tancred, happens on the scene in the company of Tancred’s page, Vafrino. At first she thinks Tancred dead but her tears waken him and Vafrino half-raises him from the ground. In Unglaub’s words, “Erminia, expert in the medicinal arts, but lacking supplies, severs her tresses to bind her beloved’s wounds. While Tasso does not specify how Erminia accomplishes this, Poussin has her wield Tancred’s sword.”

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C.4 Nicolas Poussin, Tancred and Erminia, ca. 1630–31. Oil on canvas, 98 × 147 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

For Unglaub, the painting in St. Petersburg (the earlier of two versions of the subject) “ranks as [Poussin’s] most dazzling exercise in the rendering of armorial reflections,” an exercise that reaches its apogee in the treatment of Vafrino’s cuirass, especially the portion of it below his right arm. “At first glance,” Unglaub writes, the flank of Vafrino’s cuirass appears to reflect the ocher hue of his tunic’s sleeve. On closer inspection, however, the grays, browns, and yellows of the painted surface coalesce into an altogether unexpected apparition. Counting up from the waist, at the lower edge of the third and fourth segments of the cuirass, a pair of eyes emerges. With glimmering highlights in the pupils, the gaze is intent, almost hypnotic. Around this, the rest of a face takes shape [fig. C.5]. Closer to the sleeve, a nostril appears in the third segment, its upper edge delineating the slope of the nose seen in three-quarter view. As the yellow tones fill out the flesh of the face, amorphous brown passages above and below become a dense head of hair, a beard, and a mustache. A concentration of pigment in the first segment culminating in a diagonal stroke of a lighter flesh tone may represent an ear, somewhat distorted by the convex surface of the armor, or, more plausibly, the knuckles of a fist pressed against the right cheek, reversing the famous gesture in Albrecht Dürer’s Melancolia I.

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C.5 Nicolas Poussin, Tancred and Erminia, detail of face reflected in armor

Unglaub does his best to show that the reflected face is in fact Poussin’s (the evidence is inconclusive, but there is no reason to doubt that he is right) and goes on to compare Tancred and Erminia’s partial self-portrait with the role played by mirrored images of the artist in works by Van Eyck, Savoldo (the so-called Gaston de Foix discussed in lecture 1), and, above all, Caravaggio, with special attention to the Medusa, which he believes “reflects Caravaggio’s features as he was painting, morphed into an expression of spontaneous and enduring horror, whose piercing gaze keeps the beholder spellbound.” I do not think this quite works as a reading of the Medusa (see my account of that painting in lecture 4), but the important point is that Unglaub fully understands that the comparison with Caravaggio is bound to be crucial. Basing himself on my 1997 essay, “Thoughts on Caravaggio,” which anticipates some of the arguments in these lectures, he recognizes that the partial nature of the reflected image in Tancred and Erminia “precludes the kind of overall mirroring of the artist and/or studio production that can at least be theorized in Caravaggio’s works.” But he suggests nevertheless that “the single clenched hand, pressed against the right cheek of [Poussin’s] reflected face, unmistakably registers the presence of the artist creating the work. The gesture of melancholy signifies the artistic temperament, the contemplative, if not the physical, act that brought the painting into being.” All this is to the point, and yet one wants in the end to insist on the importance of the difference between the reflected self-portrait in Tancred and Erminia and any self-portrait, explicit or disguised, in Caravaggio’s oeuvre. Perhaps the place to begin is with the observation that at first glance Poussin’s canvas could almost strike one as a scene of imminent beheading (the blow to be delivered backhanded), the great Caravaggian trope for the cutting out, the severing from its surroundings, of the autonomous gallery picture. But then one becomes aware that the sword is being held in the wrong position for that to be the case (the sharp edge of the blade has been turned away from the fallen hero), and that the scene as a whole is one of healing as Erminia wields the sword to cut off her own hair with which she will proceed to bind up Tancred’s wounds, as Unglaub also emphasizes. I read this as intimating that

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by 1630–31 the autonomy of the gallery picture in Rome had been made relatively secure, a point already touched on in these lectures (e.g., in lecture 5 in connection with an essay by Marc Fumaroli). Plus there is the implicit link between Erminia’s hair and the hair with which Poussin’s brushes would have been tipped (something similar happens years later in the art of Courbet), as if one aspect of the metaphoric work that the painting accomplishes is to shift the meaning of the sword away from Caravaggian violence toward Poussinian delectation, to put the contrast somewhat crudely (cf. Poussin’s use of the notion of “caresses” in his letters to Chantelou alluded to in lecture 6). The sword itself, as Unglaub notes, remains marvelously reflective, which further suggests that another aspect of what I have called the painting’s metaphoric work is to recast reflection itself in more “intellectual” terms. (By the way, Annibale was just as important a precedent for Poussin’s interest in reflection as was Caravaggio.) It is in this context that I interpret the partial self-portrait in Vafrino’s armor as evoking not the presence of the artist creating the work—either immersed in painting it or suddenly confronted by the resulting specular image-artifact, or even, as Unglaub suggests, thinking about it beforehand—but rather a hitherto unthematized “moment,” brushes and palette having been laid down (as is implied by the fact that the reflected artist supports his cheek with one hand), of protracted contemplation of or, say, reflection upon the finished work (this final qualification seems called for by what I take to be the obliqueness of the reflected artist’s gaze, which appears more inward than outward directed). As if Poussin’s genius, singularly sensitive to Caravaggio’s accomplishment, enabled him to discover and, so to speak, isolate a third “moment” subsequent to the other two, though perhaps also in a certain sense “between” them. And what now needs to be stressed is that this “moment” too—like the ones I have associated with Caravaggio—belongs to the world of the painter’s studio: that is, I understand Poussin’s partial self-portrait in Tancred and Erminia as evoking the artist reflecting on the painting as it rested on his easel— finished, let us say, but still subject to minute adjustment, if such were felt by him to be called for—rather than as he might on some future occasion encounter it on the wall of the (to us unknown) private collection where it was presently to hang. If Poussin in the reflection appears somewhat melancholic, as Unglaub suggests, it might be at the thought that he would soon have to part with this extraordinarily beautiful creation of his mind and hand. Apropos of the theme of beheading, it is worth glancing at Poussin’s radical reworking of the David-Goliath story, The Triumph of David (early 1630s; fig. C.6) in the Dulwich Picture Gallery. What is immediately obvious is the spatial and emotional distancing of the entire scene—one could hardly suggest in this case that decapitation stands for the cutting out of the picture itself relative to its surroundings—though a certain Carracci-like severing is at once alluded to and marginalized by the elision of fully half the figure of the woman in a blue robe by the leftmost pillar. The monstrous size of the giant’s head is also unusual, as is the fact that his forehead still bears the

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C.6 Nicolas Poussin, The Triumph of David, early 1630s. Oil on canvas, 117 × 146 cm. By Permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery

fatal stone—as if to stress the dramatic combat between the two unequally matched champions rather than the separation of the dead Philistine’s head from its trunk, which is to say narration rather than ontology. (No sword in view, either, with which that separation would have been achieved.) Is it possible, though, that there is something just the least bit “Caravaggesque” in the way in which the two groups of women in the left and center foreground have been depicted from behind? Note, however, the architectural fragment at the lower left, just below the group of three women: whatever its symbolic meaning, what strikes me is precisely that it nails down the lower left corner of the canvas, not the lower right, thereby further dissociating the Triumph from its painter-viewer (i.e., from his brush-wielding right hand). 3. At a point when this book was almost finished, I encountered at the WallrafRichartz-Museum in Cologne an astonishing picture that I at once felt demanded consideration in the light of the arguments I had been developing. The picture is Peter Paul Rubens’s Juno and Argus (1611; fig. C.7), a mythological work based on a climactic event in the story of Jove’s rape of the beautiful Io, daughter of the river god Inarchus. Briefly, Juno, Jove’s wife, noticed the darkening of the earth and realized that her faithless husband was up to one of his characteristic dalliances;

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C.7 Peter Paul Rubens, Juno and Argus, 1611. Oil on canvas, 249 × 296 cm. WallrafRichartz Museum, Cologne, inv. 1040

she descended from Olympus, but Jove quickly changed Io into a white heifer so as not to be caught in his infidelity. Juno then asked for the heifer as a gift, and Jove had no choice but to comply; still suspicious, Juno assigned Argus, a giant with a hundred eyes, to guard her new acquisition night and day; Io suffered greatly in her transfigured form; and Jove, feeling sorry for her, dispatched his son Mercury to kill Argus, which he eventually did by decapitation. Juno, furious, set a stinging fly to torment Io and drive her across the face of the earth. And she also removed each of Argus’s hundred eyes and placed them as ornaments on the tail of her favorite bird, the peacock, where, as Bulfinch says, “they remain to this day.” In Rubens’s canvas, the decapitated, all but naked body of Argus sprawls obscenely in the right foreground. Beyond him, Juno and a female companion pluck the eyes from Argus’s (oddly shrunken-seeming) severed head. To the left are two peacocks, one whose tail trails down toward the lower left corner of the canvas and a second slightly further back who stands facing the viewer with its tail spectacularly erect and spread. Still further to the left, two putti adjust or perhaps merely touch the peacocks’ feathers. Coloristically, the painting is remarkable for the brilliant red of Juno’s gown as well as for the rainbow that complements the iridescence of the peacocks’ tails.

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What struck me in Cologne, however, was not just the highly charged motif of decapitation (the two female figures with Argus’s head recall Judith and her maid with the head of Holofernes), but also—equally important—the juxtaposition of Juno and her companion’s evident absorption in the plucking out of Argus’s eyes with the almost shockingly hyperbolic address to the viewer implied by the peacocks’ tails with their many staring eyes, especially the spread-out tail of the second bird. (A pressure toward the viewer is also conveyed by the warm, advancing red of Juno’s gown and especially by the powerful, sculpturally “dense” figure of Argus in the extreme right foreground of the painting, phenomenologically a crucial locus, as we have seen.) In other words, Rubens’s astonishing canvas belongs to the same network of relationships keyed to decapitation, absorption, address, and figural “presence”—also painting, via the thematization of color—as the works by Caravaggio, the Carracci, and some of the chief Caravaggisti examined in these lectures. Indeed, there is a sense in which it brings aspects of that network to a new pitch of explicitness by way of a radicalization of address that, although not actually Manet-like, has in it more than a hint of what, in connection with Manet, I have called “facingness.” All this is to say nothing of the larger, strictly art-historical question of Rubens’s admiration for Caravaggio, a topic touched on fruitfully in a short article by Robert W. Berger in which it is shown that the group of kneeling and gesturing courtiers in the right foreground of the climactic painting in Rubens’s Marie de Medici cycle, the Apotheosis of Henri IV and the Proclamation of the Regency (1622–23; fig. C.8), was adapted from the people reaching toward rosaries held by Saint Dominic in Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Rosary (ca. 1602–3; fig. C.9), today in Vienna but as of the first half of the 1620s in Antwerp, thanks in part to Rubens himself. (The courtiers, Berger explains, are “appealing to the Queen to accept the reins of government.”) But Berger leaves unmentioned the Caravaggian implications of another figure in Rubens’s canvas, that of Minerva (the Greek Athena) standing to the left (our right) of Marie de Medici and bearing a gleaming mirror-shield at the center which one finds . . . the head of Medusa. The shield faces directly out of the painting and is in the closest possible proximity to the rightmost courtier, leaving no doubt as to the artist’s willingness, to say the least, to declare his sources. Which is to say that in the Apotheosis too one finds the juxtaposition of motifs of absorption—the courtiers, gesturing toward Marie de Medici—and address—the mirror-shield and Medusa head, in all their gleaming apotropaic splendor—in this case, unlike the first, more or less explicitly under the sign of Caravaggio. The crucial feature of Medusa’s head, of course, is its many snakes, with which I associate the proliferation of (plucked out and then reset) eyes in the Juno and Argus—as if there were something positively threatening, not simply beautiful, in the erect, multiply gazing tail of the second peacock, something related to decapitation as well as to the intimation of further violence perpetrated on the rocklike body of Argus in the vicinity of his groin. (The unpleasantly shrunken severed head is surely pertinent here. I am deliberately

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C.8 Peter Paul Rubens, Apotheosis of Henri IV and the Proclamation of the Regency, 1622–23. Oil on canvas, 394 × 727 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

C.9 Caravaggio, Madonna of the Rosary, ca. 1602–3. Oil on canvas, 364 × 249.5 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

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holding back from mobilizing Freud on castration in this context, but he need not be cited by name in order for his reflections on the topic to be in play. The question is whether Rubens’s paintings go in that direction on their own; my intuition is that they do.) Rubens is also the author of a famous Head of Medusa, a work that needs no commentary from me, but another painting by him on a decapitation-related subject bears interestingly on the concerns of this book: the Judith with the Head of Holofernes (ca. 1616–17; fig. C.10) in the Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig. Simply put, it is a powerfully Caravaggesque canvas, one that shows the keenest awareness not only of Caravaggio’s epochal achievement but also of the work of certain immediate followers—in particular, of Honthorst’s night pictures with internal sources of light such as the candle held by Judith’s maid, Abra. What I want to stress, however, is, first, the boldness of the protagonist’s address to the viewer, so foreign to Caravaggio’s picture in the Barberini; second, the relatively anodyne response of Abra as she gazes at Holofernes’ severed head, a further point of difference from Caravaggio; and, third, the ultimate point of the comparison, the tremendous “masculine” musculature of Rubens’s Judith, which together with her confrontational gaze and provocative, almost challenging expression I take to express his awareness of the sense in which (as I suggest in lecture 5) Caravaggio’s Judith may be seen as a surrogate for the painter—the import of the Braunschweig picture in this regard being a kind of deliberate personalizing of the theme of surrogacy, with the all-powerful heroine standing in for the immensely ambitious artist. Even her mostly naked breasts convey an impression of invincible strength, in contrast with the covered but excited nipples of her more ambivalently (also, it seems fair to say, more complexly) imagined predecessor. To go one step further, we can say that theme of decapitation in Rubens loses all reference to the autonomous gallery picture as such; rather the gallery picture is available to him from the outset of his career as one more arena in which to demonstrate to himself and others his invincible superiority. 4. Two other paintings of severed heads are worth looking at briefly. By now it will have become clear that scenes of decapitation and, in particular, of the presentation of severed heads, typically in pictures featuring David, Salome, and Judith of Bethulia, function throughout the period as thematizations or indeed allegories of the establishing of the gallery picture as such. What makes the Dutch painter Hendrick Ter Bruggen’s David Saluted by the Israelite Women (1623; fig. C.11) distinctive among these is the fact that it is essentially a double self-portrait of the artist as both the victorious David and the decapitated Goliath. The youthful victor enters the painting from the right with the giant’s head held by a tuft of hair in his left hand and his sword in his right resting on his right shoulder. The remainder of the canvas (about two-thirds) is taken up by the group of women saluting him with song, the most prominent among whom has been depicted from the rear and holding a sheet

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C.10 Peter Paul Rubens, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, ca. 1616–17. Oil on canvas, 120 × 111 cm. Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig, Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen

of music in her raised right hand. The special interest of Ter Bruggen’s canvas for me, of course, is that it spells out in almost didactic fashion the notion of the easel picture having had to be severed by the artist who made it from the artist who made it, with the further proviso that in the present case this seems to have called forth no conflictual feelings whatsoever; in the terminology of what I have been calling mimesis, it seems to have sidestepped all questions of immersive identification and counteridentification of the sort that we have tracked closely in various canvases by Caravaggio, which is one reason among many why Ter Bruggen is so much less compelling a painter. In the same nonconflictual spirit, the singing women, in their

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C.11 Hendrick Ter Bruggen, David Saluted by the Israelite Women, 1623. Oil on canvas, 81.8 × 105.4 cm. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation

separateness as a group and also by virtue of the fact that the foremost woman has her back to us, may be seen as thematizing the place and indeed the response of the painting’s viewer, the sheet of music in her right hand more or less facing the latter being another element conducing to the same effect. The second work I want to consider, the Florentine artist Carlo Dolci’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (ca. 1665–70; fig. C.12) in the Royal Collection, London, is more complex artistically and intellectually. This is owing to its combination of an unprecedented sense of withholding, as if the Baptist’s head on a beautifully wrought charger is not so much presented to the viewer as effectively removed from the potential sphere of any implied transaction with someone looking on, with the extraordinary, not to say excessive refinement of the treatment of Salome herself, by which I refer not simply to her sumptuous costume and jewelry, delicate hands, exquisite complexion, and elegant hairdo with its sensuous dangling curl casting a shadow on her cheek, but also to her oddly affecting if ultimately ineffable expression of something like regret, or second thoughts, or “melancholy distraction” (to quote a recent catalog entry) as she turns her head away from her grisly burden and looks

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off canvas toward her left—not that any of these formulations quite captures the delicacy, the inner valence, of her state of mind. Put slightly differently, the dominant impression is of a ravishing but somehow deflected sensuousness and an extreme but somehow attenuated emotionality, both conveyed by a fine-grained perfection of technique that is if anything almost too exquisite. Look, for example, at the tiny touches of bright crimson paint miming drips of blood on the white cloth napkin that masks the Baptist’s severed neck from view, at once a descriptive and a decorative tour de force without the like in the work of any other artist I can think of. In fact, Dolci was remarkable not only for his precocity as a painter and the sincerity of his religious views but also for an artistic perfectionism that famously limited his production; as his biographer Filippo Baldinucci writes, “He would take weeks over a single foot.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the long stay in Florence of the immensely productive and grandly superficial painter Luca Giordano precipitated a personal crisis in the form of an acute melancholy from which Dolci is said eventually to have died. “I like everything [you do], oh Carlo,” Giordano is supposed to have said to him, “but if you continue working as you do, I say, if you take so long to finish your works, I think [the day] is very far off when you will put together the one hundred and fifty thousand scudi that my brush has procured for me, and I believe you will certainly die of hunger.” Something of that melancholic mood is perhaps visible in Dolci’s “double” Self-Portrait in the Uffizi (fig. 1.34) discussed in lectures 1 and 2, specifically in the figure of the artist looking directly out of the picture while holding in his right hand a colored drawing (or painting on paper) of himself in the act of painting. Earlier I suggested that the Self-Portrait can be read as portraying both the immersive and the specular “moments” in the dynamic by which it came into being; I now want to propose that Dolci’s perfectionism—or rather his difficulty in finishing, in giving his works up to the market, which is to say to spectatordom—was at bottom nothing other than a profound reluctance to leave the realm of the immersive, which would also explain both the extreme refinement of his technique—prolonging immersion could only be accomplished by virtue of such a practice—and his work’s distinctive high-pitched, at times (many have felt) even saccharine-seeming emotionality—as if within the immersive register an intense reciprocal flow of feeling between artist and canvas could go on indefinitely, leading, as in the Salome, to an ever more febrile and refined play of descriptive and expressive nuance. In contrast Giordano, nicknamed “fa presto” on account of his speed of execution, may be taken as personifying the specular “moment” divorced from all immersiveness.1

1. One more painter whose art was formed in the wake of Caravaggio, the Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera, deserves mention in this general connection. At a late moment in the final preparation of this book, I received a seminar paper from Hannah Friedman, a graduate student in the history of art at Johns Hopkins University, entitled “Separation and Selfhood in Jusepe de Ribera’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew.” The painting in question is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., but as Ms. Friedman

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C.12 Carlo Dolci, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, ca. 1665–70. Oil on canvas, 126 × 102 cm. The Royal Collection

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5. On October 22, 1960, in Darmstadt, Paul Celan—arguably the most profound poet in any language since the Second World War—gave an address entitled “The Meridian” on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize for his achievement to date. The address proceeds by way of frequent quotations from and allusions to Büchner’s writings, prominent among which is the unfinished story Lenz. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz was a poet and playwright who for a time was close to Goethe, who suffered from mental imbalance, and who eventually was found dead in Moscow in 1792. In Büchner’s story, based on historical fact, Lenz travels by foot through the wintry Vosges to visit the clergyman Johann Friedrich Oberlin. (The year is 1778.) In Oberlin’s home Lenz finds temporary peace; one evening he begins to express his views on art. Celan writes: Lenz, that is, Büchner, has (“oh, art”) only contemptuous words for “idealism” and its “wooden puppets.” He contrasts it with what is natural for the creature and follows up with his unforgettable lines about the “life of the least of beings,” the “tremors and hints,” the “subtle, hardly noticeable play of expressions on his face.” And he illustrates this view of art with a scene he has witnessed: As I was walking in the valley yesterday, I saw two girls sitting on a rock. One was putting up her hair, and the other helped. The golden hair hanging down, and a pale, serious face, so very young, and the black dress, and the other girl so careful and attentive. Even the finest, most inward [innigsten] paintings of the old German masters can hardly give you an idea of the scene. Sometimes one would like to be a Medusa’s head to turn such a group to stone and gather the people around it. Please note, ladies and gentlemen: “One would like to be a Medusa’s head” to . . . seize the natural as the natural by means of art! One would like to, by the way, not: I would. This means going beyond what is human, stepping into a realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny—the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them . . . oh, art, too, seem to be at home.

remarks, the flaying of Bartholomew (also that of Marsyas) is a subject that Ribera turned to continually throughout his career. In her paper she also stresses the extraordinary manner in which, in the National Gallery work and elsewhere, Ribera identifies the body of the victim being flayed with that of the painting, so that (in her words) “the flaying contemplated in the [National Gallery] painting [and depicted in progress in other canvases] is not only of the picture itself, but by its own hand, so to speak.” To this I would add that Ribera’s fascination with flaying and his determination to render it in the most physically immediate terms imaginable amounts to a radicalization of what I have been calling the cutting out of the gallery picture from its surroundings—in this case, it almost seems, from its very self. (The near-physical identification of painter and painting plays a role in this as well.) For relevant illustrations and catalog entries, see Ribera (1591–1652), ed. Alfronso E. Pérez Sanchez and Nicola Spinosa, exh. cat. (Madrid, 1992). My thanks to Hannah Friedman for permission to quote from her paper.

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It is beyond my powers to propose a reading of “The Meridian” in all its tortuous complexity. But the quotation from Lenz together with Celan’s commentary has too much the character of “moments” in Caravaggio for me not to feel impelled to cite them in this context. The scene of the two girls is plainly absorptive if not immersive; the reference to the “most inward” paintings of the old German masters spells that out. Immediately, however, Büchner’s Lenz goes on to say, “Sometimes one would like to be a Medusa’s head to turn such a group to stone and gather the people around it”—as if only in this way, only by freezing and killing—that is, specularizing—that intimate scene, could it be made into art, which is also to say, be made available to spectators. (“To . . . seize the natural as the natural by means of art,” is Celan’s paraphrase of this.) “One would like to, by the way, not: I would like,” Celan writes by way of emphasizing the more than personal dimension of Lenz’s remarks. To which I want to add: One would like to be a Medusa’s head, not: one would like to hold up a Medusa’s head—by which I mean to call attention to a certain implied selfportrait structure in the very act of Medusizing the two girls (in the very structure of the more-than-personal that Celan evokes). The motif of decapitation, fundamental in Büchner’s play Danton’s Death, another frequent reference in “The Meridian,” is barely out of sight. Further on in his address, Celan will consider whether poetry—more precisely das Gedicht, the poem—can, perhaps just “for one brief moment,” escape all such relation to puppets, monkeys, and automata, which is to say to materiality, deathliness, and theatricality (in the pejorative sense, a notion Celan finds thematized in Danton’s Death), by virtue of what he calls an Atemwende, a breath-turn; again, nothing could be more hopeless than to try to summarize those reflections in a few sentences. Let me end this book, then, with the image of a certain artist, call him Caravaggio, driven by the specific necessities of his situation—including an antagonism toward “idealism” and the “puppets” of mannerism—to actualize Büchner’s Lenz’s impulse as highlighted by Celan and thus to go “beyond what is human,” to step “into a realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny . . .” not once but time after time, though perhaps with greatest lucidity in the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. The implications of that transgressive, at once murderous and suicidal, yet also profoundly creative act for the subsequent evolution of the art of painting are still being worked out.

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Notes ABBREVIATIONS FOR NOTES AC Cinotti

Hibbard Langdon Robb Spike

The Age of Caravaggio, exh. cat. (New York and Naples, 1985). Mia Cinotti, Michelangelo Merisi detto il Caravaggio, Tutte le opere, Estratto da “I Pittori Bergamaschi,” il Seicento, vol. 1 (Bergamo, 1983). Catalogue raisonné. Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (New York and London, 1983). Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (New York, 1998). Peter Robb, M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio (New York, 1998, 1999). John T. Spike, with the assistance of Michèle K. Spike, Caravaggio (New York and London, 2001). Contains a CD-Rom with a catalogue raisonné.

INTRODUCTION Some of the ideas put forward . . . Michael Fried, “Notes on Caravaggio,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 13–56. The symposium in honor of Marin was held on 12–13 November 1993.

Probably this is enough . . . See esp. Charles Dempsey’s fundamental essay, “Idealism and Naturalism in Rome around 1600,” in Il Classicismo: Medioevo Rinascimento Barocco. Atti di Colloquio Cesare Gnudi, ed. A. Emiliani (Bologna, 1993), pp. 233–42. There Dempsey argues that Caravaggio was decisively impressed by his encounter with Annibale’s Saint Margaret in Santa Caterina dei Funari, “placed there in 1599, the very year that Caravaggio was given the commission for the Contarelli chapel. According to Bellori, Caravaggio, after looking long and hard at the Saint Margaret, exclaimed ‘I rejoice that in my lifetime I really see a painter,’ and his story is confirmed

by a letter written by Francesco Albani many years after the event, in which he reports that Caravaggio ‘died over’ the painting” (p. 237). The change in Caravaggio’s art that followed this encounter is summed up by Dempsey as follows: “In the work of the 1590s, Caravaggio is still a painter in a recognizably north Italian naturalistic idiom. . . . His mature style, which moves beyond mere naturalism to the full illusion of reality, springs from his initial experience of the illusionistic conventions that had first been established by the Carracci in Bologna. Here I am referring especially to the strength and purity of their hues, and the way these are convincingly and naturalistically integrated within the force and three-dimensionality of a powerful chiaroscuro. Caravaggio may indeed be said to be the first painter, with the possible exception of Adam Elsheimer, to have fully grasped and almost instantaneously absorbed the significance and potential of the Carracci’s discoveries, and to have created a new style on the basis of that experience” (p. 236). Dempsey goes on to write: “However, even as Caravaggio appropriated the illusionistic techniques of the Carracci in his work, conventions which they had used to lend verisimilitude to a concept of the ideal that had lacked all conviction or persuasive power in the hands of the mannerist painters, he also polemicised the reform they had created. The reform had been based on two pillars, an investigation into the effects of spontaneous nature on the one hand, and investigation of the various ideal perfections of canonical artistic expression on the other. Caravaggio thematized in his painting the reality of individual experience, il vero, and by so doing called into question the very truth of the ideal itself, the truth beyond experience which had been given historical verisimilitude in the traditions of art. It is for this reason that his depiction of those things which are beyond experience, his angels or cupids, while undoubtedly vero, precisely because they are faithful to the reality of experience carry no verisimilitude. They do not convince us that they are angels or cupids, but on the contrary suggest that the artistic conventions for representing angels and cupids are mere fictions when measured against the physicality and presence of a real, and very individual, model” (p. 238).

For more on the Carracci reform, see Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (1977; Fiesole, 2000); and Dempsey, “The Carracci Reform of Painting,” in The Age of Correggio and the Carracci, exh. cat. (Bologna, Washington, D.C., and New York, 1986), pp. 237–54.

LECTURE ONE: BOY BITTEN BY A LIZARD To someone like myself . . . Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Cinotti, cat. 16; Spike, cat. 7.1. First published by Tancred Borenius, “An Early Caravaggio Rediscovered,” Apollo 2 (1925): 23–26. The version of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard, now in the Fondazione Longhi in Florence, was published (and later purchased) by Roberto Longhi in 1928 and 1929; see Longhi, “Quesiti caravaggeschi: I, Registro dei Tempi” and “II, I Precedenti,” both in Pinacotheca 1 (July–August 1928): 17–33 and (March–June 1929): 258–320; republished together in Opere complete di Roberto Longhi, 14 vols. (Florence, 1956–91), 4 (1961): 81–143; see pp. 85, 114, 124. Although only the London picture appeared in the 1985 Caravaggio exhibition, both versions were discussed in the catalog entry by Mina Gregori; see AC, pp. 236–41, cat. 70. Richard E. Spear’s introductory essay in that catalog, “The Critical Fortunes of a Realist Painter,” provides a helpful discussion of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard in relation to recent Caravaggio scholarship (pp. 22–27). Cinotti prefers the Longhi Foundation version to the London canvas (pp. 435–37); Spike, however, believes that the London picture “clearly predates the Longhi version, executed with the deeper chiaroscuro of four to five years later” (p. 40). He also suggests that the London picture suffered overcleaning in the area of the boy’s hair and in the shadows generally. In general, the dates of the pictures discussed in these lectures reflect the current scholarly consensus, but in many cases the question of dating remains open, and I have made my decisions on the basis of the evidence as I have understood it. In certain cases I have sought the advice of scholars such as Elizabeth Cropper, Charles Dempsey, and Keith Christiansen, though needless to say the responsibility for errors of dating, as for whatever other errors may be found in this book, is entirely mine. Giovanni Baglione’s “La Vita di Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Pittore” appears in his Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti . . . (Rome, 1642), pp. 136–39. The Italian text is reprinted along with an English translation in Hibbard, pp. 351–56. The citation is from p. 352. On Caravaggio’s early years, see Langdon, pp. 9–32; Giacomo Berra, Il giovane Caravaggio in Lombardia. Ricerche documentarie sui Merisi, gli Aratori e I marchesi di Caravaggio (Florence, 2005); and Gianni Papi, “Brevi notie sull’attività giovanile del Caravaggio,” in Caravaggio ospita Caravaggio,

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ed. Mina Gregori and Amalia Pacia, exh. cat. (Milan, 2009), pp. 21–27.

Much recent discussion . . . For Caravaggio’s work in the context of seicento poetry, see Eugenio Battisti, Rinascimento e Barocco (Turin, 1960), pp. 213–14, n. 3; Luigi Salerno, Duncan T. Kinkead, and William H. Wilson, “Poesia e simboli nel Caravaggio: I Dipinti emblematici,” Palatino 10 (1966): 106–17, 107; Elizabeth Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal 26 (1991): 193– 212. For a Christological interpretation of the painting, see Maurizio Calvesi, “Caravaggio o la ricerca della salvazione,” Storia dell’Arte 9–10 (1971): 93–142, 106–8. For the painting as an emblem of the choleric temperament, see Leonard J. Slatkes, “Caravaggio’s Painting of the Sanguine Temperament,” in Actes du XXIIe Congrès International d’Histoire de l’Art (Budapest, 1969): Evolution générale et développements régionaux en histoire de l’art, 3 vols. (Budapest, 1972), 2:17–24, 24; and Slatkes, “Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard,” in “Tribute to Wolfgang Stechow,” ed. Walter L. Strauss, Print Review, no. 5 (Spring 1976): 149–53. For the painting as a representation of the sense of touch, see Jane Costello, “Caravaggio, Lizard, and Fruit,” in Art the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson, ed. Mosche Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandler (New York, 1981), pp. 375–85, p. 383. For Hibbard’s discussion of the painting, see his Caravaggio, pp. 43–46; the remarks cited above are on p. 44. See also Donald Posner, “Caravaggio’s Homo-Erotic Early Works,” Art Quarterly 34 (Autumn 1971): 301–24; S. J. Freedberg, Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983), pp. 54, 59, 72; John Gash, “Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da,” in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 34 vols. (London and New York, 1996), 5:702–22, esp. pp. 708 and 718–19; and, more recently, John F. Moffitt, “ ‘Poisoned Love’ Posited in an Emblematic Lizard by Caravaggio,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 144 (July–August 2002): 1–18, slightly reworked and published as chapter 6 in Moffit, Caravaggio in Context: Learned Naturalism and Renaissance Humanism (Jefferson, N.C., and London, 2004); and John Varriano, Caravaggio: The Art of Realism (University Park, Pa., 2006), esp. 9, 12. For a strongly argued dissenting view about Caravaggio’s sexuality, see Creighton E. Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (University Park, Pa., 1995), esp. chap. 12, “Reports on Sexuality,” and chap. 13, “Proposable Conclusions.” Gilbert is particularly effective in refuting the modern assumption that Caravaggio’s early patron Cardinal Del Monte was the center of a homosexual circle (pp. 201–7). Caravaggio’s sexuality is also a topic in two recent biographies, Langdon and Robb. In 1985 Gregori, citing Longhi, wrote that the subject of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard should be understood “in terms of the attempts to depict psychological reactions—both of laughter and of pain—that were carried out in Lombardy in the sixteenth century, and which, according to Lomazzo, had

been of interest to Leonardo. Lomazzo’s own theory of emotions is described in the first chapter of book two of the Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (of 1584), which Caravaggio must have pondered. Indeed, the contents of this chapter make it clear that Caravaggio’s effort to capture the boy’s reaction to the lizard’s bite was motivated by an investigative and mimetic intent” (AC, p. 236).

Another crux, of particular interest to me . . . For example, Walter Friedlaender in Caravaggio Studies (Princeton, 1955) characterizes the Boy Bitten by a Lizard and the Uffizi Bacchus as “imaginary portraits” produced by the study of Caravaggio’s own features (p. 84); and Rudolf Wittkower in Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750 (Baltimore, 1958) expresses the belief, based on Baglione’s remarks about Caravaggio’s use of a mirror, that the works in question, along with the Uffizi Medusa, are self-portraits (pp. 22 and 335, n. 10). See also Ágnes Czobor, “Autoritratti del giovane Caravaggio,” Acta Historiae Artium Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 2 (1954–55): 201–14. Longhi, however, did not accept the Boy Bitten by a Lizard as a self-portrait and explained Caravaggio’s use of a mirror as a means of isolating “pieces” or “blocks” of reality, thereby making them available for intense optical investigation as well as establishing a kind of parity between persons and things (Caravaggio [1952; rpt., with an introduction by Giovanni Previtali, Rome, 1982], pp. 46–48). See also Longhi, “Ultimi studi sul Caravaggio e la sua cerchia,” Proporzione 1 (1943): 35, n. 7, where he argues that Baglione’s remarks do not allude to a series of self-portraits but rather signify “that the painter depicted the model not directly but via the mirror; and that for a technical reason that is familiar to painters and that is linked to a particular ‘luministic’ approach.” (Longhi adds that this was suggested to him by the painter Giorgio Morandi.) In the same vein, Gregori writes that “the supposition that the present painting is a self-portrait results from an erroneous interpretation of Baglione’s remark” about Caravaggio’s use of a mirror (AC, p. 237); she agrees with Longhi that Baglione’s reference to the mirror is “to the widespread practice of employing a mirror as an aid in achieving a realistic representation” (AC, pp. 241–44). Indeed, her most recent catalog entry on the painting does not mention the possibility of its being a self-portrait; see Gregori, La collezione di Roberto Longhi, dal Duecento a Caravaggio a Morani, exh. cat (Savigliano, 2007), cat. 30. Cinotti, too, does not believe that the Boy Bitten by a Lizard is a self-portrait. It should be noted, however, that Luigi Spezzaferro has uncovered an inventory of the collection of Giovan Angelo Altemps, dated October 15, 1620, which includes “un retratto di Caravaggia dove gli morsica una lucerta di p. 3, 1/2 con corn.ce nero rabescato d’oro” (fol. 38r). Spezzaferro does not press the point, but his find shows that within ten years of Caravaggio’s death some version of the picture (probably a nonautograph copy) was identified in an inventory as a self-portrait. For their part, Paola Caretta and Vittorio Sgarbi

seem to accept the identity of the sitter as Caravaggio; see Caravaggio e l’Europa: Il movimento caravaggesco internazionale da Caravaggio a Mattia Preti, exh. cat. (Milan and Vienna, 2005), cat. 1.1. Finally, several publications of the 1990s confirm Caravaggio’s interest in mirrors and optical phenomena in general even as they minimize the importance of self-portraiture in his early practice. First, Roberta Lapucci infers from Baglione’s statement that the young Caravaggio painted “quadretti da lui nello specchio ritratti” that he made use of an optical device of a sort described by his contemporary Giovan Battista Della Porta that would have been capable of throwing a reversed image on a wall or canvas (“Caravaggio e i ‘quadretti nello specchio ritratti,’ ” Paragone 45 [March–July, 1994]: 160–70). Second, Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini, commenting on a 1605 inventory of the painter’s studio in Rome that mentions “un specchio grande,” “un scudo a specchio,” and “undici pezzi de vetro” (possibly lenses), emphasize what they take to have been Caravaggio’s quasi-scientific or experimental interest in light and reflections (“La casa, le ‘robbe,’ lo studio del Caravaggio a Roma. Due documenti in 1603 and 1605,” Prospettiva, no. 71 [July 1993]: 68–76). See also Bassani and Bellini, Caravaggio assassino. La carriera di un “valentuomo” fazioso nella Roma della Controriforma (Rome, 1994), esp. pp. 35–43 (on the Boy Bitten by a Lizard) and pp. 201–5 (on the inventory of 1605). For both Lapucci and Bassani and Bellini, the question of self-portraiture is distinctly secondary. Third, Sandro Corradini in Caravaggio. Materiali per un proceso (Rome, 1993), a compendium of documents concerning Caravaggio’s life and career, publishes the same inventory as that cited and discussed by Bassani and Bellini (pp. 62–64). The use of mirrors and lenses by Renaissance and later painters is a major theme in David Hockney’s contentious Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York and London, 2001); I have more to say about Hockney’s views with respect to Caravaggio further on in this book.

A further point worth stressing . . . Longhi, Caravaggio, p. 55; quoted in translation by Spear, “The Critical Fortune of a Realist Painter,” p. 25. The snapshot metaphor comes from Giorgio Bonsanti, Caravaggio (1984; rev. ed., Florence, 1991), p. 6. The phrase “violent, instantaneous action” comes from Gregori, “Caravaggio Today,” AC, p. 37. For Louis Marin, see his To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (1977; Chicago and London, 1995), p. 161. Marin goes on to write that “representation [in Caravaggio] represents but a single moment. This instant is seized the way a snapshot instantaneously captures a flash of a second. In other words the action is immobilized and made into a statue. It is stupefied in a Medusa-effect” (p. 163, emphasis in original). See also Freedberg’s inspired description of the Capitoline Saint John the Baptist with a Ram (which Gilbert believes is a Pastor fido; see below) in his Circa 1600, p. 54, quoted in part and discussed in lecture 4.

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So much by way of prologue . . . Melville’s rough definition of “dispositif” comes from his “Attachments of Art History,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies (1999), issue 1, www. rochester.edu/in_visible_culture. The immediate context for his remarks is a discussion of my use of that term to name the mirror-logic of Caravaggio’s right-angle self-portraits as analyzed in my article “Thoughts on Caravaggio,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 13–56. Matisse’s last painted self-portrait, this was made in the Hôtel Beau Rivage in Nice. See John Klein, Matisse Portraits (New Haven and London, 2001), pp. 184–87 (Klein says nothing about the matter of mirror reversal).

If the basic terms of the comparison . . . Again, see Freedberg’s discussion of the Capitoline Saint John, quoted and discussed in lecture 4.

This is a lot to take in . . . On Van Eyck and reflections, see Heinrich Schwarz, “The Mirror in Art,” Art Quarterly 15 (1952): 97–118, esp. 97–99, 110; and David G. Carter, “Reflections in Armor in the Canon Van de Paele Madonna,” Art Bulletin 36 (1954): 60–62. The Peeters and Claesz still lifes are dated 1611 and 1634 respectively. For an analysis of these pictures within the broader context of Netherlandish genre painting, see Celeste Brusati, “Stilled Lives: Self-Portraiture and Self-Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Still-Life Painting,” Simiolus 2–3 (1990–91): 168–82. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (New York and London, 1991), p. 61. The passage in question is quoted and discussed in lecture 4. “The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the color of the thing that it reflects, and which is filled by as many images as there are things placed before it.” And: “When you wish to see whether the general effect of your picture corresponds with that of the object represented after nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual thing, and then compare the reflection with your picture, and consider carefully whether the subject of the two images is in conformity with both, studying especially the mirror. The mirror ought to be taken as a guide—that is, the flat mirror—for within its surface substances have many points of resemblance to a picture; namely, that you see the picture made upon one place showing things which appear in relief, and the mirror upon one plane does the same. The picture is one single surface, and the mirror is the same.” The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Edward MacCurdy, 2 vols. (New York, 1938), 2:235, 254–55.

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The citation from Pino on Giorgione comes from Mary Pardo, Paolo Pino’s “Dialogo di Pittura.” A Translation with Commentary (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1984; Ann Arbor, 1985), p. 367. See also Creighton E. Gilbert, The Works of Girolamo Savoldo: The 1955 Dissertation, with a Review of Research, 1955–85 (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1955; New York and London, 1986), p. 428. Pino’s remarks are cited and discussed in the brilliant essay by Daniel Arasse, “Les miroirs de la peinture,” in L’imitation, alienation ou source de liberté, Rencontres de l’Ecole du Louvre (September 1984), pp. 63–88.

The canvas in question . . . Savoldo’s canvas—long erroneously considered a portrait of Gaston de Foix—was first identified as a self-portrait by Gilbert in The Works of Girolamo Savoldo, pp. 428–31. For Gilbert, following tradition, the “mirrors allude to the paragone” (p. 439). See also Gilbert, “Newly Discovered Paintings by Savoldo in Relation to Their Patronage,” Arte Lombarda 96–97 (1991): 29–46. It is hard to be sure, but my impression is that Gilbert’s views have not won general acceptance. See in this connection Elena Lucchesi Ragni, cat. no. I.26 in Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo tra Foppa, Giorgione e Caravaggio, exh. cat. (Brescia and Frankfurt, 1990), pp. 164–67; Franceso Frangi, Savoldo: Catalogo completo di dipinti (Florence, 1992), cat. 12; Alessandro Ballarin, Le siècle de Titien: L’âge d’or de la peinture à Venise, exh. cat (Paris, 1993), cat. 74; and Petra Kathke, Porträt und Accessoire. Eine Bildnisform im 16. Jahrundert (Berlin, 1997), pp. 177–78, 333–34. Gilbert’s reading of the Louvre canvas as a self-portrait, which is based largely on physiognomic resemblance between the sitter of the Louvre picture and of a number of other paintings that he also takes to be self-portraits, is most forcefully countered by Andrew John Marin, Savoldos sogennantes “Bildnis des Gaston de Foix”: Zum Problem des Paragone in der Kunst und Kunsttheorie der italienische Renaissance (Sigmaringen, 1995), pp. 31–32. Another scholar, Joanna Woods-Marsden writes, “Finally, much as I longed to include a discussion of Savoldo’s wonderful portrait of the so-called Gaston de Foix in the Louvre, I could not bring myself to accept the argument in its favor as a self-likeness” (Renaissance Self-Portaiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist [New Haven and London, 1998], p. 265). In contrast, Jodi Cranston treats the work as a selfportrait in The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge and New York, 2000), pp. 133–40, as does Jonathan Unglaub in “Poussin’s Reflections,” Art Bulletin 86 (September 2004): 510–11. I am convinced that Gilbert is right and that the painting is indeed a self-portrait, for reasons I develop in the text. See my “Thoughts on Caravaggio,” p. 41, n. 34, where I advance the same case (an essay cited by Unglaub). There is a fine essay by Mary Pardo on another painting by Savoldo in which the trope of reflection plays a

crucial role: “The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene,” Art Bulletin 71 (March 1989): 67–91. I owe both to Stephen Campbell and to Michael Cole the thought that “a heightened consciousness of the working of reversal” as early as the 1520s was also grounded in the designing of prints and tapestries, which had to be conceived in reverse, because the printing process reverses the image and tapestries are woven from the back.

A related topic concerns . . . There is a considerable amount of discussion of the use of mirrors in Renaissance art, though it is widely dispersed and rarely discussed in any comprehensive fashion. Of particular interest are Bruno Schweig, “The History of Mirrors,” Glass 17 (1940): 50–51, 81–82, 108–12, 180–84; Schwarz, “The Mirror in Art”; Arasse, “Les miroirs de la peinture”; WoodsMarsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, pp. 31–34; Jonathan Miller, On Reflection, exh. cat. (London, 1998); and Hockney, Secret Knowledge, esp. pp. 103–19. On Parmigianino’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, see (among numerous discussions) Mary Vaccaro, Parmigianino: The Paintings (Turin, 2002), cat. 40; Cranston, Poetics of Portraiture, pp. 127–67; Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, “L’autoritratto del Parmigianino. La consistenza (im)materiale dell’autoritratto di Vienna,” in Parmigianino e il manierismo europeo. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, 13–15 giugno 2002 (Milan, 2002), pp. 67–82; and Parmigianino e il manierismo europeo, exh. cat. (Parma and Vienna, 2003), cat. 2.1.7, entry by Ferino-Pagden.

An important question . . . On the flat mirror in the sixteenth century, see Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (1994; New York and London, 2002), pp. 21–34. Mirrors were also widely used by artists in the fifteenth century, as evidenced by Alberti’s On Painting, in which we read: “I do not know how it is that paintings that are without fault look beautiful in a mirror; and it is remarkable how every defect in a picture appears more unsightly in a mirror. So the things that are taken from Nature should be emended with the advice of the mirror” (p. 83).

I believe that . . . No mention is made of the right-angle dispositif in Omar Calabrese’s semi-encyclopedic Artists’ Self-Portraits, trans. Marguerite Shore (New York and London, 2006), or— more surprisingly—in the chapter on self-portraits in Victor I. Stoichita, L’Instauration du tableau: Métapeinture à l’aube des temps modernes (Paris, 1993), to be discussed further in the notes to lecture 5. (It is, of course, emphasized by me in “Thoughts on Caravaggio.”) But see Anthony Bond, “Performing the Self?” in Self Portrait: Renaissance

to Contemporary, exh. cat. (London and Sydney, 2005–6), p. 32: “The mirror is usually placed to one side of the artist with the canvas on the easel at right angles to it and in easy reach of the artist’s brush. So the artist stands or sits a tightly configured triangular space compressed between mirror and canvas. As a result the painted image often seems to extend beyond the frame of the painting just as its reflection will have done beyond the mirror.” “Usually” seems a bit tendentious here, and I can’t help wondering whether Bond’s text reflects a familiarity with “Thoughts on Caravaggio” (not cited in the catalog); it may or may not be pertinent that on the following page he cites me as emphasizing Courbet’s “quasi-corporeal merger” with his self-portraits, but then writes: “I would suggest that, contrary to Fried’s view, this is not specific to Courbet but applies to self-portraiture in general” (p. 33). “Contrary to Fried’s view” is a nice touch. In her definitive study of Pontormo’s drawings, Janet CoxRearick writes of the second work: “This unusual drawing was evidently not done in connection with any pictorial motive, but is a self-portrait of the artist pointing at himself in the mirror” (The Drawings of Pontormo, 2 vols. [Cambridge, Mass., 1964], 1:247). In Elizabeth Cropper’s words: “An extraordinary study in red chalk in the British Museum of a standing man records Pontormo’s practice of making life drawings from his own appearance in the mirror. Stripped to his underwear, Pontormo draws with his right hand (reflected as left in the mirror) on the piece of paper that is now before us, placed off to the side of the image as reflected. He points with his left hand to the surface of the mirror, indicating thereby that he is looking at himself, and thus transforms the paper into a mirror, and vice versa” (“Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia: A Double Portrait,” in Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence, exh. cat. [Philadelphia, 2004], pp. 10–11). See also Cropper, Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier (Los Angeles, 1997), p. 90.

Other drawings by Pontormo . . . The earliest records already identify Raphael’s oil on panel as a self-portrait and it has been almost universally accepted as a likeness of the artist. The most thorough entry on the painting’s history, iconography, critical fortune, and numerous copies is in Raffello a Firenze: Dipinti e disegni delle collezioni fiorentine, exh. cat. (Florence, 1984), pp. 47–57. The authenticity of the Braunschweig picture has been the subject of considerable debate among specialists. It is worth noting, however, that “a portrait of Giorgione by his hand made as David and Goliath” was recorded in a Grimani inventory as early as 1528. Whether the Braunschweig canvas is identifiable as that painting remains uncertain, but it is generally accepted that the Braunschweig work, if not an autograph Giorgione, is an accurate reflection of the invention recorded in the Grimani collection, which was reproduced

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in an etching of 1650 by Wenceslaus Hollar. See Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: The Painter of “Poetic Brevity” (Paris and New York, 1997), pp. 306–7; Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, pp. 117–19; Katherine T. Brown, The Painter’s Reflection: Self-Portraiture in Renaissance Venice, 1458–1625 (Florence, 2000), cat. 8, pp. 146–49; and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat. (Vienna and Milan, 2004), cat. 18, pp. 234–36. Ferino-Pagden’s remarks about the Budapest picture come from the same catalog, cat. 17, p. 232. On that picture, see also Anderson, p. 324, and Brown, cat. 9, pp. 149–50; Brown considers the Budapest work an early seventeenth-century copy of the Brunswick picture after the latter was cut. Even more persuasive, perhaps, as a product of right-angle mirror representation is Giorgione’s Self-Portrait as Orpheus, known only from a copy by David Teniers the younger. As Ferino-Pagden remarks, “In connection with Vasari’s repeated and extensive descriptions of Giorgione’s musical interests and the invitations for him to sing and play at entertainments in patrician houses, he may well have identified himself with the mythical creator of the art of singing. It should not be forgotten that the same claim was made for David the singer in the Old Testament” (p. 236).

Other sixteenth-century paintings . . . The picture by Andrea del Sarto is generally regarded as a self-portrait, a view that is supported by the fact that it seems to have served as the model for the woodcut portrait used at the opening of the life of the artist in Vasari’s Lives. See, e.g., S. J. Freedberg, Andrea del Sarto: Catalogue Raisonné (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), cat. 80; John Shearman, Andrea del Sarto (Oxford, 1965), cat. 87 and pp. 126–28; and Antonio Natali, Andrea del Sarto, trans. Jeffrey Jennings (New York, London, and Paris, 1999), p. 132. Possibly pertinent to my interest in “right-angle” self-portraits, Shearman notes that Andrea used his own head frequently as a model. “[T]here are five or six such heads in the Scalzo frescoes,” Shearman writes, “all different and all drawn allo specchio: that is to say, at close quarters, looking out, and normally with the right shoulder (in fact the left) to the front” (p. 126). I owe this reference and the thought behind it to Christopher Nygren. For the most recent discussion of Tintoretto’s Self-Portrait and bibliographic references see Tintoretto, exh. cat. (Madrid, 2007), cat. 7, pp. 209–11. Brown considers the Philadelphia picture a copy of a lost self-portrait, along with a version in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. See Brown, The Painter’s Reflection, cat. 25 and 26, pp. 164–65. On Allori’s Self-Portrait, see Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, p. 230; and Simona Lecchini Giovannoni, Alessandro Allori (Turin, 1991), cat. 175, p. 301. I first adduced the direction of hatching in drawing as an indicator of right- or left-handedness in my essay “Between Realisms: From Derrida to Manet,” Critical Inquiry 21

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(Autumn 1994): 1–36, included (with modifications) in Manet’s Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London, 1996), pp. 365–98.

This is not the place . . . On Sofonisba’s Self-Portrait at the Clavichord, see Sofonisba Anguissola e le sue sorelle, exh. cat. (Cremona, Vienna, and Washington, D.C., 1994–95), cat. 9, pp. 202–3, entry by Rossana Sacchi, whose dating I have followed. This is not the only self-portrait by Sofonisba that bears on my argument in this chapter; my thanks to Michael Cole for making sure that she was not overlooked by me. On Lomazzo’s canvas, see James B. Lynch, “Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Self-Portrait in the Brera,” Gazette des BeauxArts 64 (1964): 189–97, who demonstrates that Lomazzo has depicted himself in the guise of Bacchus and that the staff sprouting vine and ivy leaves is nothing other than a thyrsus. My thanks to Stephen Campbell for urging me to include Lomazzo’s canvas in my survey of relevant works. On Peterzano’s Self-Portrait, see Maurizio Calvesi, “Un autoritratto di Simone Peterzano,” in Studi di Storia dell’Arte in onore di Denis Mahon (Milan, 2000), pp. 37–39; and Caravaggio: La Luce nella Pittura Lombarda, exh. cat. (Bergamo, 2000), cat. 5, pp. 180–81, entry by Calvesi, who remarks that it is possible that in 1589 the young Caravaggio still frequented Peterzano’s bottega and that he could have known this painting. Helen Langdon comments briefly on the possible relevance of Peterzano’s Self-Portrait to Caravaggio’s art in her review of the Bergamo exhibition in the Burlington Magazine 142 (August 2000): 523. Peterzano appears to have been a student of Titian, and indeed marketed himself as such; thus his Self-Portrait is signed simon. peterzannus. venetus. titiani. alumnus. fecit. mdlxxxviiii. For the most recent study of Caravaggio’s period in Peterzano’s workshop and extensive bibliographic references, see Giacomo Berra, Il giovane Caravaggio in Lombardia. Ricerche documentarie sui Merisi, gli aratori e i marchesi di Caravaggio (Florence, 2005), pp. 198–232.

Two other self-portraits . . . Paggi’s canvas was first identified as a work of the Venetian Renaissance by Waagen. Over a century later it was reidentified by Herrmann-Fiore as a work by the Florentine painter Giovanni Battista Paggi (1554–1627). Until recently, scholarship has tended to follow Hermann-Fiore. See Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Kunstwerk und Künstgler in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1843), p. 370; Kristina Herrmann-Fiore, “Due artisti allo specchio. Un doppio ritratto del Museo di Würzburg attributo a Giovanni Battista Paggi,” Storia dell’arte 47 (1983): 29–39; Woods-Marsden, Renaissance SelfPortraiture, pp. 130–31; Brown, The Painter’s Reflection, p. 104; and Cranston, Poetics of Portraiture, pp. 137–38. However, when the painting was cleaned in 1993, it revealed a

palette that has seemed to some scholars more consonant with a painter like Lorenzo Lotto than with the late Florentine Renaissance. The painter’s costume also argues in favor of the earlier dating, it has been claimed. Consequently, the painting has recently been exhibited as a Venetian painting of circa 1530, perhaps by Bernardino Licinio. For arguments in favor of this attribution, see Ekkehard Mai and Kurt Wettengl, Wettstret der Künste: Malerei und Skulptur von Dürer bis Daumier, exh. cat. (Munich and Cologne, 2002), cat. 141, pp. 353–54. The attribution is accepted in Sybille EbertSchifferer et al., Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C., 2002), cat. 141, pp. 353–54, and argued for in detail by Severin Hansbauer, “Bernardino Licinios Künstlerfreunde vor dem Spiegel,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 67 (2004): 263–78. My thanks to Peter Lukehart for bringing this article to my attention. Note, though, that the new dating would mean that the Würzburg painting’s extremely subtle use of the right-angle dispositif predates Allori’s explicit employment of it by some thirty years, a time shift I regard as highly improbable, to say the least.

Significantly, the more famous work . . . On the Brera canvas, see Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590, 2 vols. (London and New York), 1:21, 2:13, cat. 25. See also Bologna 1584: Gli essordi dei Carracci e gli affreschi di Palazzo Fava (Bologna, 1984), cat. 125, pp. 180–81; Mattias Winner, “Annibale Carracci’s Self-Portrait and the Paragone Debate,” in World Art: Themes of Unity and Diversity. Acts of the XXVth International Congress of the History of Art, ed. Irving Lavin (University Park, Pa., and London, 1986), 3 vols., 2:509–15; Wettstret der Künste, cat. 145, pp. 144–45; and Annibale Carracci, exh. cat. (Bologna and Rome, 2006), cat. I.1, pp. 76–77, entry by Daniele Benati. Roberto Zapperi interprets the Self-Portrait with Figures as based on the double schemata of the ages of man and the family portrait in his stimulating book, Annibale Carracci: Portrait de l’artiste en jeune homme, trans. Marie-Ange Maire Vigueur (1989; Aix-en-Provence, 1990).

I also want to consider . . . On Luca Cambiaso’s canvas, see Clario di Fabio, “A New Painting at Palazzo Blanco: The Self-Portrait by Luca Cambiaso,” in The “Musei di Strada Nuova” in Genoa. Palazzo Rosso, Palazzo Blanco and Palazzo Tursi, ed. Piero Boccardo and Clario di Fabio (Turin and New York, 2004), pp. 137–83; and Luca Cambiaso, un maesto del cinquecento europeo, exh. cat. (Genoa, 2006–7), cat. 1, pp. 368–69, entry by Piero Boccardo. In this fascinating painting, Cambiaso has portrayed himself largely from the rear, holding a brush in his left hand and gazing intently off to the left, one is meant to presume at the person of his father; a further implication is that his own

image depicts a reflection in a mirror situated more or less directly behind him (i.e., in the place of the viewer). On Agostino’s Self-Portrait, see Gli Uffizi: Catalogo generale, ed. Luciano Berti with Caterina Caneva (Florence, 1979), cat. A182, p. 829, entry by Evelina Borea. The tendency of painters of self-portraits to “normalize” their self-depictions by placing the brush and palette in the artist-sitter’s right and left hands respectively was first noted by Hans-Joachim Raupp, Untersuchungen zu Künstlerbildnis und Künstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden im 17. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York, 1984), p. 309, who cites three minor exceptions to this rule (in addition to Annibale’s canvas). The same point was independently noted by Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, who also acutely remarks that this situation changed dramatically around 1860, an important discovery I have exploited in my own work on Manet, FantinLatour, Whistler, Caillebotte, and others. See Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550–1700 (Princeton, 1987), p. 202.

Striking instances include . . . On Cigoli’s, Self-Portrait, see Lodovico Cigoli, 1559–1613. Tra Manierismo e Barocco. Dipinti, exh. cat. (Florence, 1992), cat. 22, pp. 105–6, entry by Caterina Caneva. On Borgiani’s 1615 Self-Portrait, see Caravaggio e i suoi. Percorsi caravaggeschi in Palazzo Barberini, exh. cat. (Rome, 1999), cat. 12, pp. 50–51. Entry by Rossella Vodret. There are three self-portraits in all, which together document his precipitous decline in health (p. 50). For an illustration of the self-portrait in the Prado, see Five Hundred Self-Portraits (London, 2000), p. 121; the last and most dire of the selfportraits, in the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, is illustrated in L’Anima e il volto. Ritratto e fisiognomica da Leonardo a Bacon, exh. cat. (Milan, 1998), p. 271. On Allori’s Self-Portrait, see Cristofano Allori (1577–1621), exh. cat. (Florence, 1984), cat. 23, pp. 75–76, entry by Miles L. Chapell. On Allori’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, see John Shearman, “Cristofano Allori’s ‘Judith,’ ” Burlington Magazine 121 (January 1979): 3–10; Shearman, The Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen: Early Italian Pictures (London, 1972), cat. 2, pp. 6–8; Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, exh. cat. (London, 2005), cat. 7, pp. 96–97, entry by Sophie Carr and Joanna Woodall; and Lucy Whitaker and Martin Clayton, with contributions by Aislinn Loconte, The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque, exh. cat. (London, 2007), cat. 93, pp. 270–71, entry by Aislinn Loconte. Although scholars agree that Rubens’s Self-Portrait in a Circle of Friends was done during his time in Italy, there is

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no consensus as to the exact dating of the picture, which in any case is the earliest known self-portrait of the painter. The other prominent figure in three-quarter profile is possibly the artist’s brother Philip, who visited Rubens in 1602. It has been proposed by Warnke that the painting commemorates the death of the humanist Justus Lipsius, who had been Philip Rubens’s professor at the University of Louvain. Lipsius (d. March 23, 1606) is identifiable as the figure in profile at the extreme right. See Martin Warnke, Kommentare zu Rubens (Berlin, 1965), pp. 21–38; Frances Huemer’s volume on portraits in the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part 19 (London, 1977), 26 parts, cat. 37, pp. 163–66; Michael Jaffe, Rubens and Italy (Oxford and Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), p. 75; and Kristin Lohse Belkins, Rubens (London, 1998), pp. 69–71. Though the picture does not seem to record an actual event, it is clearly tied to the artist’s stay in Mantua, because the background of the painting includes a view of Mantua’s Ponte San Giorgio and the Lago di Mezzo. On Van Dyke’s precocious panel, see Susan J. Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven and London, 2004), cat. I.99, pp. 92–93; and Alan McNairn, The Young Van Dyck, exh. cat. (Ottawa, 1980), cat. 1, pp. 35–36. On the Self-Portrait with a Sunflower picture, see Barnes et al., cat. IV.4, pp. 431–32. See also R. R. Wark, “A Note on Van Dyck’s ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower,’ ” Burlington Magazine 98 (February 1956): 53–54. Cf. also the copy in the Uffizi after another self-portrait by Van Dyck (the original dating probably from the early 1630s); it seems clearly a right-angle portrait, and the painter, oriented to the left, looks toward the viewer with raised brows, eyes wide, and mouth slightly open, as if he were surprised in the act of painting (but of course he would have been looking into a mirror, according to the standard right-angle dispositif). The original seems to have been given to Charles I, so the suggestion is perhaps that it was the king who condescended to visit him unannounced, which would also accord with the fact that the painter wears a gold chain, obviously a royal gift. See Il Corridoio vasariano agli Uffizi, ed. Caterina Caneva (Milan, 2002), cat. 15, pp. 192–93, entry by Silvia Meloni Trkulja. On the Pasadena Self-Portrait, see Handbook of the Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, 2003), p. 66; and Rembrandt by Himself, ed. Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot, exh. cat. (London, 1999), cat. 56, p. 176 (date given as ca. 1641). On Rembrandt’s self-portraiture more generally, see H. Perry Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity (Princeton, 1990); Harry S. Berger Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, 2000), esp. pp. 351–511; and Stephanie S. Dickey, Rembrandt Face to Face (Indianapolis, 2006). Several other self-portraits convey a similar impression, including the two oval pictures dated 1633 in the Louvre. On

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these, see Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (London and New York, 1985), p. 184, figs. 192 and 193. Still another work of 1633 that invites being seen in these terms is the etching called Self-Portrait with a Scarf around His Neck (L’Anima e il volto, pp. 278–79), if we bear in mind that the printed image is reversed relative to the image on the plate. On Rosa’s Self-Portrait in Detroit, see L’opera completa di Salvator Rosa, coordinated by Luigi Salerno (Milan, 1975), cat. 35, p. 87. On this canvas and other self-portraits by the artist, see Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “The Consolations of Friendship: Salvator Rosa’s Self-Portrait for Giovanni Battista Ricciardi,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 23 (1988): 103–24. I should mention that there is an explicitly right-angle mirrorreversed self-portrait of the painter in the act of painting in the Uffizi (1640?); see L’opera completa, cat. 36, p. 87. On Drost’s canvas, see Gli Uffizi: Catalogo generale, cat. A312, p. 861, entry by Marco Chiarini.

Something also should be said . . . On Poussin’s Berlin canvas, see Louis Marin, “Variations sur un portrait absent: Les autoportraits de Poussin 1649–1650,” Corps écrit 5 (1983): 88–107, esp. 95–96; and Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton, 1996), esp. chap. 4, “On the Experience of Light and Color: Poussin, Padre Zaccolini, Cassiano dal Pozzo, and the Legacy of Leonardo.” (Poussin’s other, more famous Self-Portrait, sent to the collector Chantelou, is discussed by Cropper and Dempsey in chap. 5, “Painting and Possession: Poussin’s Self-Portrait for Chantelou and the Essais of Montaigne.”) On Lebrun’s canvas, see the entry for this picture in Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der Gemälde im Kaiser FriedrichMuseum (Berlin, 1906), pp. 109–10.

Finally, Carlo Dolci’s “double” Self-Portrait . . . On Dolci’s “double” Self-Portrait, see Gli Uffizi: Catalogo generale, cat. A307, p. 860, entry by Silvia Meloni Trkulja; Francesca Baldassari, Carlo Dolci (Turin, 1995), cat. 141, pp. 166–68; and Artists’ Self-Portraits from the Uffizi, exh. cat. (London, 2007), cat. 13, pp. 96–97, entry by Francesca Baldassari.

Two northern works of some complexity . . . On Bailly’s painting, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago and London, 1983), pp. 103–9; and Maarten Wurfbain, “David Bailly’s Vanitas of 1651,” in The Age of Rembrandt: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, ed. Roland E. Fleischer and Susan Scott Munshower, Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, vol. 3 (University Park, Pa., 1988), pp. 48–69.

On Steenwinkel’s painting, see Deceptions and Illusions, cat. no. 69, pp. 268–69, entry by Anna Tummers. See also the discussion of that painting by Stoichita in L’Instauration du tableau, p. 245. English translation: The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. AnneMarie Glasheen (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 225–26. According to Stoichita, “The painter [reflected in the mirror] is neither working on the production of a still-life nor is he depicted in the act of painting his self-portrait. He is focusing on the moment of reflection” (p. 225). I disagree: I take the reflected image to imply that Steenwinkel is indeed working on the painting as a whole via the dispositif of right-angle mirror reflection, a possibility Stoichita does not consider. I shall have more to say about Stoichita on self-portraits further on.

Starting in the second half . . . In Reynolds’s Self-Portrait (1773) in the Uffizi, made expressly for the self-portrait collection there, the artist-sitter extends his left arm beyond the right-hand edge of the canvas in a way that clearly suggests that he is in the act of painting, despite the fact his right arm and hand are not shown holding a palette (instead, he holds a bundle of drawings inscribed with Michelangelo’s name). On this picture, see M. Chiarini in Gli Uffizi: Catalogo generale, A746, p. 970; and Silvestra Bietoletti, Artists’ Self-Portraits from the Uffizi, cat. 20, pp. 110–11. Roughly a quarter century earlier Reynolds painted perhaps the most brilliant of all his works in this genre, the Self-Portrait (ca. 1747–49) in the National Portrait Gallery, London, in which the artist-sitter is depicted shielding his eyes with his left hand while holding his palette, brushes, and maul stick in his right. The implication seems clear (though it has gone unrecognized) that until that moment the artistsitter had been painting with his left hand but that needing to shield his eyes (to cut the glare from a mirror situated where we now stand?) he placed his brush in his right hand. In other words, this picture too is mirror-reversed and may also allude, via the position of the implied mirror, to a right-angle dispositif. On that painting, see Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, cat. 22, pp. 128–29, entry by Francesca Silvester and Joanna Woodall. In David’s Self-Portrait (1794) in the Louvre, the artist-sitter is shown holding his brush in his right hand and his palette in his left. On this picture, see esp. T. J. Clark, “ ‘Gross David with Swoln Cheek,’ ” in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford, 1994), pp. 243–307; and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (New Haven and London, 1999), pp. 33–54. See also the brief discussion in Philippe Bordes, Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile, exh. cat (Williamstown, Mass., 2005), cat. 1, p. 16. In a recent essay, I claim that the Self-Portrait is based on a mirror reversal of the figure structure in David’s great painting of the previous year, Marat Dying, and discuss the implications of that

fact for the painting’s meaning. See Fried, “David/Marat: The Self-Portrait of 1794,” in David after David: Essays on the Later Work, ed. Mark Ledbury (New Haven and London, 2007), pp. 191–203. On Victor Emil Janssen’s Self-Portrait at the Easel (ca. 1829), see Werner Hofmann, ed., Hamburger Kunsthalle (Munich, 1985), cat. 97, p. 58; and Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, cat. 28, pp. 140–41, entry by Ursula Prunter. Prunter writes: “Stripped to the waist, [the artist] pivots between the image in the mirror and that on his barely suggested easel. This pictorial device of the ‘hinged canvas’ coincides with the right edge of the picture frame” (p. 140). There are two mirror-reversed Corot self-portraits, one in the Louvre (1825) and the other, seemingly right angle, in the Uffizi (ca. 1840). On the first, see Alfred Robaut, L’Oeuvre de Corot par Albert Robaut. Catalogue raisonné et illustré (Paris, 1965), 5 vols., 2: cat. 41, pp. 16–17. On the second, see Robaut, L’Oeuvre de Corot, 2: cat. 370, pp. 134–35; and Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, and Vincent Pomarède, Corot, exh. cat. (Paris, Ottawa, and New York, 1996), cat. 51, pp. 122–23. On Théodore Chassériau’s Self-Portrait (1835) in the Louvre, see Marc Sandoz, Théodore Chassériau, 1819–1856. Catalogue raisonné des peintures et estampes (Paris, 1974), cat. 14, p. 106; and Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856): The Unknown Romantic, exh. cat. (Paris, Strasbourg, and New York, 2002–3), cat. 2, pp. 66–68, entry by Vincent Pomarède. Daumier’s lithograph is illustrated but not discussed in Calabrese, Artists’ Self-Portraits, pl. 154, p. 167. The drawings by Fantin briefly described in the text are analyzed at greater length in Fried, Manet’s Modernism, pp. 365–80. That Fantin came explicitly to understand his commitment to mirror reversal in these terms is demonstrated by his portrayal of himself holding a palette in his right hand in the famous group portrait—a manifesto for his generation—Homage to Delacroix of 1864. (Others in that painting include Manet, Whistler, Alphonse Legros, Baudelaire, and Champfleury.) Simply put, the nature of a group portrait is such as to imply an impersonal or “objective” point of view; but Fantin also wished to signal that his access to his own appearance, as distinct from his access to that of the other persons in the painting, was inevitably mediated by a mirror—hence his portrayal of himself as mirror-reversed. See ibid., pp. 382–84.

Mirror reversal is also at work . . . The self-portraits by Whistler and Manet cited here are discussed at greater length in Fried, Manet’s Modernism, pp. 391–92 and 395–98.

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On Cézanne’s Self-Portrait, see The Passionate Eye: Impressionist and Other Master Paintings from the Collection of Emil G. Bührle, Zurich, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C., Yokohama, and London, 1990–91), cat. 43, entry by Charles S. Moffett. On Liebermann’s self-portrait, see Matthias Eberle, Max Liebvermann 1847–1935. Werkzeichnis der Gemlde und Ölstudien, 2 vols. (Munich, 1996), 2:721. On Corinth’s canvas, see Ulrich Luckhardt and Uwe M. Scheede, eds., Ich, Lovis Corinth. Die Selbstbildnisse, exh. cat. (Hamburg, 2004–5), cat. 29, pp. 87, 150. Photograph of Liebermann working on a self-portrait (1930), Aufnahme Fritz Eschen. Illustrated in Max Liebermann. Jahrhundertwende, ed. Angelika Weisenberg, exh. cat. (Berlin 1997), p. 37.

Finally, I want to juxtapose . . . See the discussion of Caillebotte’s Self-Portrait at the Easel in Fried, “Caillebotte’s Impressionism,” Representations, no. 66 (Spring 1999): 1–51; republished in Norma Broude, ed., Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris (New Brunswick, N.J., and London, 2002), pp. 66–116.

LECTURE TWO: IMMERSION AND SPECULARITY To plunge right in . . . I am aware that the term “immersion” belongs also to current media theory, where it signifies something like the subject’s total, multisensory participation in a technology-mediated experience of virtual reality. This obviously is not what I have in mind. For “immersion” in media theory, see, for example, Frank Biocca, “Virtual Reality Technology: A Tutorial,” Journal of Communication 42 (1992): 23–72; Frank Biocca and Ben Delaney, “Immersive Virtual Reality Technology,” in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, ed. Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (Hillsdale, N.J., 1995), pp. 57–124; Michael Heim, Virtual Realism (New York, 1998); Craig D. Murray and Judith Sixsmith, “The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality,” Ethos 27 (September 1999): 315–43; Mel Slater and Martin Usoh, “Body Centered Interaction in Immersive Virtual Environments,” in Artificial Life and Virtual Reality, ed. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann and Daniel Thallman (Chichester, 1994), pp. 125–47; Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore and London, 2001); Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); and Frank Popper, From Technological to Virtual Art (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).

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The notion of “partly automatistic” is meant to capture the sense in which the execution of an action such as painting (or indeed any action) involves involuntary “mechanisms” that nevertheless are under the overall control of an intention to accomplish a particular end. This is an immense and complex topic, but let this short paragraph from Wittgenstein’s Zettel stand for a position close to the one I would wish to stake out: Writing [for which read “painting”] is certainly a voluntary movement, and yet an automatic one. And of course there is no question of a feeling of each movement in writing. One feels something, but could not possibly analyse the feeling. One’s hand writes; it does not write because one wills, but one wills what it writes. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe [Oxford, 1967], par. 586, p. 102e) On “freezing” (and related effects) in Caravaggio, cf. Elizabeth Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193–212, esp. 203–5. For example, Cropper writes: “[W]hen Caravaggio set figures up in the studio, lighting them from above, painting them only in that moment, Caravaggio was not only denying reality, as Louis Marin has suggested, but he was also striving to find and occupy the momentary gap between the effects of Pygmalion and Medusa, between bringing images alive and turning them to stone. In the process he also places the spectator in the gap between the two, and in this is to be discovered that marvelous quality that caused spectators to be amazed, to be enchanted, to be transfixed” (p. 204). And: “Caravaggio’s figures begin in the flesh and indeed continue to appear to exist in it rather than seeming to derive from memory or art; but they harden before us, and we before them” (p. 205). See also Cropper, “Caravaggio and the Matter of Lyric,” in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. Genevieve Warwick (Newark, Del., 2006), pp. 47–56. The reference to Louis Marin is to his discussion of Caravaggio’s Medusa in To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (French original, 1977; Chicago and London, 1995). Finally, let me mention an unpublished essay by Professor Sheila McTighe of the Courtauld Institute of Art, written when she was a graduate student at Yale, entitled “The Mirror of Narcissus: Beholder and Beheld in Caravaggio’s Early Work,” in which she argues that various early paintings by Caravaggio, including the Boy Bitten by a Lizard, were intended to function as virtual mirrors that would fix the viewer before his image—at once shocking the viewer “into a single, timeless moment of wonder” and “[absorbing him] into the study of naturalistic detail.” This is significantly different from my claims in these lectures, but we are in agreement as to the centrality of the mirror “analogy” (her word) or dispositif (mine) in Caravaggio’s art.

Several very different comparisons . . . Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore and London, 2000), pp. 300–15. Further

references to Tasso’s text will be by stanza numbers within canto 16. My attention was first drawn to this episode by a brilliant essay by Giovanni Careri, “Rinaldo and Armida: Love, Honor and Sexual Identity,” subsequently published in German translation as “Rinaldo und Armida: Liebe, Ehre und geschechtliche Identität,” in Barock: Neue Sichtweisen einer Epoche, ed. Peter Burgard (Vienna, 2001), pp. 161–76. All citations in this lecture are to the English version. My thanks to Careri for allowing me to quote from the latter (itself a translation from the original French). See also the discussion of the same episode in a somewhat later essay by Careri, “Le retour du geste antique: Amour et honneur à la fin de la Renaissance,” in “La Jérusalem delivrée” du Tasse. Poésie, peinture, musique, ballet, ed. Giovanni Careri (Paris, 1999), pp. 43–65. Another essay in that volume that bears on the topic is Gianni Venturi, “Armide ou le paysage au miroir,” pp. 229–49. Stanza 20 reads in the original: “Del fianco de l’amante (estranio arnese) / un cristallo pendea lucido e netto. / Sorse, e quel fra le mani a lui sospese, / a i misteri d’Amor ministro eletto. / Con luci ella ridenti, ei con accese, / mirano in vari oggetti un solo oggetto: / ella del vetro a sé fa specchio, ed egli / gli occhi di lei sereni a sé fa spegli.” Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Giorgio Cerboni Baiardi (Modena, 1991), XVI, xx, 1–8. And stanza 30: “Egli al lucido scudo il guardo gira, / onde si specchia in lui qual siasi e quanto / con delicato culto adorno; spira / tutto odori e lascivie il crine e ’l manto, / e ’l ferro, il ferro aver, non ch’altro, mira / dal troppo lusso effeminato a canto: / guernito è sí ch’inutile ornamento / sembra, non militar fero instrumento.” Ibid., XVI, xxx, 1–8. And from stanzas 34 and 35: “. . . squarciossi i vani fregi e quelle indegne / pompe, di servitú misera insegne; / ed affrettò il partire, e de la torta / confusione uscí del labirinto.” Ibid., XVI, xxxiv, 7–xxxv, 2. In the earlier words of the good magician of Ascalona: But when she leaves her precious love alone and goes off wandering in some other place, show yourselves, take this shield of diamond stone and raise it suddenly before his face as if it were a mirror. Let him look upon his semblance, now effeminate and base, and his soft clothing; at that sorry sight shamed scorn will put unworthy love to flight. Canto 14, stanza 77 In the original: “ ‘Ma come essa lasciando il caro amante / in altra parte il piede avrà rivolto, / vuo’ ch’a lui vi scopriate, e d’adamante / un scudo ch’io darò gli alziate al volto, / sí ch’egli vi si specchi, e ’l suo sembiante / veggia e l’abito molle onde fu involto, / ch’a tal vista potrà vergogna e sdegno / scacciar dal petto suo l’amor indegno.’ ” Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, XIV, 77, 1–8.

No doubt Careri is right . . . From stanza 21: “– Volgi,—dicea – deh volgi – il cavaliero / —a me quegli occhi onde beata bèi, / ché son, se tu no ’l sai, ritratto vero / de le bellezze tue gli incendi miei; / la forma lor, la meraviglia a pieno / piú che il cristallo tuo mostra il mio seno.” Ibid., XVI, 21, 3–8.

In a recent book, Careri considers . . . See Giovanni Careri, Gestes d’amour et de guerre. “La Jérusalem delivrée,” images et affects (XVIe–XVIIe siècle) (Paris, 2005), chaps. 5 and 6, “Le conflit des ressemblances. La ressemblance amoureuse” and “Le conflit des ressemblances. La ressemblance guerrière.” For Careri’s discussion of Annibale’s canvas, see pp. 172–76.

The second, more extended comparison . . . The discussion of Courbet that follows is based on Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London, 1990).

To give no more than the briefest indication . . . Other Realist paintings by Courbet that bear especially closely on the topic are his Wheat Sifters (1853–54) and Painter’s Studio (1854–55), for which see Courbet’s Realism, pp. 148–71.

It follows that Courbet and Caravaggio . . . On the production of effects of violence in Courbet when his art misfires, see the discussion of the Death of the Stag in Fried, Courbet’s Realism, pp. 184–88. And for a strictly literary problematic involving two competing modes of seeing or visualization and yielding effects of violence and shock analogous to those considered in this essay, see Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago and London, 1987), chap. 2, “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces.” Cropper’s observations on Caravaggio and Marino in “The Petrifying Art” are also to the point.

It is therefore intensely interesting . . . Charles Dempsey, “Caravaggio and the Two Naturalistic Styles: Specular versus Macular,” in Warwick, ed., Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, pp. 91–100. See also Chiara Gauna, “Giudizi e polemiche intorno a Caravaggio e Tiziano nei trattati d’arte spagnoli del XVII secolo: Carducho, Pacheco e la tradizione artistica italiana,” in Scritti d’arte: Studi di storia della critica d’arte dal XV al XIX secolo, “Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte” 64 (1998): 57–78. According to Dempsey, basing himself on Gauna’s “meticulously researched and conceptually brilliant article” (p. 96) but also further developing her argument, the first of the two rival conceptions of naturalism was championed by [Vicente] Carducho in his Dialogos (1633). This manner was identified by the noun

notes to pages 40–49

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borrones, meaning blotted stains, or macchie, in reference to painting alla macchia, a method above all identified with the style of the late Titian. It is this that I am calling the macular (or maculated) style, and it is familiar from many of Titian’s late paintings, among them the Diana and Actaeon in the National Gallery in London, the Martyrdom of S. Lorenzo in the church of the Gesuiti in Venice, or his last painting, the sublime Pietà in the Accademia. Carducho’s support for macular naturalism was founded in its mastery of the general optical effects regulating distinctions between areas defined by contrasts of light and shadow in nature, making discernible their determining principles. Although such macchie could be quite specific, as in the rendering of highlights sharply glancing from the surfaces of darker armor or cloth, the macular style depends upon a comprehensive rationalization of light, based upon the initial organization of a composition by laying in the principal areas of light and shade. (Indeed, as Baldinucci notes, the word macchie also denotes dappling on leaves or the light in a forest glade.) The alternative naturalist manner, identical to the new and revolutionary realism [Caravaggio’s] we have been defining here, was vigorously supported by [Francisco] Pacheco in the Arte de la Pintura of 1649. It was identified by the adjective acabado, meaning rifinito, or highly polished, like the surface of a mirror. As a “realistically” naturalist manner, acabadismo was specifically opposed to painting alla macchia, and just as specifically identified with Caravaggio, together with his Spanish followers Ribera and Pacheco’s son-in-law Velásquez, in particular the Velásquez of the bodegones, who, in Pacheco’s words, “followed Caravaggio in always keeping the natural model before him.” This polished manner, which I am denominating the specular style, is easily exemplified by paintings like Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus in the National Gallery in London and Velásquez’s Old Woman Cooking Eggs in the National Gallery of Scotland. Rather than giving a sense of a scene structured by light, it produces the effect of light reflecting, mirror-like, from the smooth surface of the painting itself, and hence of an actual world in a moment of flux. Even the most rigorously composed painting represents a fugitive instant in time, a split second that will be immediately shattered as the figures continue their actions, getting on with the haphazard business of life. Accordingly, Carducho vigorously attacked Caravaggio’s specular manner as capable only of rendering a particularized surface illusion; he wrote that Caravaggio’s reality was merely an inganno, a deception without artifice, an effect without substance, resulting in superficial copies in the absolutely literal sense of a mirrored instant in time. (p. 96)

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notes to pages 49–54

For Dempsey, Caravaggio was “the foundation for a new specular realist style in painting that . . . swept through Italy and the whole of Europe in the early decades of the seicento” (p. 99). (For obvious reasons, I will use the term “ mirrorlike” in preference to “specular” in Dempsey’s sense throughout these lectures.)

My final comparison calls for . . . The citation from Bersani comes from Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1977), p. 87, n. 17.

Also in a psychoanalytic vein . . . Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, 1988), p. 93. The entire chapter, “Ecce Ego,” bears closely on the topic. See also the essays gathered in Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et al. (1991; Stanford, 1993), esp. “The Unconscious, Nonetheless,” pp. 123–54. My sense of the pertinence of Borch-Jacobsen’s writings on mimesis to my arguments in these lectures owes almost everything to the work and conversation of Ruth Leys. See in this connection Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago and London, 2000). For René Girard on the mimetic origins of desire, see, e.g., his Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (1961; Baltimore and London, 1965).

My last comparison, in other words, . . . My citations from Borch-Jacobsen are, first, to his response to his critics in Léon Chertok, ed., Hypnose et Psychanalyse. Réponses à Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (Paris, 1987), p. 198 (my translation); and second (Borch-Jacobsen quoting Freud) to “The Unconscious, Nonetheless,” p. 153.

It is evident . . . For Dolci’s preparatory drawing (in an octagonal format), see Francesca Baldassari, Carlo Dolci (Turin, 1995), fig. 141a. Gabinetto dei Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, inv. n. 1173F. For more on Dolci and immersion, see the conclusion to this book.

There is more to say . . . The best overview of the Del Monte milieu, offering a comprehensive account of all the figures (painters, musicians, scientists) involved in the household, is Zygmunt Wazbinski, Il cardinale Francesco Maria del Monte, 1549–1626 (Florence, 1994), 2 vols. It offers copious documentation, including transcriptions of many important letters. Baglione reports that Cardinal del Monte invited Caravaggio into his home; see Hibbard, p. 352. The center of cultural activity surrounding Del Monte was the Palazzo Madama, which had been offered to the cardinal in 1589 by Ferdinando de Medici,

and it is there that Caravaggio seems to have resided between the autumn of 1595 and sometime in 1600. See also Luigi Spezzaferro, “La cultura del cardinal Del Monte e il primo tempo nel Caravaggio,” Storia dell’Arte 9–10 (1971): 57–92; Herwarth Röttgen, Il Caravaggio: Ricerche e interpretazioni (Rome, 1974), p. 148; Wazbinski, Il Cardinale Francesco Maria del Monte, 1:188; Creighton E. Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (University Park, Pa., 1995), pp. 111–34, esp. p. 133; and Langdon, pp. 96–130. As for Galileo, it seems that he visited del Monte in Rome twice, in 1611 and 1615, in other words well after Caravaggio had left the Palazzo Madama. On the other hand, there does seem to have been at least some correspondence between Galileo and Guidobaldo del Monte, Francesco’s brother, particularly in 1593. See Wazbinksi, Il Cardinale Francesco Maria del Monte, esp. 1:59, 108. The scholar who has most insisted on the affiliation between Caravaggio’s art and the scientific tendencies of his age is of course Ferdinando Bologna; see his L’incredulità del Caravaggio e l’esperienza delle “cose naturali” (Turin, 1992); and more recently “Caravaggio, the Final Years (1606–1610),” in The Final Caravaggio, exh. cat. (London, 2005), pp. 16–47.

Hals’s later portraits are remarkable for how boldly they confront the viewer with the gaze of the sitter, but the same tendency is nakedly present from the start, as in his earliest known painting, the crude but intense panel Portrait of Jacobus Zaffius (1611) in Haarlem, illustrated and discussed in Frans Hals, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C., London, and Haarlem, 1989–90), cat. 1, pp. 130–32. For Hals’s use of gazes to achieve a balance of internal versus external coherence in group portraiture, see Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles, 1999), pp. 321–51; and Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984 (Princeton, 1987), pp. 176–85. Cf. Wittgenstein: “We do not see the human eye as a receiver, it appears not to let anything in, but to send something out. The ear receives; the eye looks. (It casts glances, it flashes, radiates, gleams.) One can terrify with one’s eyes, not with one’s ear or nose. When you see the eye you see something going out from it. You see the look in the eye” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe [Oxford, 1967], para. 222, p. 40e).

Two other works by Caravaggio . . . By the same token, . . . In the words of Cesare Brandi, quoted in translation by Hibbard: “He did not draw, because the X-rays have shown that there is no compositional preparation underneath, but rather new beginnings, simultaneous and overlapping, with heads that almost always begin with an ear and that are then abandoned and covered up” (p. 29, n. 9). The reference is to Brandi, “L’‘epistème’ Caravaggesca,” Colloquio 5 (1974): 9–17, 10. Keith Christiansen is skeptical about Brandi’s findings on the grounds that X-rays can tell us where paint is thickest but not, or not usually, which part of the painting was done first (personal communication to the author). But then there is the finding reported by Sergio Benedetti that Judas’s ear in the Dublin Taking of Christ (to be discussed in lecture 6) was lowered two centimeters from its initial position, which suggests that it may well have been placed there early on and then adjusted as the rest of the composition took shape around it. (See Sergio Benedetti, Caravaggio: The Master Revealed, exh. cat. [Dublin, 1993–94], p. 34.) Similarly, in Caravaggio’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist in London, not only did the old woman accompanying Salome originally have a visible ear, but the latter had actually been incised in wet paint before being covered over by the artist (I owe this information to a recent paper by Larry Keith, “Caravaggio’s Technique Revisited,” given as a talk at a multisession symposium, “Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions,” organized at the 2008–9 meeting in Los Angeles of the Renaissance Society of America by Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone). In general, ears play an unusually prominent role in Caravaggio’s canvases throughout his career.

Caravaggio, Sick Bacchus (Bacchino Malato), Cinotti, cat. 52; Spike, cat. 3. The Bacchino Malato is generally regarded as a self-portrait on the basis of Baglione’s testimony. It has been proposed by Maurizio Calvesi that the figure derives from the melancholic figure of the suffering Christ, which was used as the frontispiece to Dürer’s large woodcut Passion (ca. 1511), a suggestion recently reasserted in the catalog for the 2007 exhibition dealing with Dürer’s influence in Italy. Keith Christiansen, however, in a fundamental essay, has suggested that the Bacchino’s pose derives from that one of the seated figures in the lower right-hand corner of Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of The Judgment of Paris (the same figure that would later provide a source for the naked woman in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe). Neither association in any way invalidates my reading of the picture as a disguised right-angle mirror-reflection self-portrait. See Maurizio Calvesi, “Caravaggio o la ricerca della salvazione,” Storia dell’arte 9–10 (1971): 93–142, esp. 98; Calvesi, La realtà di Caravaggio (Turin, 1990), pp. 224–28; Kristina Hermann-Fiore, “Il Bacchino malato autoritratto del Caravaggio ed altre figure bacchiche degli artisti,” in Caravaggio: Nuove riflessioni, ed. Dante Bernini (Rome, 1989), pp. 95– 134; Sergio Rossi, “Peccato e redenzione negli autoritratti del Caravaggio,” in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti. Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi, ed. Stefania Macioce (Rome, 1996), pp. 316–30; Dürer e l’Italia, exh. cat. (Rome, 2007), pp. 328–30; and Keith Christiansen, “Thoughts on the Lombard Training of Caravaggio,” in Come dipingeva il Caravaggio, ed. Mina Gregori (Milan, 1996), p. 18.

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As for the Musicians, . . .

Moreover, if we look more closely . . .

Caravaggio, The Musicians, Cinotti, cat. 38; Spike, cat. 6. The figure toward the right holding the cornetto and looking directly out of the canvas was first identified as a self-portrait by Longhi, an identification that has gained widespread currency. See Roberto Longhi, Il Caravaggio (Milan, 1952), p. 19; Hibbard, pp. 31–35; Mina Gregori in AC, cat. 69, pp. 228–35; and Langdon, pp. 109–11. Posèq has suggested that the scene might record an amateur reenactment of an ancient symposium, which may have been part of the festivities in the Del Monte household. See Avigdor W. G. Posèq, “Bacchic Themes in Caravaggio’s Juvenile Works,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 115 (1990): 113–21. The Musicians has generally been seen as the work referred to in Baglione’s Life of Caravaggio, where it is discussed in relation to the Lute Player: “This was the means by which he met Cardinal Del Monte, an art lover, who invited him to his home. In these quarters Michelangelo was given room and board, and soon he felt stimulated and confident. For Cardinal Del Monte he painted a Concert of Youths from nature, very well. He also painted a youth playing a lute, and everything seemed lively and real, such as the carafe of flowers filled with water, in which we see clearly the reflection of a window and other objects in the room, while on the petals of the flowers there are dewdrops imitated most exquisitely. And this picture (he said) was the best he had ever done.” For Baglione’s original text and a translation, see Hibbard, p. 352. (The Lute Player will be discussed in lecture 4.) The recent tendency to read this picture within the context of a homosexual culture fostered by Del Monte has been forcefully dismissed by Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, pp. 191–237.

Mina Gregori’s characterization of the ripples on the surface of the wine is from her catalog entry on the painting in AC, p. 244.

I now want to turn briefly . . . Caravaggio, Bacchus, Cinotti, cat. 13; Spike, cat. 14. The Bacchus was found and attributed to Caravaggio by Longhi but was universally recognized as autograph only after the 1922 exhibition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian painting at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence; see Matteo Marangoni, “Note sul Caravaggio alla mostra del Sei e Settecento,” Bolletino d’arte, no. 5 (November 1922): 224. Since then, the Bacchus has been considered a principal work of Caravaggio’s early period in Rome. The secondary literature on this picture is vast; see, e.g., Hibbard: “Here, more than in his previous pictures, we meet the peculiarly ambivalent nature of Caravaggio’s realism. . . . Caravaggio is attempting— unsuccessfully—to evoke an ancient and poetic world wholly outside his own. His pagan nude has the red face and hands of a man who is customarily clothed. Caravaggio paints the model more faithfully than he imagines the subject, which seems to be a mere pretext. (Is it seemly to show an antique god with dirty fingernails?)” (p. 40). See also Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “Au beauty parlour,” Traverses, no. 7 (1977): 74– 94; and Langdon, pp. 150–53.

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“Prolongation” is a term introduced in an analogous context by Stephen Melville in his review of Courbet’s Realism, “Compelling Acts, Haunting Convictions” (1991), in Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context, ed. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (Amsterdam, 1996), p. 190. It might be noted that the (seeming) ripples are at odds with the reflective properties of the surface of the wine, a fact I am tempted to associate with a passage from the introduction to Hegel’s Aesthetics cited and discussed in the last chapter of Courbet’s Realism as anticipating theoretically the anti-specular, anti-narcissistic import of Courbet’s project as I understand it. To quote again the last two sentences from that passage: “‘Even a child’s first impulse involves this practical alteration of external things [as a means of representing himself, Hegel implies]; a boy throws stones into the river and now marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something that is his own doing. This need runs through the most diversiform phenomena up to that mode of selfproduction in external things which is present in the work of art’” (Courbet’s Realism, p. 276; emphasis added). Not a narcissistic mirroring of the self in the undisturbed surface of a pond but a representation of the self in action (in the action of self-representation) by the disruption of a potentially reflective surface: is it legitimate to read a prefiguring of the Hegelian scenario in Caravaggio’s depiction of Bacchus’s arm, hand, and goblet of wine? Even if it is, of course, that act of reading takes place against the grain of the representational tenor of the painting as a whole, which as the secondary literature attests could hardly be more specular or discontinuous in its overall effect.

All this may seem to go quite far . . . That the seeming ripples are in fact spirals in the glass bowl of the goblet has gone unremarked by everyone (with a sole exception) who has written to date about the Bacchus. It was spotted years ago by Charles Dempsey, who passed the observation on to me. The exception is Wolfram Pichler in a recent article, “Die Evidenz und ihr Doppel. Über Spielräume des Sehens bei Caravaggio,” in Das Bild ist der König. Repräsentation nach Louis Marin, ed. Vera Beyer, Jutta Voorhoeve, and Anselm Haverkamp (Munich, 2006), pp. 125–56. But he appears to have picked up the observation from my “Thoughts on Caravaggio,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 13–56, which he criticizes in a footnote (see below). Two additional observations are pertinent to this paragraph. First, Bacchus himself seems clearly to wear makeup. Needless to say, this has often been given a sexual interpretation, but what I want to emphasize is that the impression of applied or supplementary coloring, of coloring that is avowedly

artificial rather than natural, amounts in this context to a thematization not of the act of painting as such—of painting in general, which is how Jean-Claude Lebensztejn reads it—but rather of the second or specular “moment” in my conjectural scenario of the painting’s production. “A travers l’histoire de l’imitation,” Lebensztejn writes toward the beginning of his article, “il se repète que la peinture est une cosmétique, mais que la cosmétique est le côté honteux de la peinture, sa matérialité mauvaise dans l’ordre de la représentation” (“Au beauty parlour,” p. 77). And a related detail: for all the elegance of the gesture with which Bacchus extends the goblet of wine, the fingernails of his left hand appear to be dirty (as Hibbard remarks in a passage cited above). Now one would not be surprised to discover traces of paint under a painter’s nails on his brush hand. But the perception of that detail, which takes place only at close range, produces a tiny effect of shock that reproduces in miniature the distancing effect of the picture as a whole.

One other, extremely important feature . . . The quotation from Gregori is to her entry on the painting in AC, p. 244. On an early morning visit to the Uffizi in April 1994, Elizabeth Cropper, Charles Dempsey, Ruth Leys, and I were able to look at the Bacchus under a strong light, and sure enough the head was there; the “canvas” was less certain, though there did seem to be a diagonal mark that might have been the vestige of one. My thanks to Caterina Caneva, deputy director of the Uffizi, for making our visit possible. The crucial early discussion of the “reflected” figure is by Marangoni in 1922 (see above). Marangoni’s commentary, quoted first by Lebensztejn in “Au beauty parlour” (p. 76) and then, from Lebensztejn, by Marin in To Destroy Painting (pp. 134–35), reads: In the center of the mirror created by the wine in the flask, a recent cleaning has revealed, as if reflected, the miniscule head of a young man that really does bring to mind the young Caravaggio’s physiognomic traits: large sockets, a broad-based nose, slightly snubbed, full lips and a half-open mouth. Here we have yet another reason, if another is needed, for including this work among the first to be painted by Caravaggio. My friend Carlo Gamba helped me to see the similarity between this little portrait and the figure that I, in my article in Dedalo, had taken for The Fruit Vendor cited by Lanzi . . . , a figure that, according to Gamba, could be that of a young man, and thus a kind of free selfportrait of Caravaggio as a young man. The likelihood of this assumption could be confirmed by Baglione’s testimony, for he claims that after Caravaggio left [the Cavaliere d’Arpino’s] “he tried to support himself by producing some small paintings of himself in the mirror, of which the first was a Bacchus with clusters of grapes of different kinds, made with great care, but in a somewhat dry manner.” This

Bacchus, as Longhi was the first to suggest, must be the one in the Uffizi, which would thus suddenly become not only an original but also a free self-portrait, given its close connection with the Little Fruit Vendor in the Borghese Gallery. Incidentally, Fiocco made me realize that Bacchus is the representation of a figure reflected in a mirror, for he holds the cup with his left hand. One must conclude, then, that the androgynous type, involving a combination of individual and ideal traits, that may be found in early works such as the Petrograd Bacchus [presumably the Lute Player in the Hermitage], The Fruit Vendor, The Lute Player, and in the young man in the Louvre’s Gypsy . . ., and even, I believe, in the Uffizi’s Medusa, is a product of Caravaggio having used himself as his own model. What Marangoni does not quite say (nor does Lebensztejn or Marin) is that the figure of Bacchus holding the cup with his left hand represents the painter painting the Bacchus with his right hand. This does seem to be the implication of Ágnes Czobor’s observation that “in testa [of the figure of Bacchus] si mette una corona di fronde e di grappoli d’uva e,—per rendere perfetto il giuoco—depone sul desco levigato, accanto al piatto della fruta, un fiasco di vin rosso, anzi, nella mano sinistra—poichè con la destra deve depingere—tiene una coppa colma di vino rosso” (“Autoritratti del giovane Caravaggio,” Acta Historiae Artium Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 2 [1954–55]: 206–7). This is said in the course of a discussion of the Bacchus as a self-portrait made with the help of a mirror, but nothing further is made of it by Czobor or anyone else. A further aspect of the contrast between goblet and flask concerns the slight but palpable temporal separation between the ripples/spirals in the goblet (whether they are read as markers of instantaneousness or of prolongation) and the tilted surface of the wine in the flask as well as the tiny bubbles that ring that surface, which together suggest that the flask has just been put down, that is, that Bacchus a moment ago poured wine from the flask into the goblet and then placed the flask on the low white tabletop separating him from the viewer before proffering the goblet to the latter (as Gregori, following Marini, remarks [AC, p. 241]). What makes the separation of those moments all the more suggestive—what makes it allegorical of the division between immersive and specular “moments” I have been analyzing— is the tension verging on contradiction between the implied previous action of Bacchus’s right hand (pouring the wine) and its present position and action (lightly fingering the bow of his sash). In view of all this (text and notes), I find Pichler’s remark in the article cited above that he finds my analysis of the goblet and wine in “Thoughts on Caravaggio,” which closely anticipates what I have said here, “zu stark auf den optischen Vibrationseffekt der Rille abhebt” (“Der Evidenz und ihr Doppel,” p. 147, n. 53) surprising, to say the least.

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Interestingly, the remark does not occur in another version of his article, “Il Dubbio e il doppio: Le evidenze in Caravaggio,” trans. Mauro Tosti-Croce, in Caravaggio e il suo ambiente. Ricerche e interpretazioni, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Julian Kliemann, Valeska von Rosen, and Lothar Sickel (Milan, 2007), pp. 9–33. Indeed, Pichler refers there to my “splendida analysi” of the Bacchus (p. 24, n. 50).

To underscore the obsessive nature . . . Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, Cinotti, cat. 51; Spike, cat. 77. The considerable controversy regarding the dating of this picture is reflected in the recent publications of the Galleria Borghese itself, which, over the past ten years or so, has oscillated between 1605–6 and 1609–10. For the earlier date, see Paolo Moreno and Chiara Stefani, Galleria Borghese (Milan, 2000), p. 298; the later date is proposed in Guida alla Galleria Borghese, ed. Kristina Hermann-Fiore (Rome, 1997), p. 61. This uncertainty is reflected in the recent monograph Caravaggio, ed. Gabriella Greco (Milan, 2007), which lists the painting’s date as “1605–1606 or 1610” (p. 282). The David is mentioned in a number of seventeenthcentury sources, the most important of which is undoubtedly Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni (1672). Bellori connects the painting to the patronage of Scipione Borghese, for whom Caravaggio painted a number of canvases, including the London Supper at Emmaus (in reality the latter was not commissioned by Borghese but rather was purchased by him from the Mattei at an early date, probably before 1616) and the Galleria Borghese Saint Jerome. Bellori writes: “For the same cardinal [Scipione Borghese] Caravaggio painted . . . the half-figure of David, who holds the head of Goliath by the hair, which is his own portrait. He holds the sword and is shown as a bareheaded youth with one shoulder emerging from his shirt; it is painted with the deep shadows that Caravaggio liked to use in order to give strength to his figures and compositions.” For Bellori’s text, see Hibbard, p. 367. Given the connection to Scipione Borghese posited by Bellori’s Life, scholars had long dated the work toward the end of Caravaggio’s Roman period, when the artist is known to have been in contact with the cardinal. In 1959, however, Roberto Longhi argued that stylistic affinities with the London Salome with the Head of John the Baptist suggest a later date, during the artist’s second period in Naples. This dating has been adopted by Calvesi, Rossi, Puglisi, Spike, Varriano, and others (it is the prevailing view, in other words). But the question remains open: to Keith Christiansen it has seemed that for many scholars the compelling nature of the biographical account—seeing the David as a work from the very end of Caravaggio’s career, made to send to the powerful cardinal in an attempt to obtain pardon for the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni—has taken precedence over stylistic considerations. “I believe,” Christiansen writes, “like Frommel, that the David is a late Roman work, for its style and technique announce the Seven

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Acts of Mercy rather than the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula; the current late date usually assigned to it has more to do with a romantic, biographical reading of the picture than an analysis of its style” (Keith Christiansen, A Caravaggio Rediscovered: The Lute Player, exh. cat. [New York, 1990], p. 52, n. 88). And in slightly greater detail: “I consider the Borghese David to be a late Roman work—not a painting of Caravaggio’s second Neapolitan period. As far as I can see, its point of comparison is with the Madonna di Loreto rather than with the Borghese Saint John the Baptist, and I do not believe the biographical subtext would make sense if it was painted in Naples” (Caravaggio: The Final Years, exh. cat. [London, 2005], p. 110). The earlier dating is also favored by David Stone, “In Figura Diaboli: Self and Myth in Caravaggio’s David and Goliath,” in From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism in Italy, ca. 1550–1650, ed. Pamela Jones and Thomas Worcester (Leiden and Boston, 2003), pp. 19–42; and Stone, “Self and Myth in Caravaggio’s David and Goliath,” in Warwick, ed., Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, pp. 36–46. Another scholar who favors a late Roman dating is Gianni Papi in his excellent short monograph, Cecco del Caravaggio (Soncino, 2001), pp. 16–17, who indeed believes the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Cecco served as the model for the figure of David. My thanks to Keith Christensen for discussing this matter with me.

Another difference . . . On the relationship between David’s and Goliath’s respective expressions, cf. Frank Stella’s powerful suggestion that “the glance of David can be seen as a different, distinct, continuing extension of time at odds with the fading temporal measurement expressed in the disjoined vision of Goliath, where one eye is fixed while the other forces a last blurred look at what it had experienced as reality” (Working Space [Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1986], pp. 104, 109).

Various other works invite discussion . . . Caravaggio, Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist, Cinotti, cat. 26; Spike, cat. 58. See also Gregori, AC, cat. 96, pp. 335–37; and Hibbard, pp. 249–51.

This impression is if anything . . . Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, Cinotti, cat. 28; Spike, cat. 69. There has been much debate about the dating of the two Salomes. The London painting has been dated to both of Caravaggio’s periods in Naples (i.e., 1606–8 and 1609–10). For the history of the controversy surrounding those dates, see Cinotti, pp. 453–57. Most recently, Dawson Carr has argued on stylistic grounds that the London painting must postdate the Madrid version (Christensen agrees). In his words: “It is clear that the London Salome was created in Caravaggio’s last years because it is an essay in laconic painting. It seeks to impart the gripping, emotive essence of the story with an austerely limited

use of paint and colour that anticipates The Denial of Saint Peter and The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. The finer tonal gradations of Caravaggio’s earlier work become more starkly contrasted in this painting, but not quite to the degree seen in the Denial and Saint Ursula. The relative solidity of the forms in this work would seem to place it shortly before the very last paintings, which would accord with the implied date of 1609 for the work mentioned by Bellori” (Caravaggio: The Final Years, p. 132). A similar date was proposed in Caravaggio e l’Europa: Il movimento caravaggesco internazionale da Caravaggio a Mattia Preti, exh. cat. (Milan and Vienna, 2005) cat. I, 9, pp. 164–65, entry by Paola Caretta and Vittorio Sgarbi. Spike, however, believes that the London version precedes the Madrid canvas.

LECTURE THREE: THE INVENTION OF ABSORPTION I think of the first development . . . For a detailed account of the evolution of an absorptive problematic in French painting and art criticism between the 1750s and the 1860s, see my trilogy Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980; Chicago and London, 1988); Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London, 1990); and Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London, 1996). I go on to consider the further vicissitudes of absorption, and the intimately associated issue of the relationship between work and beholder, in recent art photography in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (London and New Haven, 2008).

The first thing to make clear . . . On Giustiniani’s classical collection, and its publication in illustrated form in the Galleria, see Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton, 1996), pp. 64–105. Sergio Benedetti illustrates Valesio’s engraving and compares it to the seated protagonist in Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome in Montserrat in “Classical and Religious Influences in Caravaggio’s Painting,” in Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image, ed. Franco Mormando, exh. cat. (Boston, 1999), pp. 208–33, esp. p. 218. See also Salvatore Settis, “Images of Meditation, Uncertainty and Repentance in Ancient Art,” orig. 1975, trans. Peter Spring, History and Anthropology 1 (1984): 193–237. It is worth noting the compositional novelty of Giorgione’s picture. The Adoration of the Magi was one of the most common subjects in Renaissance painting. The Allendale Nativity, however, offers a new presentation of the subject, in which the main character—the infant Christ—is shifted from the center of the composition, which is now occupied

by the shepherds, who are wholly engrossed—absorbed—in adoring the Christ Child. The history of the painting’s attribution is fraught with controversy. In recent years, however, the painting almost universally has been given to Giorgione, an attribution that seemed to be confirmed during the 2006–7 exhibition in Washington, D.C., and Vienna, which allowed stylistic comparisons to be made with other paintings by him. See David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C., and Vienna, 2006–7), cat. 17, pp. 116– 19, entry by Mauro Luco. See also Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: The Painter of “Poetic Brevity” (Paris and New York, 1997), pp. 109–14 and 294–95. For arguments in favor of an attribution to the young Titian, see S. J. Freedberg, “The Attribution of the Allendale Nativity,” Studies in the History of Art 45 (Washington, D.C., 1993): 51–70. On Catena’s canvas, see Giles Robertson, Vincenzo Catena (Edinburgh, 1954), pp. 50–51, and The National Gallery Complete Illustrated Catalogue (New Haven and London, 2001), p. 104. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, ed. William Gaunt, 4 vols. (London, 1963), 4:128– 29; on the figure of Night, 135. I have slightly emended the first citation, which in the original confuses the Cumaean and the Erythrean sybils. On Michelangelo’s Night, see Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo. Sculptor, Painter, Architect, trans. Gaynor Woodhouse (Princeton, 1975), cat. 30, pp. 204–5. The basic discussion of the project is by de Tolnay, Michelangelo. III. The Medici Chapel (1948; Princeton, 1970). For a persuasive recent interpretation of Night and indeed the Medici Chapel as a whole in terms of a metaphorics of dead time, see Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, The Betty Allison Rand Lectures in Art History (Chapel Hill and London, 2001), pp. 219–31. On sleep as a modality of absorption, see Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, pp. 28–35, and lecture 5 in this book.

Another major painter who belongs . . . For the history of the attribution of this panel, see Eugenio Riccòmini, “Il Leonardo di Parma,” in Leonardo: Il Codice Hammer e la Mappa di Imola presentati da Carlo Pedretti. Arte e scienza a Bologna in Emilia e Romagna nel primo Cinquecento, exh. cat. (Bologna and Florence, 1985), pp. 141–42; and Galleria Nazionale di Parma. Catalogo delle opere dall’Antico al Cinquecento, ed. Lucia Forneri Schianchi (Milan, 1997), 1:136–37. On the sfumato technique, see Alexander Nagel, “Leonardo and sfumato,” Res, no. 24 (1993): 7–20; and Janis Bell, “Sfumato and Acuity Perspective,” in Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, ed. Claire Farago (Manchester and New York, 2008), pp. 161–88. See also John

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Shearman, “Leonardo’s Colour and Chiaroscuro,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 25 (1961): 13–47; and “Sfumato, Linien un Natur,” in Leonardo da Vinci Natur im Übergang; Beitrage zu Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, ed. Frank Fehrenbach (Munich, 2002): 229–56. Nagel, “Leonardo and sfumato,” p. 13. No doubt more could be said about Caravaggio’s possible indebtedness to Leonardo and the Leonardesque tradition in Milan and its environs. For one thing, it is undeniable that Leonardo introduced a new pitch of subjectivity and inwardness into the genre of the portrait, and it might even be argued that his most frequently painted subject, the Madonna and Child, allowed him to experiment with compositions that emphasize relationships describable in terms of absorption. But quite apart from the extraordinarily personal inflection that marks everything Leonardo did, nothing in his art is at all comparable to what I shall argue is the systematic minimalism of Caravaggio’s use of absorptive motifs and effects. Another possible source of indebtedness is Leonardo’s chiaroscuro (not just his sfumato), but the difference between the almost infinitely protracted reworking that one senses at work in a painting like the late Saint John the Baptist in the Louvre and the much more openly declarative use of light-dark contrast in all the relevant canvases by Caravaggio could hardly be more palpable. My thanks to Michael Cole for inviting me to think more about the CaravaggioLeonardo relationship, not that my brief discussion of it in this note is likely to satisfy him.

This is, of course, the logic of absorption in French midand late eighteenth-century painting as developed at length in Absorption and Theatricality. Interestingly, the latter book is criticized by Shearman in a footnote earlier in the same chapter. Shearman begins by citing my statement: “More nakedly and as it were categorically than the conventions of any other genre, those of the portrait call for exhibiting a subject, the sitter, to the public gaze; put another way, the basic action depicted in a portrait is the sitter’s presentation of himself or herself to be beheld. It follows that the portrait as a genre was singularly ill equipped to comply with the demand that a painting negate or neutralize the presence of the beholder . . .” (p. 109). And then sternly remarks: “It will be my contention here that these characteristics are not inherent to the genre, not necessary to its functioning, but were, on the contrary, a product of will and imagination in the Renaissance. If Fried means what he appears to mean, his comment exemplifies a too-common tendency to identify the creative legacy of the Renaissance with a norm, or with convention” (p. 108, n. 1). Maybe so, but did Shearman thereby consider himself absolved from the obligation to cite Absorption and Theatricality when it had clearly anticipated his own thoughts on the painting-beholder relationship? And in any case, might one not say that the “creative legacy of the Renaissance” amounted in this regard to the establishing of a norm or a convention? By the way, I suggest that Shearman’s notion that in front of pictures such as those he mentions “the viewer is made to feel that, in a sense, he ought not to be present” is somewhat overdone, if not indeed ahistorical in its generality.

Now let us look at one . . . The fullest discussion of Correggio’s picture is by John Shearman, who writes: “Raphael’s Tommaso Inghirami [in the Pitti] introduces a paradox. Can it be right to interpret a spectator-subject relationship when the subject is explicitly described as unaware of anyone but himself? There are a number of very beautiful, very imaginative portraits of this kind, that is, of the creatively distracted like Inghirami or the utterly absorbed reader such as the scholar—a priest, I think, or a monsignore reading his breviary—in Correggio’s picture in Castello Sforzesco, or of the man lost to the world altogether, in a state of reverie, as in the extraordinary Moretto in London [Portrait of a Man (Fortunato Martinengo?)]. In such portraits the reverie is descriptive not of a generalized state of mind, as it might still be in an idealized image, but of a particularized character—that happens, it seems, because the context of the state of mind is emphatically particularized in other ways, such as lighting, texture, environment, and not least by a descriptive affinity with the spectator. But I find that in such cases, when the viewer is made to feel that, in a sense, he ought not to be present, he is all the more aware that he is, that his position and affinity are peculiarly privileged” (Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1988 [Princeton, 1992], p. 131).

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Caravaggio, Penitent Magdalen, Cinotti, cat. 53; Spike, cat. 16. The painting is briefly mentioned by Giulio Mancini in his Considerazioni sulla pittura (1617–21), though he gives no more than the painting’s subject, “the Penitent Magdalen.” Relevant portions of Mancini’s text are transcribed and translated by Hibbard, p. 347. Although the first record of the painting places it in the Pamphili collection in 1657, it is generally assumed that the painting was executed during Caravaggio’s stay in the household of Cardinal del Monte. See Hibbard, pp. 50–53; Langdon, pp. 50–53; Robb, pp. 79– 80; and L’Idea del Bello: Viaggio per Rome nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori, exh. cat., 2 vols. (Rome, 2000), 2: cat. VII:2, pp. 276–77, entry by Luigi Spezzaferro.

The literature on the painting . . . Bellori’s remarks are transcribed and translated in Hibbard, p. 362. On Fillide Melandroni and Anna Bianchi, see Langdon, pp. 140–49; and Robb, esp. pp. 88–91. For Langdon’s remarks about Caravaggio’s originality, see p. 149.

Langdon’s remarks are mostly true . . . According to Langdon: “In Cardinal Del Monte’s collection there hung a copy of Titian’s Mary Magdalene (now in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence), then the most famous rendering of this theme” (p. 148). However, she does not give any citations for this assertion. The 1627 inventory of the Del Monte collection is rather vague, stating simply “una Maddalena di mano di Titiano con Cornice Indorata di palmi cinque, e mezzo.” For the Del Monte inventory, see Christoph Luitpold Frommel, “Caravaggios Frühwerk und der Kardinal Francesco Maria del Monte,” Storia dell’Arte 9–10 (1971): 5–52, esp. 35. On the Pitti Magdalen, see Harold Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. 1: The Religious Paintings (London, 1969), cat. 120, pp. 143–44. Stanley Cavell in a personal communication has suggested that the position of the Magdalen’s hands may express a private fantasy of motherhood, as if cradling an infant. Cf. John Spike: “The weeping girl’s fingers are not interlaced in the classic gesture of penitence; rather her hands are folded on her abdomen at which she looks tearfully and cradles in her arms. But this mother’s cradle is empty. It seems like she is weeping for a lost child. Her womb is a vessel without life, the painter tells us, like the empty vase on her dress” (p. 74).

I have used the phrase . . . Robb’s remarks are on p. 80.

Before leaving the Penitent Magdalen . . . In a not quite final version of her essay “Leonardo’s Trattato della Pittura, Nicolas Poussin, and the Pursuit of Eloquence in Seventeenth-Century France,” Pauline Maguire Robison quotes Leonardo in the 1651 editio princeps of his Trattato della pittura as saying that the artist should “ ‘observe and sketch briefly, with few lines, the actions of men as they occur accidentally, without their being aware of it. If they become aware of your observation, their minds will be occupied with you, which will make them abandon the energy their actions showed when their minds were wholly intent.’ ” The precise quotation is absent from the published version of her essay, which appears in Farrago, ed., Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, pp. 189–236. The editio princeps to which Maguire refers was first published “in Paris in 1651 in the original Italian by Raphael du Fresne, with a translation in French the same year by Roland Fréart Sieur du Chambray” (p. 189). Further on in the published essay Maguire writes: “The chapters in the Trattato concerning the depiction of figures in total concentration on the activity at hand accurately describe an aspect of Poussin’s achievement in the [Israelites Gathering Manna in the Wilderness] highly commended by Le Brun in his conférence [on that painting]. Leonardo’s pronouncements on the subject mark the first appearance in

France of a theoretical statement on the critical concept of ‘absorption’ that Michael Fried sees as occupying an important place in French painting and art criticism in the latter half of the eighteenth century, citing Poussin’s paintings as the model” (p. 216). On the issue of the subject’s unawareness of being beheld as a supposed criterion of naturalness in photography, see Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, esp. pp. 101–2 (on Susan Sontag on Walker Evans’s subway photographs), 134–38 (on Peter Galassi and Michael Kimmelman on Struth’s Pergamon Museum photographs).

Having said all this, . . . Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin, Cinotti, cat. 41; Spike, cat. 45. The painting was commissioned in 1601 and eventually acquired by the Duke of Mantua in 1607. There is some debate as to the exact dating of the painting’s execution, with most scholars favoring 1604–6 but some holding out for an earlier date. Among the latter are Pamela Askew, Caravaggio’s “Death of the Virgin” (Princeton, 1990), pp. 16–18, and the extremely knowledgeable and acute Keith Christiansen, who “see[s] no reason to dissociate its style from that of the second version of the Inspiration of Saint Matthew, delivered in 1602” (review of Askew, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 61 [1992]: 300). Catherine Puglisi, too, opts for an early date, 1601–3, in Caravaggio (London, 1998), pp. 185–88. Spike, by the way, who offers a date of circa 1605, remarks in his catalog entry, “The style of the painting has convinced most scholars that Caravaggio executed it before 1604” (p. 204). S. J. Freedberg, Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 65–68. Something of the effect of absorption and inwardness I have tried to describe is registered (but not analyzed or explained) by Jean-Luc Nancy, who writes: “On the threshold, all at once, a scene stands out. This scene is not staged for us, it is not laid out for the attention or the intention of a subject. Everything happens in an indifference to the visitor, and it even seems that it ought to remain hidden from whoever is not, already, one of a familiar circle. No one looks at us or invites us in. Indiscreet, we have, in sum, entered by force. But this force of intrusion is that of the scene itself. If one dared, one might say that it ravishes us. In any case, we are seized there, on the spot, in our very discretion” (“On the Threshold,” in The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf [1994; Stanford, 1996], p. 57).

Another thread in Freedberg’s remarks . . . For Askew’s multiply symbolic reading of the curtain, see Caravaggio’s “Death of the Virgin,” pp. 111–19. Christensen, however, is deeply skeptical of her conclusions (review,

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p. 299), as is Charles Dempsey, “Dormition with a Difference,” Times Literary Supplement, December 7–13, 1990, p. 1322. The notion that the curtain serves as a “resonator” or “intensifier” is indebted to Robb, who writes apropos of Caravaggio’s late Saint Johns: “It was marvelous what M could get out of a bolt of red cloth. It was a leit motiv in his work and never more intensely present than in these paintings of 1610, an intensifier of very different feelings, from the carnal through the tragic to the desolate, as if in itself it were a flame of human feeling, blazing or glowing against encroaching darkness” (p. 465).

The major painting that most interestingly . . . Caravaggio, Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Cinotti, cat. 44; Spike, cat. 33. In his Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti (Rome, 1642), Baglione states that Caravaggio painted the Incredulity of Thomas for Ciriaco Mattei: “Moreover, Signor Ciriaco Mattei succumbed to the propaganda [i.e., to favorable publicity put about by Caravaggio’s agent, Prospero Orsi]: for him Caravaggio had painted St. John the Baptist, the Lord going to Emmaus, and also St. Thomas who pokes his finger into the ribs of the Savior.” The painting, however, is first recorded in the Giustiniani inventory of 1638, which raises the possibility that the painting was given to Vincenzo Giustiniani as a gift by Mattei. For this hypothesis, see Langdon, p. 235. Francesca Cappelletti, however, has proposed that Caravaggio painted the Incredulity directly for the Giustiniani (“Gli affanni e l’orgoglio del collezionista. La storia della raccolta Mattei e l’ambiente artistico romano dal Seicento all’Ottocento,” in Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei, exh. cat. [Rome, 1995], pp. 39–54, esp. p. 46). For Baglione’s original text and a translation of it, see Hibbard, pp. 351–56, esp. p. 353. For the Giustiniani inventory, see Stefania Macioce, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: Fonti e documenti, 1532–1724 (Roma, 2003), p. 353. For an account of the controversy surrounding the dating and attribution of the Potsdam painting and its many copies, see Caravaggio e i Giustiniani. Toccar con mano una collezione del seicento, exh. cat. (Rome and Berlin, 2001), cat. D2, pp. 278–80. See Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (London, 1963). The success of Caravaggio’s Roman sojourn is largely indebted to the patronage he received from three families; the Del Monte, the Giustiniani, and the Mattei all played an important role in introducing Caravaggio into the competitive art market of Rome in the age of Clement VIII. Studies of Caravaggio’s patrons are many. Here it will have to suffice to list a few key studies regarding Caravaggio’s relationship to each family.

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For the Del Monte: Luigi Spezzaferro, “La cultura del Cardinal del Monte e il primo tempo del Caravaggio,” Storia dell’arte 9–10 (1971): 57–92; Frommel, “Caravaggios Frühwerk und der Kardinal Francesco Maria del Monte”; Maurizio Calvesi, La realtà del Caravaggio (Turin, 1990), esp. pp. 163–173; Denis Mahon, “The Singing ‘Lute-Player’ by Caravaggio from the Barberini Collection, Painted for Cardinal Del Monte”; Elizabeth Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193–212; Franca Trinchieri Camiz, “Music and Painting in Cardinal Del Monte’s Household,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 213–26; Zygmunt Wazbinski, Il cardinale Francesco Maria del Monte, 1549–1626 (Florence, 1994), 2 vols.; Creighton E. Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (University Park, Pa., 1995), pp. 111–34; Frommel, “Caravaggio, Minniti e il Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte,” in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti. Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi, ed. Stefania Macioce (Rome, 1996), pp. 18–41; Zygmunt Wazbinski, “Il viaggio del Cardinale Francesco Maria del Monte a Napoli negli anni 1607–1608,” in ibid., 42–62; Langdon, pp. 96–130. For the Giustiniani, recognition of their importance began in earnest with Luigi Salerno, “The Picture Gallery of Vincenzo Giustiniani,” Burlington Magazine 102 (1960): 21–27, 93–104, 135–48. Since then, much progress has been made in discerning the role that Vincenzo’s brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, played in the patronage of Caravaggio. Among the important contributions to this development is S. Danesi Squarzina, “Caravaggio and the Giustiniani Family,” in Macioce, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, pp. 94–122. These studies culminated in the extraordinary exhibition at the Palazzo Giustiniani in 2001 (Caravaggio e i Giustiniani), which brought together a substantial portion of the works listed in the early seventeenth-century inventories, including five prominent works by Caravaggio. See also Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, chap. 2, “Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Galleria: A Taste for Style and an Inclination to Pleasure.” For the Mattei, Francesca Cappelletti, Laura Testa and Creighton Gilbert have emphasized the role played by Ciriaco Mattei and his brother Cardinal Girolamo Mattei in fostering Caravaggio’s development. See the essays gathered in Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei, and (a brilliant study in this regard) Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, pp. 135–58. For Giulio Mancini, see Frances Gage, “Giulio Mancini’s ‘Considerazioni sulla Pittura’: Recreation, Manners and Decorum in Seventeenth-Century Roman Picture Galleries” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2001). The historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of the gallery picture in early modern Europe are complex and multifaceted. Most pressing among the historical forces at

work here seem to have been the broad diffusion of devotional pictures as an integral part of late medieval and Renaissance spirituality; the general rise in disposable income that allowed individuals outside of the ruling classes to own and collect works of art; and the rise of semiprivate spaces such as the studiolo in which early modern Europeans could use these newly purchased works not only as aids toward cultivated leisure but also as instruments in an orchestrated presentation of the self. A key work dealing directly with the emergence of what the author calls the “tableau,” Victor Stoichita’s L’Instauration du tableau: Métapeinture à l’aube des temps modernes (Paris, 1993)—in English The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge, 1997)—will be discussed in text and notes in lecture 5. On the half-figure format as such, see Sandra Gianfreda, Caravaggio, Guercino, Mattia Preti. Das halbfigurige Historienbild und die Sammler des Seicento (Emsdetten and Berlin, 2005). Of Caravaggio’s followers, Bellori remarks in his Life of the painter, “Since it was easy to find models and to paint heads from life, giving up the history painting appropriate for artists, these people made half-figures, which were previously uncommon” (quoted in the original and translation in Hibbard, p. 372). Apropos of the notion of the modern easel painting’s “homelessness,” here is an important nineteenth-century art writer, Etienne-Jean Delécluze, on what he saw as the unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable, advent of the category of the tableau d’histoire (or history painting, i.e., a superior form of easel painting) in the modern period. I cite the original French: “Entre la fin du XVIIe siècle et le commencement du XVIIIe se développa une idée nouvelle: on prétendit qu’à la faveur de la liberté du choix des sujets, le génie des artistes, dégagé de toute entrave, prendrait un essor plus hardi, plus vigoureux, et s’élancerait dans des sphères immenses et inconnues jusque-là. De cette époque date l’introduction de ce que l’on appelle encore aujourd’hui tableau d’histoire, oeuvre conçue et exécutée sans destination précise, sans que le sujet ait ordinairement aucun rapport avec l’édifice et la place que sa dimension et le hasard premettent de lui assigner, et qui, faute de cette dernière faveur, est enfin relégué dans un de ces hôpitaux de la peinture auxquels on donne le nom fastueux de musées” (M.E.J. Delécluze, Louis David, son école et son temps. Souvenirs [Paris, 1855], p. 403).

What more than anything else . . . Hibbard, p. 168. “Lastly, as I said, I think one should take care that the same gesture or attitude does not appear in any of the figures.” Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (New York and London, 1991), p. 76. Glenn Most devotes a superb chapter to Caravaggio’s painting in the context of earlier and later versions of the subject in

Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2005), pp. 160–214. Apropos of Thomas’s expression, he writes: “The upwardly directed furrows in Thomas’s forehead— they are incised so severely and emphasized so forcefully by the contrast of light and shadow that, after Jesus’s wound, they are the single most notable skin feature in the entire painting—indicate that his eyes are opened as wide, and the eyebrows pushed up as far, as they can possibly go. By contrast, the other two disciples’ brows are furrowed downward and their eyebrows are pulled together and down toward the bridge of their noses. In the semiotics of the expression of human emotion, the meaning of both aspects is unmistakable: the other two disciples are shown under the pressure of intense visual and mental concentration, but Thomas is shown in the grip of an overwhelming astonishment. The two other disciples, like doctors in the audience at a public anatomy lesson, are concentrated, observing, serious: they are careful and conscientious empirical investigators who are encountering an unusual phenomenon and want to be sure that no detail of it escapes their meticulous gaze. Thomas’s emotion is different: his eyes are open so wide that we might even say that he is no longer seeing in the conventional sense of the term. Instead, he has become the locus of a religious miracle” (pp. 200–201). On the strength of these observations, might we say that Thomas, but not the other disciples, is immersed, not merely absorbed, in what is taking place?

Several other features of the Thomas . . . Caravaggio, Saint Francis in Meditation, Cinotti, cat. 6; Spike, cat. 9.1. The tear in Thomas’s jacket is seen as taking part in a process of “Verdoppelung” by Wolfram Pichler, “Die Evidenz und ihr Doppel. Über Spielråume des Sehens bei Caravaggio,” in Das Bild ist der König. Repräsentation nach Louis Marin, ed. Vera Beyer, Jutta Voorhoeve, and Anselm Haverkamp (Munich, 2006), pp. 125–56, esp. pp. 150–56. See also Nicola Suthor, “Bad Touch? Zum Körpereinsatz in Michelangelo/ Pontormos ‘Noli me tangere’ und Caravaggios ‘Ungläubigem Thomas,’ ” in Der Stumme Diskurs der Bilder. Reflexionsformen des Ästhetischen in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Valeska von Rosen, Klaus Krüger, and Rudolf Preimesberger (Munich, 2003), pp. 261–81; and Marianne Koos, “Haut als mediale Metapher in her Malerei von Caravaggio,” in Weder Haut noch Fleisch. Das Inkarnat in der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Daniela Bohde and Mechthild Fend (Berlin, 2007), pp. 65–85. I owe the observation that Christ is wearing his shroud to Charles Dempsey. Apropos of Caravaggio’s treatment of male nipples, it is striking that when Rembrandt painted arguably his most “Caravaggesque” painting, The Angel Stopping Abraham from Sacrificing Isaac to God (1635) in the Hermitage, he

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depicted Isaac with a bare chest and conspicuous nipples. For a brief comparison of Rembrandt’s canvas to Caravaggio’s painting of the same subject in the Uffizi, see RembrandtCaravaggio, exh. cat. (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 97–103, entry by Duncan Bull. On the “femininity” of Christ in connection with Caravaggio’s Thomas, see also Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Aldershot, and Burlington, Vt., 2001), pp. 40–42. Glenn Most briefly discusses the skeptical implications of his subject in the afterword to his book (Doubting Thomas, pp. 223–26).

Another three-quarter-length religious painting . . . Caravaggio, Crowning with Thorns, Cinotti, cat. 89; Spike, cat. 38. For a brief summary of the current state of the question regarding dating and authorship, see Spike, pp. 176–77; and the entry by Wolfgang Prohaska in Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His World, exh. cat. (New South Wales and Victoria, 2003), cat. 6, pp. 90–91. Documents recently uncovered in the State Archive of Vienna lend strong support to the view that the Vienna picture is indeed the one described in the 1638 inventory of the Giustiniani collection. For an explanation of the documents and a discussion of the issue of dating, see Caravaggio e I Giustiniani, pp. 288–93. Van Mander’s brief notice of 1604 is quoted and translated in Hibbard, p. 344. The remarks by Keith Christiansen (paraphrasing Roberto Longhi) come from his fundamental article, “Caravaggio and ‘L’esempio davanti del natural,’ ” Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 421–45, 425. As he also writes: “[M]uch the most interesting and original use of these incised lines is a direct response to Caravaggio’s habitual practice—at least prior to 1605—of painting from models” (p. 427). Christiansen emphasizes that although live models had long been used by artists, the issue of figure drawing from the model took on added critical purchase in the early reception of Caravaggio: “[A]ll Caravaggio’s contemporaries viewed his practice of painting from a live model to be the single most outstanding feature of his work” (p. 22). He also illustrates and discusses the incisions in the Vienna Crowning (pp. 444–45). See also, in the last connection, Marco Cardinali, M. Beatrice De Ruggieri, and Claudio Falucci, “Incisions in Caravaggio’s Working Process, from the Illumination of the Subject to the Depiction of Shadows: A Revolution without Heirs,” trans. Paola Cardinali, Technologische Studien, Kunsthistorisches Museum 2 (2005): 50–71. On the use of models in the period, see also Jacob Hess, “Modelle e modelli del Caravaggio,” Commentari 5 (1954): 271–89; Christoph Luitpold Frommel, “Caravaggio und seine Modelle,” Castrum Peregrini 96 (71): 21–56; Elizabeth

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Cropper, “Michangelo Cerquozzi’s Self-Portrait: The Real Studio and the Suffering Model,” in Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift für Matthias Winner, ed. Victoria V. Flemming and Sebastian Schütze (Mainz am Rhein, 1996), pp. 401–12; Christiansen, “The Art of Orazio Gentileschi,” in Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy, exh. cat. (Rome, New York, and St. Louis, 2001– 2), pp. 3–37, esp. pp. 9–12; and Cropper, “Life on the Edge: Artemisia Gentileschi, Famous Woman Painter,” in ibid., pp. 262–81. In the last connection, see also Christiansen, “Becoming Artemisia: Afterthoughts on the Gentileschi Exhibition,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 39 (2004): 101–26, esp. 111. Christiansen notes that the seventeenth-century physician and collector (and patron of Caravaggio) Giulio Mancini warns in his Considerazioni sulla pittura (manuscript of ca. 1617–21) “that while painting from a model can produce good results with pictures of single figures, it does not work as well when painting a large narrative composition, ‘it being impossible to put a multitude of men in a room to represent a narrative . . . and have one who laughs or cries or feigns walking while he stands still in order to be copied’ ” (“Caravaggio and ‘l’esempio davanti del naturale,’ ” p. 422). For Mancini’s remarks on Caravaggio in the original and in translation, see Hibbard, pp. 346–51. Roughly fifty years later, Giovanni Pietro Bellori describes Caravaggio’s posing of his models “in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark” (from his Le vie de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni [1672], quoted and translated in Hibbard, p. 364). Bellori also criticizes the Contarelli Chapel pictures, and characterizes Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul in the Cerasi Chapel as “completely without action” (ibid., p. 366). Christiansen rightly emphasizes the need to understand crucial aspects of the appearance of Caravaggio’s paintings as deriving from the use of models.

In addition, Christ’s state of mind . . . Robb, p. 394. The “Servant of Adonai” citations are from Isaiah, chap. 53. My thanks to the late Salvatore Camporeale for pointing these out to me.

A particularly telling detail . . . The two most important influences on Caravaggio’s depiction of the Passion are Dürer and Titian. Dürer’s printed scenes of the Passion were broadly circulated throughout Europe and became an important influence on Italian depictions of Christ’s Passion. Dürer’s versions of Christ Crowned with Thorns are all generically related, drawing a stark visual contrast between the passivity of the suffering Christ and the vicious mocking of the tormentors. This is especially true in

the Albertina Passion (ca. 1494), the small woodcut Passion (published in 1511), and the engraved Passion of 1512. See F.W.H. Hollstein, German Engraving, Etchings and Woodcuts, ca. 1400–1700, ed. K. G. Boon and R. W. Scheller (Amsterdam, 1954), 73 vols., 7: nos. 110, 143, and 9, respectively. Equally important, perhaps, for the Vienna Crowning was a painting of the same subject by Titian, which was held in the Milanese church of Santa Maria delle Grazie until 1797 when it was taken by Napoleon (it is today in the Louvre). See Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. 1: The Religious Paintings, cat. 26, pp. 82–83. On the passivity of activity in Courbet, or to put this slightly differently, on the role of automatism in his art, see Fried, Courbet’s Realism, pp. 182–84, 278–80. For the citations from Marino, see Robert Enggass and Jonathan Brown, eds., Italian and Spanish Art, 1600–1750: Sources and Documents (Evanston, 1970), pp. 31–32. In the original: “Altrettanto in questa maravigliosa dipintura di Cristo può contemplare l’anima cristiana: disegno interno e disegno esterno: amore e dolore: l’uno nello spirito, l’altro nel senso: l’uno nell’intenzione, l’altro nell’effetto: l’uno nel volere, l’altro nell’esseguire: con l’uno offerisce, con l’altro sofferisce, con l’uno elegge di patire, con l’altro realmente patisce, con l’uno, nel didentro si contenta di sostenere una morte brutta e vituperevole per la salvezza del genere umano, con l’altro si espone e sottopone a tutti que’ martiri e supplici che poteva meritare il peccato degli uomini” (Giovanbattista Marino, Dicerie Sacre e la Strage de gl’Innocenti, ed. Giovanni Pozzi [Turin, 1960], p. 156). For more on Caravaggio and Marino, see esp. Cropper, “The Petrifying Art”; and Cropper, “Caravaggio and the Matter of Lyric,” in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. Genevieve Warwick (Newark, Del., 2006), pp. 47–56. Cf. Cavell: “If I say that any action can be done actively or passively, then I should say that an action done through will is done passively. I realize that one’s first intuition here, supposing the issue is clear enough to excite intuition, is likely to run the other way. But that would be the will’s doing. To act through will is to be commanded by oneself, perhaps driven; it is to be a good soldier. No doubt this is in general better than being a bad soldier. But it is still not being the initiator of one’s commands, hence not being in a position, no matter one’s private feelings, of countermanding them” (Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy [Oxford and New York, 1979], p. 384). The last sentence but one before this citation reads: “For any performance or deed can be done through will or through grace” (ibid.). In a paper read at the 2009 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Erin Benay argued persuasively that in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Rome the Shroud of Turin was intimately associated with the Doubting Thomas theme and more broadly with the wounds of Christ, which helps explain Marino’s interest in the topic. See Benay, “The Pursuit of Truth and the Doubting Thomas

in the Art of Early Modern Italy” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2009).

Significantly, there exists a series . . . On Orazio’s Christ Crowned with Thorns, see the entry by Keith Christiansen in Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 23, pp. 130–33. “The way the figure on the right roughly grips Christ’s wrist to make him hold a mock scepter demonstrates just how familiar Orazio was with the psychology of torture,” Christiansen remarks (p. 133). See also Orazio’s treatment of the same subject in a fresco in San Venanzio, Fabriano (ca. 1613–17), illustrated in ibid., p. 121, fig. 51. In this version, the scepter appears to be clasped between Christ’s hands, which in turn are pressed between his knees. In other words, he is not exactly shown holding it and yet it is held. On Manfredi’s Crowning, see Nicole Hartje, Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582–1622). Ein Nachfoler Caravaggios und seine Europäische Wirkung (Weimar, 2004), cat. A13, pp. 319–21. Spada’s painting may have been commissioned by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (later Pope Urban VIII) during his period as papal legate in Bologna (1611–14). Upon his election to the papacy in 1623, Urban VIII left a number of works to his brother, Carlo Barberini, among which is a painting of this subject by Spada. See Caravaggio e i suoi: Percorsi caravaggeschi in Palazzo Barberini, exh. cat. (Rome, 1999): cat. 18, pp. 62–63. Honthorst’s canvas came to light in the late 1990s when it was purchased by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is therefore not discussed in the most recent catalogue raisonné, J. Richard Judson and Rudolf E. O. Ekkart, Gerrit van Honthorst, 1592–1656 (Ghent, 1999), nor in the most recent catalogs of the museum itself. Since its discovery, however, it has been featured in several international exhibitions, notably The Genius of Rome, 1592–1623, exh. cat. (London and Rome, 2001), cat. 119, p. 319; and Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His World, cat. 29, pp. 136–37. On Valentin’s crowning, see Rüdiger van der Heiden, Die Alte Pinakothek: Sammlungsgeschichte Bau und Bilder (Munich, 1998), p. 556; and Marina Mojana, Valentin de Boulogne (Milan, 1989): pp. 88–89. Interestingly, there is another painting of this same subject by Valentin, also in the Alte Pinakothek, which is significantly different in its setting and general tone. The scene is no longer a nocturne, but seems to be lit by a strong light from the upper left. In addition, the composition has been expanded to include six tormentors. See Mojana, Valentin de Boulogne, pp. 64–65. Ter Bruggen’s painting has been in private collections since the seventeenth century, and was essentially unknown until it

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was purchased by James Fairfax in 1999. It was first brought before the public in the exhibition Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His World, cat. 16, pp. 110–11. See also Richard Beresford and Peter Raissis, The James Fairfax Collection of Old Master Paintings, Drawings and Prints (Sydney, 2003), pp. 42–45.

Robb for one has no doubts. . . . Robb, p. 394, quotation slightly revised. Apropos of the notion of conversion, see Pamela Askew, “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision,” in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. La vita e le opere attraveso I documenti, ed. Stefania Macioce, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Rome, 1996), pp. 248–69.

latter could hardly be expected to feel on command” (Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting [Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983], p. 71).

In closing, I want to call attention . . . For Courbet’s Portrait of Baudelaire, see T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973; Princeton, 1982), pp. 74–76; Fried, Courbet’s Realism, p. 220; and Gustave Courbet, exh. cat. (Montpellier, Paris, and New York, 2007–8), cat. 62, pp. 198–99, entry by Sylvain Amic.

LECTURE FOUR: SKEPTICISM, SHAKESPEARE, ADDRESS, DENSITY

On Caravaggio’s art in relation to contemporaneous natural philosophy, see above all Ferdinando Bologna, L’Incredulità del Caravaggio e l’esperienza delle “cose naturali” (Turin, 1992), esp. chap. 4, “Il ‘naturalismo’ di Caravaggio.” Elizabeth Cropper remarks that Bologna stresses Caravaggio’s connection “as a naturalist painter to the natural philosophy of Galileo in a shared culture to which the Del Monte family made important contributions” (“Caravaggio and the Matter of Lyric,” p. 48). Cropper also notes that “Galileo’s own experimentation began in the late 1580s, when, as recorded by his pupil Viviani: ‘He recognized that the effects of nature, however minimal and not worth observing they appeared, should never be dismissed by philosophers, but all equally and greatly prized; and he used to say that nature made much with little, and that all of her operations were equally marvelous’ ” (p. 49, emphasis added; cited from Bologna, L’Incredulità, p. 294). The notion of effects so minimal as to seem not worth observing but which nevertheless turn out to be crucial bears a suggestive relation to the expressive and gestural minimalism I have been focusing on in this lecture. Another important albeit problematic study of Galileo as natural philosopher is Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Princeton, 1987); see Cropper’s essay for a brief discussion of his contribution as well as of the criticisms that have been made of certain of his claims. See also Eileen Adair Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton, 1997); and Horst Bredekamp, Galilei der Künstler. Die Zeichnung, Der Mond, die Sonne (Berlin, 2007).

To sum up my argument in lecture 3 . . .

In any case, it is worth noting . . .

In stating the foregoing . . .

Apropos of the Crucifixion of Saint Andrew in Cleveland, a work discussed in lecture 4, S. J. Freedberg remarks that “the sense of authenticity in the emotions that Caravaggio depicts is such that we must force ourselves to realize that these countenances and gestures are not ‘records’; they are creative imaginings of the artist, who has felt in himself and then projected on the emotionally inert models what the

On the philosopher’s settling for the notion of belief “to name our immediate or absolute relation to the world,” see Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York, 1987), pp. 7–8. Cavell’s book gathers four previously published essays on Shakespeare (on King Lear, Coriolanus, Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale), plus an extended discussion of Othello taken from his

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Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, Cinotti cat. 47, Spike cat. 49. See Paolo Moreno and Chiara Stefani, Galleria Borghese (Milan, 2000), pp. 192–93.

Even among the four paintings . . . De Piles’s complete list can be found in Elizabeth G. Holt, Literary Sources of Art History: An Anthology of Texts from Theophilus to Goethe (Princeton, 1947), pp. 415–16.

All this is something new . . . Early in his career Longhi considered the Vienna Crowning a faithful copy of a lost painting by Caravaggio. He attributed the painting to one of Caravaggio’s Neapolitan followers, Giovanni Battista Caracciolo (also called Batistello). However, later in his life Longhi became less adamant in his dismissal of the painting, and by 1968 had come to accept it as an autograph work. See Roberto Longhi, “Battistello Caracciolo,” L’Arte 18 (1915): 120–37; Longhi, “Ultimi studi sul Caravaggio e la sua cerchia,” Proporzioni 1 (1943): 5–63; Mostra del Caravaggio e dei Caravaggeschi, exh. cat. (Milan, 1951), cat. 59, p. 41; Longhi, Caravaggio (Rome, 1968), p. 42.

Two more sets of remarks . . . This paragraph is indebted to discussions with Walter Benn Michaels.

book The Claim of Reason, and adds a long introduction that contains a new reading of Antony and Cleopatra. On the thesis that Shakespearean tragedy “is an interpretation of what skepticism is an interpretation of,” see ibid., pp. 5–6. On Othello’s “plac[ing] a finite woman in the place of God,” see ibid., p. 35. On Leontes’ inability to recognize his son as his own, see ibid., p. 203. On Coriolanus’s hunger “to lack nothing,” see ibid., p. 149. On Hamlet’s inability to take the burden of human existence upon himself, see ibid., p. 187. Cf. the Cavell-influenced but also brain-science-inflected discussions of Coriolanus and Othello in Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2000), chap. 3, “Finding the Right Touch: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as Type and Token,” and chap. 4, “The Tragic Power of Imagining in Shakespeare’s Othello.”

All this in turn has much to do . . . The long quotation beginning “My intuition is that the advent of skepticism . . .” and the shorter one that immediately follows it come from Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, p. 3. “Knowing and Acknowledging” appears in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York, 1969), pp. 238–66. In that essay Cavell writes: “[The skeptic] says that the other alone knows [that he is in pain], not that the other alone can acknowledge. But what is the difference? It isn’t as if being in a position to acknowledge something is weaker than being in a position to know it. On the contrary: from my acknowledging that I am late it follows that I know I’m late (which is what the words say); but from my knowing I am late, it does not follow that I acknowledge I’m late— otherwise human relationships would be altogether other than they are. One could say: Acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.)” (p. 257, emphasis in original). And ventriloquizing the position of the skeptic, Cavell adds: “[I] am filled with this feeling—of our separateness, let us say—and I want you to have it too. So I give voice to it. And then my powerlessness presents itself as ignorance—a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack” (p. 263). See also Cavell’s discussion of the “specialness in the example of pain” (pp. 264–66). On “Knowing and Acknowledging” in relation to the essay on Lear, see Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, p. 5. On “a metaphysically desperate degree of private bonding,” see ibid., p. 10. On the “standing possibility of death-dealing passion,” see ibid., p. 6, quoted from Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Cambridge, New York, and Oxford, 1979), pp. 451–52.

Another passage from . . . The Claim of Reason, p. 423. Actually, Cavell writes: “On the one hand it seems to me that . . . my taking you as human

depends upon nothing more etc.” (emphasis added). And then: “On the other hand I feel that the other, some other, can still tell me of, or show me, his or her existence; that he or she will be able to step outside their confinement from me. . . . I do not, that is to say, know whether to take it that I can never be certain of the existence of others on the basis of my empathic projection with them, or not so to take it” (ibid., emphasis added). Further on he remarks: [The concept of “empathic projection”] emerged [in his previous pages] as little more than a dummy concept for something that must be the basis for my claims to read the other, something that I go on in myself in adopting, or calling upon, my attitude toward other human beings. Even so, I can see two suspicions over it. First: Isn’t the wish for such a concept really a persistence of the idea that the other is “like” oneself, that whatever one can know about the other one first has to find in oneself and then read into the other (by analogy): whereas the essence of acknowledgment is that one conceive the other from the other’s point of view. Moreover, the concept makes one’s knowledge of the other seem to be something one engages in afresh, as a special feat, in each case—not in each case of another, which is fair enough; but in each case in which one undertakes to know another. Whereas knowing others is, barring brain damage or some equal disaster, just a fact about our capacities as knowers; others are, as it were, among the items of our knowledge. If you wish to say that we have somehow to get over to the other (or inside) then this is something already true of us before a given other appears upon the scene. . . . Second: Doesn’t the concept of empathic projection make the idea of knowing others too special a project from the beginning, as if the knowing of objects could take care of itself, whereas what goes into the knowing of others is everything that goes into the knowing of objects plus something else, something that, as it were, animates the object? It might in fact be the case that this is what knowledge of others is like. But that would be an empirical claim, for which philosophers certainly have no particular evidence. It might also be true that this is a fantasy of knowledge which we then project into the object of knowledge, thus producing the idea of the other as a material object plus something more. (pp. 440–41, emphasis in original) The question, or a question, that then arises is to what extent such considerations are modified or inflected by the fact that we are dealing with paintings rather than with actual persons. I do not pretend to have done justice to the subtlety of Cavell’s thought in the above. The whole of part four of The Claim of Reason, “Skepticism and the Problem of Others,” bears on the present issue. One other quotation from the introduction to Disowning Knowledge seems especially

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suggestive here: “Hegel says that with the birth of Christianity a new subjectivity enters the world. I want to say that with the birth of skepticism, hence of modern philosophy, a new intimacy, or wish for it, enters the world; call it privacy shared (not shared with the public, but from it)” (p. 21). The complementary work of absorption—as of the Shakespearean soliloquy?—would then be to include a certain public— the beholder, the audience—in that wished for intimacy and shared privacy. For Cavell on Descartes in the Meditations, see Disowning Knowledge, p. 127; Claim of Reason, pp. 482–83.

For Cavell, as has emerged, . . . The relation of Shakespeare to Catholicism is an area of intense controversy among scholars, but see, e.g., Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, 2001); Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York and London, 2004), chap. 3, “The Great Fear,” and pp. 302–22 (on Hamlet, Purgatory, “inwardness”); Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard, eds., Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (New York, 2003); and David N. Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark, Del., 2008). See also Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594 (New Haven and London, 1995), esp. chap. 4, “Religion”; chap. 9, “John Shakespeare’s Catholic Testament”; and chap. 10, “Lancashire.” My thanks to Richard Halpern for guiding me through this fascinating material as well as for the earlier references to Spolsky’s Satisfying Skepticism.

My second set of remarks . . . One way of describing the larger trajectory of these lectures might be to say that they begin (with Boy Bitten by a Lizard) in the most secluded imaginable situation (the painter, the canvas on the easel, the mirror, in short the painter’s studio), which then turns out to comprise within itself the larger historical framework (the state of painting in late sixteenthcentury Italy, the contemporary art world in Rome, the rise of the natural sciences, the vicissitudes of Catholicism in the age of Counter-Reform, the crisis of skepticism). My thanks to Ralph Ubl for urging this formulation on me. On the theme of the artist’s studio in Rembrandt and Velásquez, see Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others (New Haven and London, 2005); and on the studio more broadly, see Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, eds., Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005). The most suggestive and sustained reading of the Sonnets remains Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1986).

I now want to change direction . . . This is an argument that Belting has developed in a number of places. See, e.g., Hans Belting, Giovanni Bellini: Pietà.

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Ikone und Bilderzählung in der venezianischen Malerei (Munich, 1985); Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London, 1994), esp. pp. 409–57; and Belting, “The Invisible Icon and the Icon of the Invisible: Antonello and New Paradigms in Renaissance Painting,” in Watching Art: Writings in Honor of James Beck, ed. Lynn Catterson and Mark Zucker (Perugia, 2006), pp. 73–84. John Shearman, Only Connect . . . : Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1988 (Princeton, 1992).

One early example . . . Caravaggio, Boy with a Basket of Fruit, Cinotti, cat. 49; Spike, cat. 2. Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit, Cinotti, cat. 32; Spike, cat. 11. Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge and New York, 1989), p. 87. See also Michel Butor, “La Corbeille de l’Ambrosienne,” in Répertoire, vol. 3 (Paris, 1968), pp. 43–58; and Roberto Longhi, Caravaggio, ed. Giovanni Previtali (Rome, 1982), pp. 46–48. Bann writes: “Caravaggio’s essays in still life are at the same time essays in the art of presentation: they seek to exhaust and transcend representation by integrating every element in a concerted movement, which is expressed in and through the object but seeks at the same time to annul it as an object. Such a process is accurately called not ‘figuration’ but ‘transfiguration,’ without prejudice to the religious and cultural aura which that term implies” (p. 87). He goes on to say: “Caravaggio is envisaging a viewer who does not ‘see’ but is ‘shown,’ in term of Diderot’s distinction” (ibid.), which leads to a consideration of my work on absorption and theatricality (pp. 89–90).

More pointedly, the Uffizi Bacchus . . . A leading predecessor work is Raphael’s so-called Raphael and His Fencing Master (1518) in the Louvre, discussed by Shearman in Only Connect, p. 140.

Or, to take a picture not yet discussed . . . Caravaggio, Saint John the Baptist with a Ram, Cinotti, cat. 59; Spike, cat. 29. The subject of the painting has been much disputed. In 1642 Baglione referred to a painting of “San Giovanni Battista” in the Mattei household, which has been identified with the Capitoline canvas. Another early source, however, refers to the painting as a shepherd boy, a “Pastor friso.” While most scholars have accepted the former identification, Creighton Gilbert has argued forcefully, if not wholly persuasively, in favor of the latter. See Creighton E. Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (University Park, Pa., 1995), pp. 1–97; and Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei, exh.

cat. (Rome, 1995), cat. 2, pp. 120–23. Keith Christiansen raises telling objections to the “Pastor friso” identification in “Thoughts on the Lombard Training of Caravaggio,” in Come dipingeva il Caravaggio. Atti della giornata di studio, ed. Mina Gregori (Milan, 1996), p. 15. Another line of interpretation favors an identification of Caravaggio’s youthful protagonist as Isaac, depicted a few moments after the breaking off of the sacrifice by his father, Abraham; the ram would therefore be the animal provided to replace the youth. See Conrad Rudolph and Steven F. Ostrow, “Isaac Laughing: Caravaggio, Non-traditional Imagery and Traditional Identification,” Art History 24 (November 2001): 646–81. I am out of my iconographic depth here, and will continue with the traditional identification as John the Baptist. S. J. Freedberg, Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983), p. 54. Slightly further on Freedberg writes: Yet, even as it inescapably demands relationship, the image retains the character of a thing apart from us: a presence and a personality that Caravaggio has objectified. The objectivity is not just in the painter’s truth of physical description but also in the psychological characterization, and beyond that it arises from Caravaggio’s management of the aesthetic factors of which the painting is composed. The latter are easier to explain: the planar setting of the body; the self-containing, regulating arrangement of the limbs into a contrapposto; the logic of an evident geometry that relates the image to the picture field and seems to lock it there, holding it thus separate from us. (pp. 54–55) Freedberg’s emphasis on separation as well as immediacy is consistent with my understanding of the dynamic of what I am calling address, or perhaps more accurately with elements at once of address and of the “moment” of specularity.

A somewhat earlier canvas . . . Caravaggio, The Lute Player, Cinotti, cat. 24; Spike, cat. 10.1. On the relation of Caravaggio’s work to the lyric tradition, see Elizabeth Cropper, “Caravaggio and the Matter of Lyric,” in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. Genevieve Warwick (Newark, Del., 2006), pp. 47–56, esp. p. 60 (for both citations); and Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193–212. The Hermitage Lute Player belonged to Giustiniani, but Caravaggio made a close variant of it for Del Monte, no doubt during the period he was a member of the latter’s household in the Palazzo Madama. This is not the place to summarize all we know—thanks to scholars such as Keith Christiansen, Luigi Spezzaferro, and the late Franca Trinchieri Camiz—about the probable identity of the singer, the specific pieces of vocal music depicted in the painting,

and Del Monte’s central role in the thriving Roman musical culture of his time. What seems worth stressing is the perfect fit between the Lute Player’s intimate yet high-keyed address to the viewer and the tastes of its first, target audience of elite, ambitious, highly cultured collectors who appear to have taken special pleasure in being engaged pictorially in the way Cropper describes. See also Christiansen, A Caravaggio Rediscovered: The Lute Player, exh. cat. (New York, 1990), which focuses on a later replica by Caravaggio of the Hermitage canvas.

Another work of around the time . . . Caravaggio, Eros Triumphant, Cinotti, cat. 1; Spike, cat. 26. On this fascinating work, see, e.g., Herwarth Röttgen, Caravaggio. Der irdische Amor, oder, Der Sieg der fleischlichen Liebe (Frankfurt am Main, 1992); Caravaggio e i Giustiniani. Toccar con mano una collezione del seicento, exh. cat. (Rome and Berlin, 2001), cat. D3, pp. 282–86, entry by Silvia Danesi Squarzina; and Rudolf Preimesberger, “Michelangelo da Caravaggio—Caravaggio da Michelangelo. Zum ‘Amor’ der Berliner Gemäldegalerie,” in Der stumme Diskurs der Bilder. Reflexionsformen des Ästhetischen in her Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Valeska von Rosen, Klaus Krüger, and Rudolf Preimesberger (Berlin, 2003), pp. 243–60. According to Mina Gregori, “Sandrart, who saw the picture in Giustiniani’s palace between 1629 and 1635, records that it was hung in a gallery so that it was the last picture a visitor would come upon, and that it was covered by a curtain, probably not only for reasons of decency and morality, but also to enhance the surprise aroused in the spectator by this provocative nude painted from life” (in AC, p. 277). I thought I was alone in reading the boy’s gesture in these terms, but Helen Langdon draws the same conclusion in her biography of the painter (p. 215). For the identification of the boy as the young Cecco and more broadly on his relations with Caravaggio between roughly 1601 and (quite possibly) the master’s death, see Robb, esp. pp. 194–96; and the basic study by Gianni Papi, Cecco del Caravaggio (Soncino, 2001). Caravaggio’s sexual orientation has been the subject of much discussion and indeed considerable dispute. The most evenhanded appraisal of the historical evidence can be found in Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, pp. 191–237.

One last group of paintings . . . Caravaggio, Head of Medusa, Cinotti, cat. 11; Spike, cat. 12. Baglione reports that the painting was given to Grand Duke Ferdinando de’Medici by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte: “[Caravaggio] made a head of a terrifying Medusa with vipers for hair placed on a shield, which the Cardinal

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sent as a gift to Ferdinando, Grand Duke of Tuscany.” See Hibbard, p. 353. The secondary literature on the Head of Medusa is considerable. See esp. L’Anima e il volto. Rittratto e fisiognomica da Leonardo a Bacon, exh. cat. (Milan, 1998–99), pp. 182–83, 643–57 (on the restoration of the painting); Caravaggio: La Medusa. La splendore egli scudi da parata del Cinquecento, exh. cat. (Milan, 2004), essays by Luigi Spezzaferro, Susanne E. L. Probst, Paulo Moreno, Francesco Rossi, and Giacomo Berra; and Klaus Krüger, “Un’immagine inconcepibile: La Medusa di Caravaggio,” in Caravaggio e il suo ambiente. Ricerche e interpretazioni, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Julian Kliemann, Valeska von Rosen, and Lothar Sickel (Milan, 2007), pp. 35–57. For the citation from Ovid, see his Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1976), book IV, p. 233. In the entry on “Ragione” in his famous book of emblems, Cesare Ripa writes about the multivalent symbolic power of the Medusa head: “L’arbore dell’alloro con la testa di Medusa pendere, da esso, dimostra la vittoria, ch hà la ragione de gli inimici contrarij alla virtù, quale gli rende stupidi, come la testa di Medusa, che faceva restare medesimamente stupidi quelli, che la guardavano, & leggiamo che Domitiano Imperatore la portava sempre scolpita nell’armature, & nel sigillo, a fine di mostrarsi vittorioso.” Cesare Ripa, Iconologia. Padua, 1611, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York and London, 1976), p. 452.

Some writers, notably Louis Marin . . . See Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (1977; Chicago and London, 1995), p. 118: “In my reading of the legend, I carry Perseus’s trick to its extreme: I imagine a Medusa who petrifies herself by looking at her image in the shield’s mirroring eye. In keeping with this myth, the French verb méduser means to petrify, to turn someone into a frozen, marble statue. But if we read the legend this way, one question remains unanswered. If Medusa was transformed into marble the very moment she saw herself in the bronze mirror, then how could Perseus possibly have decapitated her with his golden sword? Would he not have broken his sword against the hard stone? Perhaps he cut her head off the very instant her self-transformation took place, or, rather, the very instant it was about to occur or was in the process of occurring. Perhaps the decapitation happens when the tender flesh of the beautiful Medusa, who had been ravished by Neptune, is no longer quite so tender but is not yet as hard as marble. Neither flesh nor stone; still flesh, already stone; Medusa hovers in the instant of the now, that is, the neuter, the complex moment of the transformational process.” In support of my notion that the Medusa would most efficiently have been decapitated with a backhand blow: (1) “I

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crept upon him, grasping a Pistoian dagger, and aimed a sudden back-stroke with the idea of cutting his head clean off” (Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography, trans. George Bull [New York, 1998], p. 91); (2) Orazio Gentileschi, David Slaying Goliath, ca. 1605–10, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (see R. Ward Bissell, Orazio Gentileschi and the Poetic Tradition in Caravaggesque Painting [University Park, Pa., and London, 1981], p. 26, cat. 15); (3) Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, ca. 1612–13, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Garrard, however, comments upon the somewhat awkward positioning of Judith’s arms: “Moreover, she could not easily have accomplished the decapitation with arms in that position (the spurting blood tells us that the sword has passed through the neck, moving away from Judith’s body),” that is to say with a backhanded motion (Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art [Princeton, 1989], p. 310). A poem inspired by the painting published by Gasparo Murtola in 1604 lends historical purchase to the thematic of petrification. In Langdon’s translation: “Is this the Medusa, her poisoned hair armed with a thousand snakes? / Yes, yes: do you not see, how the eyes roll and dart? / Flee, flee her anger, flee her scorn, / For should she catch your gaze, / She’ll change you too to stone” (p. 120). The original poem is reprinted in Maurizio Marini, Caravaggio: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio “pictor praestantissimus” (Rome, 1987), p. 404. On painting and petrification, see Cropper, “The Petrifying Art.” Marin on the two moments: “The first of the two moments is found at the level of what is essentially the story’s represented ‘content’: Medusa is stupefied and turned into a statue by her own reflection. The singular potency of her own gaze is applied intransitively to itself, reflecting itself and thereby producing its own petrifaction. . . . Caravaggio captures the moment of petrifaction just an instant before it happens. The interval in question here is the most furtive, infinitesimal instant of time, but in its very evanescence it is also the most permanent moment of all. I would like to name it the sculptural moment” (To Destroy Painting, p. 136, emphasis in original). The moment that follows involves “the representation itself, or, in other words, the total product that Caravaggio presents to the viewer. The latter includes everything that comes ‘after’ the decapitation. We can call this the ornamental or decorative moment, when the mirror, Perseus’s defensive weapon, becomes a shield bearing an image of a Medusa who is ready to go on repeating her deadly act” (p. 138). Furthermore: “Caravaggio’s painting is a historical painting because it condenses two historical moments, causing each of them to envelop the other. . . . The fact that the moment of the blow itself cannot be presented is designated by the folding together of the moments just before and after the blow. For what is absent from the painting is indeed Perseus’s gesture of severing Medusa’s head. The hero’s stroke is absent, as is the stroke of the painter’s brush in making

his painting” (p. 139). The painting, in Marin’s account, is organized around this rift, which he equates with the discontinuity between nature and art. He concludes: “At the level of contemplation and theory, this painting represents the moment in which art and Nature become equal, a moment when Nature is produced as art, a moment that is unbearable and literally stupefying. I would add that it was precisely such a moment that Caravaggio sought to capture as nearly as possible” (ibid.).

Another suggestion that has been made . . . A number of scholars have argued that Medusa is actually a self-portrait of Caravaggio. See, e.g., Matteo Marangoni, Il Caravaggio (Florence, 1922), pp. 144–45; Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton, 1955), pp. 87–89; Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, and Baltimore, 1958), p. 23; and Avigdor W. G. Posèq, “Caravaggio and the Antique,” Artibus et Historiae 11 (1990): 147–67. Many, however, have resisted such an identification. Langdon intelligently bridges the difference: “Caravaggio’s painting also suggests the contemporary interest in the mysterious effects that could be created by mirrors, for it seems that he studied either his own face (which he then considerably altered) or the face of a model lit by a lamp in a darkened convex mirror, and it is this that creates the distortions and gives the painting its strange power” (p. 122). For Marin’s account of the Medusa as an instance of “the most radical kind of self-reflexivity of painterly representation”—in that sense a kind of self-portrait— see To Destroy Painting, p. 142. On the psychodynamics of mimetic identification with the aggressor, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago and London, 2000), esp. pp. 32–33, 134–38.

The painting is Ludovico’s The Chess Players . . . On the Chess Players, see Ludovico Carracci, exh. cat. (Bologna and Fort Worth, 1993–94), cat. no. 16, pp. 35–36, entry by Gail Faigenbaum. The painting is not signed but has been widely accepted as a painting by Ludovico. In a recent monograph on the artist, however, Alessandro Brogi rejects that attribution (Ludovico Carracci [1555–1619] [Bologna, 2001], cat. R21, pp. 258–59). Feigenbaum, however, sees no reason to think that the painting is not by Ludovico (personal communication). On Bordone’s canvas, see Paris Bordon, exh. cat. (Treviso, 1984), cat. 25, pp. 92–93. The citation from Feigenbaum is from Ludovico Carracci (Bologna and Fort Worth), p. 35. The origins of “genre” painting have been much discussed in recent scholarship. See Painters of Reality: The Legacy

of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, exh. cat. (New York and Cremona, 2004); and Sheila McTighe, “Foods and the Body in Italian Genre Paintings, about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci,” Art Bulletin 86 (2004): 301–23. While Ludovico received his training in the workshop of Prospero Fontana, it is certain that the Carracci were familiar with Passarotti’s art. For example, Malvasia reports that Ludovico’s cousin Agostino studied for a period with Passarotti. See Anne Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci: Commentary and Translation (University Park, Pa., 2000), pp. 82–83, 89.

A similar oppositional structure . . . On Chardin’s Card Castle, see Pierre Rosenberg, Chardin (1699–1779), exh. cat. (Paris and Cleveland, 1979), cat. 73, pp. 236–37. The description of the Card Castle in this paragraph is based on Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980; Chicago and London, 1988), pp. 46–51.

With Ludovico’s canvas in mind . . . Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, Cinotti, cat. 70; Spike, cat. 4. For Bellori’s original text and a translation, see Hibbard, p. 363. Thus, Langdon describes both Caravaggio’s Gypsy Fortune Teller and Cardsharps as “redolent of the popular theatre which Del Monte so admired” (p. 84). A few pages later she says of the Gypsy Fortune Teller that “Caravaggio has recreated a fleeting moment in the life of the street. But it is also a painting of a moment in the theatre . . .” (p. 88). And: “The theatrical figures of The Cardsharps are companions of The Gypsy Fortune Teller and like her they draw both on the life of street and tavern and on literary and iconographic prototypes” (p. 89). In a recent article, Lorenzo Pericolo emphasizes (correctly, in my view) the absorption of the dupe in his cards, though I cannot go along with his suggestion that there is something latently “religious” in the dupe’s state of mind, or with his claim that “the youth’s earnestness in contemplating his cards somehow exceeds the mechanism of the visual plot” (“Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps and Marino’s ‘Gioca di primera’: A Case of Intertextuality?” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 53 [2008]: 129–52, 146).

Another reason why . . . Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller, Cinotti, cat. 58; Spike, cat. 5. Miguel de Cervantes, “Rinconete and Cortadillo,” Exemplary Stories, trans. Lesley Lipson (Oxford and New York, 1998), p. 79. For an altogether different reading of the Fortune Teller, which suggests that the gypsy is frustrated by the “physiognomic puzzle” presented by the young man’s unrevealing expression, see Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit,

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Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1998), pp. 16–18.

Another early multifigure painting . . . Langdon, p. 109. See the preceding pages for Del Monte’s taste in music. The Musicians has suffered much damage over the centuries, and the area containing the musical scores is no exception. As Mina Gregori notes, “the badly damaged musical scores in the Musicians are no longer legible, but at one time they were; the text set to the music could also be read in at least one of them.” Gregori also notes that Caravaggio included a legible musical score in at least two other paintings, the Rest on the Flight into Egypt and the Hermitage Lute Player (AC, pp. 229–32). For the history of the painting’s many restorations, see Cinotti, pp. 476–79.

A third painting from the same period . . . Caravaggio, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Cinotti, cat. 54; Spike, cat. 17. Thanks in part to the popular success of The Golden Legend, the palm tree—bending low to the ground to devoutly adore Christ—had become a standard element in the iconography of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Caravaggio, however, here replaces the palm with an oak tree, which, as Catherine Puglisi notes, may allude to the tree of life, from which Christ’s crucifix was hewn (Caravaggio [London, 1998], p. 117). See also Langdon, pp. 125–26. For the story of the palm, see Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1993), 1:57. For the specific motet being played by the violinist angel, see Langdon, p. 125.

Unlike the Musicians, which makes an initial impression . . . The Italianate character of the landscape has been commented upon by a number of authors. See, e.g., Langdon, pp. 124–25; Robb, p. 81; and Puglisi, Caravaggio, p. 120.

So once again we are dealing . . . The Tribute Money and The Bravo are discussed (along with others) by Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius (New Haven and London, 2001), pp. 237–67. My own sense of the matter is that this protracted moment of spatial compression and bodily overlapping—even, in The Bravo, of the juxtaposition of facing and facing away—soon gave way to a lateral distribution of figures, as well as to other modes of pictorial organization. As Joannides writes: “By the end of the 1520s Titian seems to have felt that he had exhausted the possibilities of half-length narrative and while some artists—such as Veronese—pursued them later in

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the century, for really substantial innovation in the genre it is necessary to look to the generation of Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio, both of whom turned back to Venetian art of the early sixteenth century” (p. 267). In a Johns Hopkins University dissertation in progress, Christopher Nygren takes The Tribute Money in particular as a point of departure for an account of Titian’s development during these years.

There is still more to be said . . . On the contrast between the left and right halves of the foreground, see Langdon, p. 125. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, in their book on Caravaggio, note in passing that the lower right-hand corner of the canvas is “frequently a charged site in Caravaggio’s work” (Caravaggio’s Secrets, p. 81). They offer no explanation for this, however. In my article “Thoughts on Caravaggio,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1997), I write (following a brief discussion of the London Salome with the Head of John the Baptist): “I will only add that the lower right-hand corner of the canvas is often a strongly marked location in Caravaggio’s art, bearing as it does a special relationship to the artist’s right or painting hand: see for example the large bow in the sash of the youth seated in the right foreground studying a musical score in the Musicians; the dagger, partly concealed playing cards, and gesture of the seated cardsharp reaching back to extract one of those cards in the Fort Worth Cardsharps; the elaborate swordhilts in the Rome and, especially, the Paris versions of the Gypsy Fortuneteller; and the incandescent green plant in the Capitoline St. John the Baptist with a Ram” (pp. 51–52).

In other words, I see . . . The notion of “lived” spatiality (perhaps not in as many words) comes from the writings of the French existential phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom I first read in my early twenties and from whom, as all my work attests, I have learned a great deal. On the model for the angel’s wings, see Langdon, p. 126. Let me add that my account of the phenomenologically multivalent significance of the figure of the angel in The Rest on the Flight is perfectly consistent with Keith Christiansen’s observation that that figure (depicted from behind, standing in the middle of the composition) ultimately derives from the standing goddess depicted from behind in the middle of Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of Raphael’s composition of The Judgment of Paris (“Thoughts on the Lombard Training of Caravaggio,” pp. 7–28, esp. p. 18). That is, there is to my mind no contradiction between my interpreting certain figures as embodying a complex relation to the artistviewer and Christiansen’s insistence that, partly owing to his Lombard background, Caravaggio often based individual figures on central Italian stylistic paradigms of one sort or

another, with Raphael and Michelangelo playing important roles. Even my proposal that a painting like the Bacchino malato (or Self-Portrait as Bacchus) or indeed The Rest on the Flight can be read in terms of “moments” of immersion and specularity in no way rules out the possibility that such paintings are also—in a preliminary way—based in the first case on the pose of one of the seated river nymphs in Raimondi’s engraving (as proposed by Christiansen, p. 18) and in the second on the central standing figure in the same print. Put slightly differently, the relation to a source image does not in itself equate with specularity from the outset, any more than the notion of immersion implies that the painter had no specific image in mind before he began to paint. To go a step further: to speak of a “moment” of immersion is not necessarily to posit an actual stage in the production of a given painting; my claim is rather that Caravaggio’s paintings characteristically invite us to imagine such a “moment,” along with a subsequent “moment” in which the work is given over to beholding—in other words, that such a distinction should be understood in the first instance as structural rather than literal (a point already made in lecture 2, but one worth underscoring).

A brief discussion of two paintings . . . Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, Cinotti, cat. 25; Spike, cat. 25. For recent discussion of this picture, see Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei, cat. 1, pp. 118–19; and Caravaggio: The Final Years, exh. cat. (London, 2005), cat. 1, pp. 98–99. As Charles Scribner notes, the primary source for the story of the Supper at Emmaus is the Gospel of Luke (24:13–35), in which no mention is made of Christ’s appearance. The story is also briefly touched on in the Gospel according to Mark (14:12), where Christ is described as appearing to the disciples “in another likeness” (in alia effigie), which precludes their recognizing Him until the moment that the bread is broken, a clear allusion to Christ’s physical presence in the Eucharist. See Charles Scribner III, “In alia effigie: Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 375–82; Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, pp. 141–51; and Lorenzo Pericolo, “Visualizing Appearance and Disappearance: On Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus,” Art Bulletin 89 (2007): 519–39.

Naturally, I am aware that my account . . . Langdon, pp. 231, 232. Bellori seems somewhat unwittingly to have signaled to future generations the importance of the basket of fruit, seeing in it a violation of the rules of decorum. That is, because Christ’s resurrection and subsequent encounter with the disciples on the road to Emmaus both took place in the spring, the fruits depicted by Caravaggio—grapes, figs, and pomegranates are singled out—are all out of season. For Bellori’s

text, see Hibbard, p. 372. On the symbolic import of the fruit basket, see Susanne J. Warma, “Christ, First Fruits, and the Resurrection: Observations on the Fruit Basket in Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 53 (1990): 583–86. See also Caravaggio: The Final Years, p. 98. On the Emmaus as “a collector’s piece,” see Langdon, p. 232.

For his part, David Hockney in his book . . . David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York, 2001), p. 120. Competent critiques of Hockney’s methods of inquiry have been set forth in many reviews of the book. See, for instance, Ingrid D. Rowland, “Through a Glass, Darkly,” New York Review of Books 49 (28 February 2002): 10–14; and David Bomford, review of Secret Knowledge by David Hockney, Burlington Magazine 144 (March 2002): 173–74. See also John Varriano, Caravaggio and the Art of Realism (University Park, Pa., 2006), esp. pp. 7–16. In a video made in connection with the book, Hockney imagines Caravaggio using a lens-mirror to project on a canvas an inverted image of models holding the poses of the figures in the Supper at Emmaus and then essentially fixing those images in paint. It is to me out of the question that Caravaggio could have proceeded in that fashion. See David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, DVD, produced by Randall Wright (London: BBC Worldwide, 2001; re-released, Princeton: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 2002). “‘Le peintre apporte son corps,’ dit Valéry. Et, en effet, on ne voit pas comme un Esprit peut peindre. C’est en prêtant son corps au monde que le peintre change le monde en peinture. Pour comprendre ces transsubstantiations, il faut retrouver le corps operant et actuel, celui qui n’est pas un morceau d’espace, un faisceau de functions, qui est un entrelacs de vision et de mouvement” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Oeil et esprit [Paris, 1964], p. 16).

Finally, the mental state or mood . . . Pamela Askew, “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision,” in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti. Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi, ed. Stefania Macioce (Rome, 1996), pp. 248– 69, citations from p. 252. As Askew notes, other critics have not been nearly as generous to the innkeeper; Langdon, for instance, attributes to him a “blunt incomprehension” regarding the sacred event occurring before him (p. 231).

The mythological painting . . . Caravaggio, Narcissus, Cinotti, cat. 57; Spike, cat. 70. Since its discovery in a Milanese private collection in 1913, the painting has been the subject of heated debate regarding its attribution. A satisfactory appraisal of its style is hampered

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by its poor state of conservation, though scholars now seem to be more or less in agreement that the painting is autograph. See esp. Rossella Vodret, “Il restauro del ‘Narciso,’ ” in Macioce, ed., Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, pp. 167–83. See also her entry on the painting in Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and his World, exh. cat. (New South Wales and Victoria, 2003–), cat. 3, pp. 84–85 (where she suggests a date of 1597–99). Spike, surprisingly, proposes the much later date of 1608–10. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book III, p. 157 (for Narcissus’s words); p. 161 (for the flower that replaced him).

For Alberti, writing in the 1430s . . . “Consequently I used to tell my friends that the inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus, who was turned into a flower; for, as painting is the flower of all the arts, so the tale of Narcissus fits our purpose perfectly. What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?” (Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson [London and New York, 1991], p. 61). On Narcissus in Italian painting, see Bann, The True Vine, p. 127. One notable exception, remarked by Bann, is Tintoretto’s Narcissus at the Fountain (ca. 1550) in the Galleria Colonna in Rome. Matteo Marangoni, Il Caravaggio (Florence, 1922), p. 43. Cited in Hubert Damisch, “D’un Narcisse à l’autre,” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 13 (1976): 109; and Bann, The True Vine, p. 135. The passage beginning “What is . . . striking is the almost perfect reciprocity between Narcissus and his reflection” comes from Stephen Bann, “Philostratus and Caravaggio,” in Philostratus, ed. Jas´ Elsner and Ewen Bowie (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 353–54. The passage continues: “Of course, this is not perceived through our close inspection of the head and its reflection—which is hard to achieve—but through the close cropping of the image by the frame and the consequent effect of bilateral symmetry” (p. 354).

With respect to the Ovidian text . . . For Narcissus’s hair, see Bann, “Philostratus and Caravaggio,” pp. 347–48. For the inspiration for Caravaggio’s painting’s “remarkable unity of effect,” see ibid., pp. 354–55. For the citations from Philostratus, see Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library (1931; Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1979), book I.23, pp. 93, 91. See also Elsner, “Naturalism and the Erotics of the Gaze,” in Sexuality and Ancient Art, ed. N. B. Kampen (Cambridge and New York, 1996), pp. 247–61; and Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, 2007), chap. 6: “Viewer as Image: Intimations of Narcissus.”

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notes to pages 134–41

Not surprisingly . . . On Plotinus’s version of the Narcissus story, see Pierre Hadot, “Le Mythe de Narcisse et son interpretation par Plotin,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 13 (1976): 81–108.

A different sort of specular “moment” . . . Damisch, “D’un Narcisse à l’autre,” 116. Cited by Bann, The True Vine, p. 135; I have slightly modified the quotation. Bann’s observations about the “wheel formed by the body” and the exclusion of the viewer are from the same text (p. 156). For Damisch on Narcissus’s knee, see “D’un Narcisse à l’autre,” p. 110; cited by Bann, The True Vine, p. 135. See also Bann on how the Narcissus “demonstrates the efficacity of a mechanism, which, in excluding us from the charmed self-absorption of the languid youth, is also cutting us from a painted scene into which we can never enter” (p. 139). For a modern version of the “severing” of the picture from the beholder, see my analysis of Andreas Gursky’s photographs in Why Photography Matters as Never Before (London and New York, 2008), pp. 156–82. A further indication of the closure of the painted image to the viewer, or rather of the disorienting effect of such closure, is the revelation by X-rays of the difficulty the painter seems to have had in managing the reflections of the knee and the face in the pool—as if somehow the reflections “belonged” to the point of view of the painting’s protagonist rather that to that of the painter-viewer. See in this connection the detailed discussion of the pentimenti in the area of the reflections in Vodret, “Il restauro del ‘Narciso,’ ” p. 170, as well as the briefer entry on the Narcissus by the same author in Caravaggio e i suoi, exh. cat. (Rome, 1999), cat. 2, p. 27.

LECTURE FIVE: SEVERED REPRESENTATIONS In lecture 4 . . . Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (London and New York, 1991), pp. 77–78. Writing about Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul in the Cerasi Chapel, Bellori noted that “the history is completely without action.” Francesco Scannelli made a similar observation regarding the Penitent Magdalen, which he saw in the collection of the Pamphili Prince. Comparing it to a painting of the same subject by Correggio, he wrote: “The work by Caravaggio is not natural, except on the purely superficial level, because he gives it no life, it is without spirit, grace, and appropriate expression, so that one could say that everything appears dead.” Of Caravaggio’s followers Giovanni Baglione complained: “[M]any young artists followed his example and painted heads from life, without studying the rudiments of design and the profundity of art, but were satisfied only with the colors; therefore these painters were not

able to put two figures together, nor could they illustrate a history because they did not comprehend the value of so noble an art.” See Hibbard, pp. 366, 360, and 355 for the three citations.

Another place to look for precedents . . . If Baglione is to be believed, Federico Zuccaro was one of the first to notice Caravaggio’s debt to Venetian painting when, looking at Saint Matthew and the Angel in San Luigi dei Francesi, he remarked, “What is all the fuss about? . . . I do not see anything here other than the style of Giorgione [il pensiero di Giorgione].” See Hibbard, p. 353. Dempsey has argued persuasively that it was in 1599, in response to the unveiling of Annibale Carracci’s Saint Catherine in Santa Caterina dei Funari, that Caravaggio abandoned his early, generically Giorgionesque manner in favor of strong chiaroscuro and extreme effects of light and dark. See Charles Dempsey, “Idealism and Realism in Rome around 1600,” in Il classicismo: medioevo, Rinascimento, barocco. Atti del Colloquio Cesare Gnudi, ed. A. Emiliani (Bologna, 1993), pp. 233–43. For a historical consideration of the status of Giorgione and Giorgionism circa 1600, see Charles Hope, Giorgione or Titian? History of a Controversy (New York, 2003). In 2001 Salvatore Settis delivered the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., under the title “Giorgione and Caravaggio: Art as Revolution.” Taking his lead from Zuccaro’s comment regarding the affinity between Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro and the style of Giorgione, Settis sought to examine the parallels between these two artists and the impact that their styles of painting had on contemporary artists. For a brief overview of Settis’s lectures, see Dempsey, “Salvatore Settis. ‘Giorgione and Caravaggio: Art as Revolution,” in The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Fifty Years, introd. Elizabeth Cropper (Washington, D.C., 2002), pp. 209–12. There is, of course, no contradiction between a recognition of the Venetian elements in Caravaggio’s early work and Keith Christiansen’s insistence on the general importance of his Lombard roots (“Thoughts on the Lombard Training of Caravaggio,” in Come dipingeva il Caravaggio. Atti della giornata di studio, ed. Mina Gregori [Milan, 1996], pp. 7–28). The seventeenth century saw the emergence of the picture gallery as a locus of recreation and self-maintenance. This phenomenon has been studied from a number of different viewpoints. On the theorization of the picture gallery in mid-seventeenth-century Rome, see Frances Gage, “Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni sulla pittura: Recreation, Manners and Decorum in Seventeenth-Century Roman Picture Galleries” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2000). See also Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1996), chap. 2, “Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Galleria: A Taste for Style and an Inclination to Pleasure.” pp. 64–105.

I have also tried to show . . . Charles Dempsey, “Caravaggio and the Two Naturalistic Styles: Specular versus Macular,” in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. Genevieve Warwick (Newark, Del., 2006), p. 91–100. See also Dempsey, “Idealism and Realism in Rome around 1600.”

A further dimension of the issue of embodiment . . . Robb calls attention to “the seductive detail of the dark eagle’s feather curling over and caressing the boy’s hairless thigh” (p. 193).

Or consider two works by Caravaggio’s rival . . . On Annibale’s canvas, see Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590, 2 vols. (London and New York, 1971), 2: cat. 47, p. 21; and Annibale Carracci, exh. cat. (Bologna and Rome, 2006–7), cat. IV.7, pp. 198–99, entry by Alessandro Brogi. In Malvasia’s words: “The Carracci made a practice of posing as models for one another; Agostino prided himself in being able to adopt the exact poses and attitudes desired by Ludovico, for he believed that anyone who did not understand these poses would not know how to represent them well and that this was why the poses of the professional models were artificial and lifeless. Nor did Ludovico, who was rather plump and fleshy, deem it beneath him to strip to the waist and have his back copied by Annibale in the attitude needed for the Venus in the picture that the Bolognetti later sold to their Serene Highnesses of Florence and that can be found today in the royal museum.” (A stupefying thought.) Anne Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci. Commentary and Translation (University Park, Pa., 2000), p. 120.

In a very different work . . . On Annibale’s Bean Eater, see Posner, Annibale Carracci, 2: cat. 8, p. 5; and Catalogo sommario della Galleria Colonna in Roma. Dipinti, ed. Eduard A. Safarik (Busto Arsizio, 1981), cat. 43, pp. 50–51. The notion of “interpellation,” which I am consciously misusing, comes from Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Notes toward an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 2001), pp. 117–20. For the citation from Malvasia, see Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, p. 266.

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I should add that the absorption-plus-address system . . . Apropos of the basic conditions of visibility, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes: “Chaque quelque chose visuel, tout l’individu qu’il est, fonctionne aussi comme dimension, parce qu’il se donne comme résultat d’une déhiscence de l’Être. Ceci veut dire finalement que le propre de visible est d’avoir une doublure d’invisible au sens strict, qu’il rend présent comme une certaine absence” (L’oeil et l’esprit [Paris, 1964], p. 85). No one can claim that Merleau-Ponty’s meaning is perfectly clear, but if ever a painter could be said to exemplify his point, Caravaggio is the one. (Merleau-Ponty’s choice would be Cézanne, also for good reasons.)

Originally I had hoped to find . . . Caravaggio, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, Cinotti, cat. 62a; Spike, cat. 24.2. Caravaggio, Conversion of Saint Paul, Cinotti, cat. 62b; Spike, cat. 24.1. For an analysis of the chapel and its paintings, including the recent restoration, see Maria Grazia Bernardini et al., eds., Caravggio, Carracci, Maderno. La Cappella Cerasi in Santa Maria del Popolo a Roma (Milan, 2001). On Annibale’s Assumption of the Virgin, see Annibale Carracci, cat. VIII.7, pp. 380–81, entry by Silvia Ginzburg. The classic article by Leo Steinberg is “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel,” Art Bulletin 41 (June 1959): 183–90. The exploitation of binocular vision, if something of the sort is truly in play in the Cerasi Chapel canvases, is more radical than the kind of site specificity identified by Steinberg and, indeed, would have stemmed from the fact that for Caravaggio site specificity of an essentially Renaissance or mannerist sort was no longer a natural condition of the art of painting. The issue of binocular vision arises with special force in Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven and London, 2002), esp. pp. 16, 62, 169–72.

There is more to say about Caravaggio’s engagement . . . Victor I. Stoichita, L’Instauration du tableau: Métapeinture à l’aube des temps modernes (Paris, 1993); English translation as The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge and New York, 1997). The passages cited are from pp. xiv–xv. The reference to Claude Perrault is to a passage in his Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes. On the implications of Stoichita’s argument, see Rose Marie San Juan, “Framing the Early Modern Field of Vision,” Oxford Art Journal 23 (2000): 171–77; and Christopher Wood, review of The SelfAware Image by Victor Stoichita, caa.reviews, September 24, 1999, doi:10.3202/caa.reviews.1999.38.

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On Gijsbrechts’s painting, see Stoichita, L’Instauration du tableau, pp. 296–300; and Illusions. Gijsbrechts, Royal Master of Deception, exh. cat. (Copenhagen, 1999), cat. 29, pp. 206–7.

Among the features . . . Although I admire Stoichita’s book, I have reservations concerning his treatment of the self-portrait in the crucial chapter 8, “Images du peintre/Images du peindre” (in English: “Two Images: The Painter / The Act of Painting”). Bottom line: Stoichita seems not to have recognized the significance of two issues crucial to these lectures, mirror reversal and the right-angle dispositif. So, for example, in his discussion of Antonie van Steenwinkel’s Self-Portrait with Mirror etc. (fig. 1.37), he fails to grasp that the artist reflected in the mirror should be seen as at work on a canvas off mirror (off picture) to the right. Instead, he writes: “The painter [in the mirror] is neither working on the production of a still-life nor is he depicted in the act of painting his self-portrait. He is focusing on the moment of reflection. It is as though Steenwinkel were still in front of the mirror on the very spot a spectator would be standing today” (The Self-Aware Image, p. 225). But the painter in the mirror is not depicted in the act of painting only in the sense that we see neither brushes nor palette; his bodily orientation tells another story, as does his facial expression, which I read as almost amusedly inviting the viewer to grasp what is going on. Nor, apparently, does Stoichita recognize the implicit right-angle structure of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in Vienna (fig. 1.5). (He is not alone in this—to my knowledge, no one has remarked on it.) The larger stakes of these and similar misapprehensions become clear when he argues that there is no way in which a painting can represent the process of its own production. Thus, he writes: “One of the major problems of the ‘image of the act’ involves the simultaneousness of the presentation of the painter and his work. I know of no representation ‘in the first person’ that is capable of overcoming this difficulty. Because it is the painter who is representing himself, he must look ‘toward the camera.’ To really represent oneself in the act of working would involve the painting being worked on eclipsing the face and gaze. . . . It is only by jeopardizing the image of the ‘self’ that the painter can represent himself, brush in hand, in the act of producing an image. This operation becomes possible the moment the ‘scenario of production’ is dealt with in the third person. . . . In the scenario of production in the third person, it is the painter’s back we see and the front of his work. The painter’s face is not visible (this type of scenario is not a ‘self-portrait’): His work, on the other hand, is. We can easily distinguish the painter’s hand, the brush, the tip of the brush dipping into the paint, the contact he makes with the nascent canvas” (pp. 240–41, emphasis in original). In other words, there is an “incompatibility between the simultaneous presentation of the ‘work’ and its ‘making’ ” (p. 234). It should be obvious that the entire thrust of the present lectures goes against these

generalizations. Significantly, Stoichita chooses not to discuss Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures, which would have troubled his thesis. Instead, he devotes several pages to Annibale’s Self-Portrait in the Hermitage (which depicts a portrait of the artist resting on an easel), which he considers to be “the most complex example [of a self-portrait] that plunges into the representation,” meaning by this that the artist was “determined to present [his portrait] to the spectator for what it really is, namely, a painting” (p. 212, emphasis in original). Altogether, the chapter on self-portraits is in my view the weakest in the book.

One figure, indeed the principal figure . . . Caravaggio, Judith and Holofernes, Cinotti, cat. 55; Spike, cat. 19.l. See also Caravaggio e i suoi. Percorsi caravaggeschi in Palazzo Barberini, exh. cat. (Rome, 1999), cat. 1, pp. 24–26, entry by Rossella Vodret, and the interesting discussion of the picture by Langdon, pp. 166–68. Keith Christiansen in Christiansen and Judith W. Mann, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, exh. cat. (Rome, New York, and St. Louis, 2001–2), p. 82. This is said apropos of Artemisia’s Judith and Her Maidservant (ca. 1608–9) in Oslo, to be discussed shortly. The Judith and Holofernes is discussed by Christiansen in his important article, “Caravaggio and ‘L’esempio davanti del naturale’ ” (Art Bulletin 68 [1986]: 421–25, esp. 427–28), where he concludes: “[W]hat has been seen as the forced expression and the frozen pose of Judith may now be understood as the natural consequence of Caravaggio’s remarkable method and his conception of narrative painting as a literal recreation—a tableau vivant, as it were—of a specific action” (p. 429).

Recent commentators have also emphasized . . . “Richard Spear pointed out to me that [Judith’s maid] is most probably based on a Roman Republican portrait bust— which seems obvious once it has been mentioned” (Hibbard, pp. 66–67).

I have just alluded to the specular “moment” . . . As regards the blood spurting unnaturally from the wound in Holofernes’ throat, it is as though Caravaggio had in mind a pictorial equivalent to Benvenuto Cellini’s famous statue of Perseus (Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence), one of whose most original and, to Cellini’s contemporaries, impressive features was precisely its congealed outpouring of coral-like blood. In this connection, see Michael Cole, “Cellini’s Blood,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 215–35; and Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, chap. 2, “Casting, Blood, and Bronze.” “Judith is in most respects less believable [than Holofernes],” John Varriano writes. “Modeled, according to Fiora Bellini,

on the features of [Caravaggio’s] friend Fillide Melandroni, she is a reluctant heroine, poorly positioned and rather too standoffish to seem capable of the demanding physical and psychic effort required of her. That she appears so unconvincing relative to the portrayal of her victim may reflect the artist’s unfamiliarity with the sight of a woman in the role of assailant. Nevertheless, there is one intriguing aspect of Judith’s demeanor that might suggest her excited state of mind. Her visibly erect nipples are an indication of the conjoining of sexual arousal and physical violence that is commonly believed to occur” (Caravaggio: The Art of Realism [University Park, Pa., 2006], p. 81). The reference to Bellini is to Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini’s notoriously unreliable Caravaggio Assassino. La carriera di un “valenthuomo” fazioso nella Roma della Controriforma (Rome, 1994).

A particularly revealing work in this connection . . . Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, Cinotti, cat. 8; Spike, cat. 55. For a discussion of the problem of dating, see Keith Christiansen’s entry on the painting in Caravaggio: The Final Years, exh. cat. (London, 2005), cat. 8, pp. 109–11. Ferdinando Bologna, too, argues for a date during the artist’s first Naples period in his discussion of the painting in his essay “Caravaggio, The Final Years (1606–1610)” in the same catalog (pp. 24–26). The quotation from Christiansen is from The Final Years, p. 109. Apropos of the moment in the narrative chosen by Caravaggio, Bologna with characteristic acuteness notes that the “saint is seen naked on the cross . . . bending his head down in order to speak to the man in armour (the proconsul Aegeas), who on hearing his name raises his head up towards the saint, while the executioner, having mounted the ladder to untie the victim, is bending backwards as if paralysed, clinging on to the ropes he was supposed to loosen” (p. 25). As regards Aegeas’s profile, unfortunately a tear in the canvas ran through his eye and face, causing an inevitable loss of nuanced expression.

At this point I shall leave Caravaggio . . . Among the important exhibitions that have made this and related work newly accessible in recent years have been Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei (Rome, 1995); Caravaggio e i suoi; The Genius of Rome 1592–1623 (London and Rome, 2001); Caravaggio e i Giustiniani. Toccar con mano una collezione del Seicento (Rome and Berlin, 2001); Nicolas Tournier (Toulouse, 2001); Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi; Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His World (New South Wales and Victoria, 2003–4); Luce e Ombra. Caravaggismo e naturalismo nella pittura Toscana del Seicento (Pontedera, 2005); and Caravaggio e l’Europa. Il movimento caravaggesco internazionale da Caravaggio a Mattia Preti (Milan and Vienna, 2005–6). See also Alfred Moir, The Italian Followers of Caravaggio, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.,

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1967); and Richard Spear, Caravaggio and His Followers, exh. cat. (Cleveland, 1971; rpt., New York, 1975).

In Orazio Gentileschi’s three-quarter-length . . . On the Oslo Judith, see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 13, pp. 82–86, entry by Keith Christiansen. See also ibid., fig. 46, which illustrates another version of the subject in a private collection in which the Abra figure twists her head so as to face directly away from the viewer. On the Hartford Judith, see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 39, pp. 186–90, entry by Christiansen. On the Getty Lot and His Daughters, see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 37, pp. 180–84, entry by Christiansen.

Footnote: The role of sleep as a modality . . . On Annibale’s Sleeping Venus, see Posner, Annibale Carracci, cat. 134, pp. 59–60.

On the formation and history of the Mattei collection, see the essays by Claudio Strinati, Maurizio Calvesi, Laura Testa, Francesca Cappelletti, Lorenza Mochi Onori, Rossella Vodret, and Daria Borghese gathered in ibid., along with relevant documents pertaining to the collection.

Finally, one work not by one of Caravaggio’s followers . . . On Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian, including details of the commission, see Ludovico Carracci, exh. cat. (Bologna and Fort Worth, 1993–94), cat. 70, pp. 152–54, entry by Gail Feigenbaum.

(No doubt the compositional openness . . . Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac, Cinotti, cat. 12; Spike, cat. 34. See also, most recently, Michelangelo da Caravaggio 1602: “The Night of Abraham,” ed. Maurizio Marini (Modena, 2007).

Artemisia as well depicts figures . . . On Agucchi, see, most famously, Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (London, 1947), part 2, “Agucchi and the Idea della Belleza: A Stage in the History of a Theory”; and, more recently, Silvia Ginzburg, “Giovanni Battista Agguchi e la sua cerchia,” in Poussin et Rome, Actes du colloque de l’Académie de France à Rome, 1994, ed. Olivier Bonfait, Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Michel Hochmann, and Sebastian Schütze (Paris, 1996), pp. 273–91; and Ricardo de Mambro Santos, Arcadie del vero: Arte e teoria nella Roma del Seicento (Rome, 2001), esp. pp. 95–109, subtitled “Limiti e possibilità della descrizione ecfrastica.”

The limits of the canvas are differently thematized . . . On Valentin’s canvas, see Marina Mojana, Valentin de Boulogne (Milan, 1989), cat. 8, pp. 68–69; and Caravaggio e i suoi, cat. 48, pp. 122–23, entry by Rossella Vodret. On Serodine’s Tribute Money, see Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei, exh. cat. (Rome, 1995), cat. 15, pp. 148–49, entry by Francesca Cappelletti. On Serodine’s Parting of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, see Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei, cat. 20, pp. 162–63, entry by Francesca Cappelletti. On da Cortona’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, see Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei, cat. 17, pp. 150–55, entry by Anna Lo Biancho. For Valentin’s version of the same subject, see Mojana, Valentin de Boulogne, cat. 10, pp. 72–73. For Turchi’s picture, see Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei, cat. 19, pp. 158– 61, entry by Francesca Cappelletti.

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On Artemisia’s Judith in the Pitti, see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 60, pp. 330–33, entry by Judith W. Mann. On the Saint Cecilia, see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 63, pp. 350–52, entry by Mann. On the Self-Portrait as a Female Martyr, see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 56, pp. 320–21, entry by Mann. On the Lucretia, see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 67, pp. 361–64, entry by Mann. Mann believes the Lucretia dates from ca. 1623–25, Christensen from ca. 1612–13. On the Conversion of the Magdalene, see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 52, pp. 325–28, entry by Mann. On the importance of Artemisia’s bodily presence in her art, see the brilliant essay by Elizabeth Cropper, “Life on the Edge: Artemisia Gentileschi, Famous Woman Painter,” in ibid., pp. 263–81. Cropper’s views are strongly endorsed by Keith Christiansen in “Becoming Artemisia: Afterthoughts on the Gentileschi Exhibition,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 39 (2004): 101–26, esp. 111–12. Of Artemisia’s Lucretia in the Etro Collection, in which the protagonist wields a dagger in her left hand, Christiansen writes: “I believe the explanation for Artemisia’s emphasis on this narrative detail lies in a desire to affirm the representation as a mirrored image of the artist. By this, I do not wish to suggest that the picture originated as a simple transcription of Artemisia’s reflection as she posed before a mirror, a process that would confuse process with intention. Rather, the right-to-left reversal emphasizes the critical notion of painting as a mirror of nature; of the act of painting as an extension of subjective experience. It is from the act of self-identification that

the painting derives its dramatic intensity: a psychologically neutral exemplum virtutis transformed into a vivid allegory of violation and vindication. The prominence of the dagger in the painting cannot help but recall Artemisia’s account of her rape” (p. 111). More broadly, Christiansen describes her approach in works such as the Lucretia (and I would say the Conversion of the Magdalen) as seeking “to break down the aestheticizing impulse of Renaissance art by merging the roles of model and painter. Later, as Artemisia established an independent activity, this radical act of self-identification was subsumed into the profession of making pictures. It is important to insist on the fact that it was Caravaggio’s practice of painting directly from the model . . . that opened the road to Artemisia’s self-identification. Similarly, it was her move beyond Caravaggesque practice [in her later career] that closed it off. Although she continued to introduce her own face and features into her work, the pictures lose that quality of immediacy and urgency that came from those early acts of selfidentification” (p. 112). On the Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 81, pp. 417–21, entry by Mann; and Cropper, “Life on the Edge,” pp. 278–79. Cropper acknowledges that the figure of Painting in this canvas hardly resembles what we know of Artemisia’s appearance. But she adds that “self-identification with a work has little to do with resemblance,” and goes on to write: “The figure of Painting is a passionate young woman, her dark brown eyes looking up to the light, light that emphasizes intellect and body as it falls on her high forehead, and upon her full breast. This shining breast is framed by the lines of the gold chain— that token of esteem usually given by patrons to male painters. The figure holds her brush up to the edge of the actual canvas as if to begin to paint the empty canvas behind her, but she is caught in a moment of meditation or inspiration, as if to show that ‘painting is a noble exercise, and cannot be done without much application of the intellect.’ Through this gesture, the entire composition captures the sense of embodiment of Artemisia’s art, her consubstantiality with it, for the moment of inspiration speaks Artemisia’s own name: Artemi-sia, or ‘Let art be for me.’ She signed the work AGF (Artemisa Gentileschi fecit)” (p. 278). On this picture, see also Mary D. Garrard, “Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as an Allegory of Painting,” Art Bulletin 62 (1980): 97–112; Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, 1983), chap. 6, “The Allegory of Painting”; and Michael Fried, “Thoughts on Caravaggio,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 39–40, n. 33.

As for Manfredi and company . . . On Manfredi’s A Reunion of Drinkers, see Dopo Caravaggio. Bartolomeo Manfredi e la Manfrediana Methodus, exh. cat. (Milan, 1987), cat. 5, pp. 66–67; and Nicole Hartje, Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582–1622). Ein Nachfolger Caravaggios

und seine Europäische Wirkung. Monographie und Werkverzeichnis (Weimar, 2004), cat. A11, pp. 312–15. On Valentin’s Concert with Bas-Relief, see Mojana, Valentin de Boulogne, cat. 24, pp. 100–101. On Régnier’s Cardplayers with a Fortune Teller, see The Genius of Rome, cat. 12, p. 54; and Annick Lemoine, Nicolas Régnier, ca. 1588–1667. Peintre, collectionneur et marchand d’art (Paris, 2007), cat. 30, pp. 233–34. According to the entry by John T. Spike in the Darkness and Light catalog, the Budapest picture is a more refined version of a painting of the same subject made circa 1620 and now in the Musée d’Art et Histoire in Geneva (cat. 45, pp. 168–69). On Manfredi’s Bacchus and a Drinker, see Dopo Caravaggio. Bartolomeo Manfredi e la Manfrediana Methodus, cat. 2, pp. 60–61; Caravaggio e i suoi, cat. 13, pp. 52–53; and Hartje, Bartolomeo Manfredi, cat. A7, pp. 302–4.

All this amounts to something . . . Apropos of the general topic of “figural presence” in Caravaggio and the concomitant staving off of considerations of composition as they came to be understood in France in the wake of Poussin’s achievement, see Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400–1800 (New Haven and London, 2000), pp. 148–53. Giovanni Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, Hellmut Wohl, and Tomaso Montanari (Cambridge and New York, 2005), p. 186. This is said toward the end of his Life of Caravaggio. Langdon has remarked that “[t]hroughout the 1620s, in his increasingly ambitious compositions . . . figures are often linked in a deep space by bold diagonals” (“Cardsharps, Gypsies and Street Vendors,” in The Genius of Rome, p. 60).

Let me mention one additional point . . . On Valentin’s Samson, see Mojana, Valentin de Boulogne, cat. 56, pp. 166–67; and Masterpieces of European Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art, ed. Margaret Iacono, exh. cat. (New York, 2006), cat. 7, pp. 40–43, entry by Inge Reist.

The new paradigm, to the extent that it was one . . . According to André Félibien, “Poussin could not bear Caravaggio and said that he had come into the world in order to destroy painting” (quoted by Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort [Chicago and London, 1995], p. 3). Marin’s reference is to Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur

notes to pages 165–75

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les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes; avec la vie des architects, 6 vols. (Trevoux, 1725), 4:194. On the Germanicus, see Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665, exh. cat. (Paris and London, 1994–95), cat. 18, pp. 156–59, entry by Pierre Rosenberg. Charles Dempsey, “Nicolas Poussin between Italy and France: Poussin’s Death of Germanicus and the Invention of the Tableau,” in Max Seidel, ed., L’Europa e l’arte italiana: Per i cento anni della fondazione del Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Venice, 2000), pp. 320–35. For an important engagement with the complexities of Poussin’s project in this regard, see Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, esp. chap. 8: “Poussin’s Thoughts on Invention and Disposition,” and chap. 12: “The Rule of the Tableau and Its Losses.” I discuss the meaning and significance of the concept of the tableau and its relation to Diderot’s ideal of dramatic unity in Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980; Chicago and London, 1988), esp. p. 89; for its relevance to a later, crucial moment in the evolution of French painting, see Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or, The Shape of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London, 1996), pp. 267–80. In a fine essay, “Poussin and the Ethics of Imitation,” in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 51–52 (2006–7): 298–344, Richard Neer shows how Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod not only cites various figures from Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s composition The Plague of Phrygia (Il Morbetto), as has always been recognized, but also bases the figure of the “pudgy toddler in the foreground, fleeing to [the] right with his arm upraised” on the fleeing altar boy in Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (p. 305)—this despite Poussin’s disparagement of Caravaggio as “born to destroy painting.” Neer’s larger point is both that “Poussin folds Caravaggio’s ultrarealism into a group in which every detail refers to other, prior figures and groups” and that his “practice of citation amounts to the negation of Caravaggio’s realism and Raimondi’s sepulchral [mechanical] replication. It is Caravaggio in scare quotes: a way of holding the Copy at bay or even defeating it” (p. 309). The resemblance between the sorrowing soldiers in the Death of Germanicus and the grieving disciples in the Death of the Virgin would be characteristic of this tendency, as would, I further suggest, the resemblance between the absorbed heads of Moses and three onlookers, making a fairly tight compositional parallelogram, in the left-hand portion of Poussin’s Moses Sweetening the Waters of Marah (ca. 1626–27, in other words roughly contemporary with the Germanicus) in the Baltimore Museum of Art and the heads of Thomas and the other disciples in the Incredulity of Thomas. In this latter connection, it may be iconologically relevant that the theme

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of Moses striking the rock (in Julian Kliemann’s words) “has always been interpreted as a prefiguration of Christ’s side wound from which flowed both blood and water, the symbols of the baptism.” See Kliemann, “L’Amore al fonte di Cecco del Caravagio e l’ultimo quadro del Merisi: Omaggio al maestro o pittura ambigua?” in Caravaggio e il suo ambiente. Richerche e interpretazioni, ed. Sybille EbertSchifferer, Julian Kliemann, Valeska von Tosen, and Lothar Sickel (Milan, 2007), p. 208, n. 104. The quotation in English comes from Kliemann’s paper, itself based on the article just cited, “Cecco del Caravaggio’s Amor at the Fountain, or the Limits of Painting,” given at the 2009 meeting of the American Renaissance Society in Los Angeles.

The later painting by Poussin . . . For discussions of Poussin’s Eudamidas that emphasize its relation to Stoic thought, see Walter Friedlaender, Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach (New York, n.d.), p. 168, pl. 35; and Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1958 (New York, 1967), pp. 106, 306, pl. 224. The Eudamidas is seen as exemplifying a “self-reflective” practice of painting by Todd P. Olson, Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 162–75. See also Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665, cat. 139, pp. 345–46, entry by Pierre Rosenberg. I discuss the close relation between the Eudamidas on the one hand and David’s Horatii on the other in two places, Absorption and Theatricality, p. 193, and “David et l’antithéâtralité,” in David contre David, Actes du colloque organisé au musée du Louvre par le service culturel du 6 au 10 décembre 1989, ed. Régis Michel (Paris, 1993): 1:199– 227. It seems obvious that the Socrates also found inspiration in the pantomime of Socrates’ last hours in Diderot’s De la poésie dramatique (1758). Interestingly, the painting by Poussin that was held to be most exemplary by later seventeenth-century French theorists was neither the Germanicus nor the Eudamidas but rather the Israelites Gathering Manna in the Wilderness (1637–39); see in this connection the highly informative essay by Pauline Maguire Robison, “Leonardo’s Trattato della Pittura, Nicolas Poussin, and the Pursuit of Eloquence in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, ed. Claire Farago (Manchester and New York, 2008), pp. 189–236.

My larger claim at this juncture . . . On what might be called the prehistory of the gallery picture in the sixteenth century, see the interesting remarks, keyed in the first place to Raphael’s Entombment (1507) and pictorial responses to it, by Alexander Nagel in Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge and New York, 2000), chap.

4, “The Altarpiece in the Age of History Painting,” esp. pp. 135–40.

In this connection I want to look again . . . Robert Zapperi, Annibale Carracci: Portrait de l’artiste en jeune homme, trans. Marie-Ange Maire Vigueur (1989; Aixen-Provence, 1990). Annibale’s continuing stake in the interplay of painting and mirroring functions is suggested by a preliminary drawing at Windsor Castle for the late Self-Portrait in the Hermitage, a work that depicts a self-portrait on an easel. “At the top of the Windsor drawing,” Donald Posner writes, is a study for a portrait of the artist, behind whom is what appears to be an oval mirror in which seemingly the same sitter appears again, in the same direction, however, as in the foreground portrait. In the next stage, sketched in below in the Windsor drawing, the portrait is seen on a canvas resting on an easel. Behind is a window or mirror in which another figure is seen. . . . The final painting represents a simplification of the design, and it was painted hurriedly and rather carelessly (Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590, 2 vols. [London, 1971], 2:65–66).

Stephen J. Campbell, “The Carracci, Visual Narrative, and Heroic Poetry after Ariosto: The Story of Jason in Palazzo Fava,” Word and Image 18 (2002): 210–30.

Consider, too, from the Carracci’s next decorative project . . . For Malvasia’s description of the project and his attribution of individual scenes to one or another of the Carracci, see Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, pp. 148–57. For a complete publication of the Palazzo Magnani frescoes, see Andrea Emiliani, Le storie di Romolo e Remo di Ludovico e Agostino e Annibale Carracci in Palazzo Magnani a Bologna (Bologna, 1989). On Annibale’s role in the early fresco projects, see Anna Stanzani, “Annibale frescante a Bologna, nei palazzi Fava, Magnani e Sampieri,” in Annibale Carracci, pp. 431–47.

The depiction of the goddess’s profile . . . On Annibale’s Saint Margaret, see Annibale Carracci, cat. VI.5, pp. 286–87, entry by Silvia Ginzburg.

On the Windsor drawing, see also Annibale Carracci, cat. I.4, pp. 82–83, entry by Daniele Benati.

On Ludovico’s Lamentation, see Keith Christiansen, “Ludovico Carracci’s Newly Discovered ‘Lamentation,’ ” Burlington Magazine 142 (July 2000): 416–22; and Christiansen, “Going for Baroque: Bringing 17th-Century Masters to the Met,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 63 (Winter 2005): 3–48, esp. 22.

It is in this light that I see . . .

In an obvious sense, the cultivation . . .

On the divinarelli pittorici, see Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, p. 269. They are briefly discussed by Posner, Annibale Carracci, 1:65. The similarity between the divinarelli and the elision performed by the edge of the canvas in Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures is noted by Zapperi, Annibale Carracci: Portrait de l’artiste en jeune homme, p. 106.

Consider, for example, a scene . . . The Jason cycle was one of the first endeavors that the Carracci undertook after the founding of their academy. The project was probably begun in 1583 and finished in 1584, the date that is inscribed under the figure of Jupiter. For Malvasia’s description of the project, see Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, pp. 102–13; the quotations come from pp. 103, 103, and 108 (for the scene with the fighting men). See also Bologna 1584. Gli esordi dei Carracci e gli affreschi di Palazzo Fava, exh. cat. (Bologna, 1984); Clare Robertson, “I Carracci e l’invenzione: Osservazioni sull’origine dei cicli affrescati di Palazzo Fava,” Accademia Clementina: Atti e Memorie 32 (1993): 271–313; Ludovico Carracci, exh. cat., cat. 4 and 5, pp. 8–11, entry by Gail Feigenbaum; and

On Annibale’s Butcher Shop pictures as portrayals of the artists, see John Rupert Martin, “The Butcher’s Shop of the Carracci,” Art Bulletin 45 (September 1963): 263–66; Charles Dempsey’s catalog entry on the great Christ Church College, Oxford, version of the subject in AC, cat. 24, pp. 111–13; Zapperi, Annibale Carracci, chap. 3, “La geste des bouchers”; and Daniele Benati’s entry on the Fort Worth canvas in Annibale Carracci, cat. II.1, pp. 94–95. Annibale’s concern with elision is also registered in a drawing at Windsor Castle that parodies or caricatures Tintoretto’s Annunciation in the Scuola di San Rocco. In Tintoretto’s picture, the annunciating angel, shown in flight as he enters the room in which the Virgin sits, has his lower legs cut off by a wall that we view almost end-on; the wall nearest us, however, is mysteriously absent. Annibale in his drawing mischievously restores the latter wall, with the result that most of the angel is now obscured from view. “By a witty, relatively small, and not so illogical change in the image,” Posner writes, “the marvelously expressive spatial configuration in Tintoretto’s painting is transformed into an architectural and presentational absurdity. The drawing thus unmasks what Annibale considered the underlying indecorousness, that is, the visual and contentual inappropriateness, of the painting”

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(Annibale Carracci, 1:84). An alternative reading to Posner’s is that Annibale saw in Tintoretto’s elision only of the annunciating angel’s lower legs a trivial use of his own master trope. In the Windsor drawing in contrast, only the angel’s lower legs and feet and pointing finger are not elided by the walls of the Virgin’s house; it thereby reverses the terms of Tintoretto’s composition to comic effect but, precisely by doing so, calls attention to the suggestive powers of elision that Tintoretto, on this account, failed sufficiently to mobilize. See also Creighton E. Gilbert’s discussion of Annibale’s drawing, which he places in 1597, in Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (University Park, Pa., 1995), pp. 86–87.

Footnote: Not that ellipsis as a device . . . On Orazio’s Lute Player, see Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, cat. 22, pp. 113–15, entry by Christiansen.

Finally, as Posner was the first to remark . . . Posner, The Age of Correggio and the Carracci, p. 281. Michael Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge and New York, 2002), chap. 2, “Casting, Blood, and Bronze.” The emphasis throughout Cole’s study on the thematization in Cellini’s art of the act of sculpture is pertinent to my argument in this book. For the Perseus’s relation to Donatello’s sculpture, see Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, pp. 61–68, 138–39; and John Shearman, “Art or Politics in the Piazza?” in Benvenuto Cellini: Kunst und Kunsttheorie im 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Alessandro Nova and Anna Schreurs (Cologne, 2003), pp. 19–36.

A brief look at another painting . . . On Annibale’s Venus Adorned by the Graces, see Posner, Annibale Carracci, cat. 85, p. 35; The Age of Correggio and the Carracci, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C., New York, and Bologna, 1986–87), cat. 93, pp. 281–82, entry by Donald Posner; and Diane de Grazia et al., Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art, Systematic Catalogue (New York and Oxford, 1995), pp. 49–54. The quotation from Posner is from The Age of Correggio and the Carracci, pp. 281–82.

Because the mirror is not precisely at a right angle . . . I owe to Ralph Ubl the thought that Titian’s Venus points toward a dialectic of immersion-specularity—as if her reflected and mostly elided face makes a kind of rupture, unsettling the pleasure of contemplating her body. On Titian’s canvas, see Titian: Prince of Painters, exh. cat. (Venice and Washington, D.C., 1990–91), cat. 51, pp. 302–5, entry by David Alan Brown. A similar play of mirrors and reflections can be seen in two other paintings by Annibale from this period: An Allegory of Truth and Time, ca. 1584–85, Collection of Her Majesty Elizabeth II; and the Chantilly Sleeping Venus. Not to mention the Rinaldo and Armida in Naples, discussed in relation to “moments” of immersion and specularity in lecture 2. An Allegory of Truth and Time is also remarkable for the elision of Time’s left leg as he emerges from the well in the company of Truth, whom he has brought to light and for the way in which the mirror held by Truth, seen from our point of view, reflects part of her arm (only part of her arm, one might say). Another thought of Ubl’s, having read this book in manuscript, is that although mannerist art is typically rich in foreshortening, the artful and decorative flow of contour is such as to divest the latter of its elliptic power. With the Carracci and Caravaggio, foreshortening regains its power rooted in elision.

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LECTURE SIX: THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF THE PICTORIAL ACT In July 1599 Caravaggio . . . Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, Cinotti, cat. 61a; Spike, cat. 22.1. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, Cinotti, cat. 61b; Spike, cat. 22.2. For the documents on the commission of the paintings, see Herwarth Röttgen, Il Caravaggio. Ricerche e interpretazioni (Rome, 1974), pp. 57–62; Marco Pupillo, “I Crescenzi, Francesco Contarelli e Michelangelo da Caravaggio: Contesti e documenti per la commissione in S. Luigi dei Francesi,” in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti. Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi, ed. Stefania Macioce (Rome, 1996), pp. 148–66; Stefania Macioce, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: Fonti e documenti, 1532–1724 (Rome, 2003), esp. pp. 76–79. There is a large literature on these paintings; see, e.g., Hibbard, pp. 91–117; Franca Trinchieri Camiz, “Death and Rebirth in Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew,” artibus et historiae, no. 22 (Vienna, 1990): 89–105; Creighton E. Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (University Park, Pa., 1995), chap. 11, “The Matthew Cycle and the Interested Parties”; Langdon, pp. 170–79; Spike, pp. 92–100; and Todd P. Olson, “Pitiful Relics: Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew,” Representations, no. 77 (Winter 2002): 107–42. The Calling and the Martyrdom, in particular the former, are the focus of a fascinating lecture by Salvatore Settis in his A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for 2001 (see below). I owe to Joseph Connors, director of I Tatti, the information that the light in the Contarelli chapel would originally have been “abundant, at least at midday, given the southern exposure and the low ruins of the Baths of Alexander Serverus on the other side of the street. But when the Palazzo

Medici-Madama was built over the ruins in 1638, the tall building mass darkened the chapels, as the priests foresaw it would. The yellow opaque glass in the lunette, which I would guess to be nineteenth- or twentieth-century, deepens the darkness in a romantic but maddening way. Anyway, the early Caravaggisti who did versions of the paintings before 1638 saw them clearly” (personal communication). Connors cites two studies by Elena Fumagalli, “La ‘fabbrica’ di Palazzo Madama in Piazza Madama a Roma” (tesi di laurea, Università di Firenze, 1986); and “La facciata quattrocentesca del palazzo Medici in piazza Madama: Un disegno e alcune considerazione,” Annali de Architerrura 3 (1991): 26–31.

We know more than we usually do . . . Giovanni Urbani, “Il restauro delle tele del Caravaggio in San Luigi dei Francesi,” Bollettino dell’Istitutio Centrale del Restauro 46 (1966): 36–80. See the discussion of the first version of the Martyrdom in Hibbard, pp. 104–6.

First, not only is the figure of Christ . . . So, for example, Hibbard remarks the figures “seem to be shown outside a Roman palace rather than within it” (p. 96); Spike locates the scene on a “narrow alley street-corner” (p. 96); while Sergio Benedetti locates the scene indoors. See Sergio Benedetti, “Darkness and Light” in Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His World, exh. cat. (New South Wales and Victoria, 2003], p. 31). Langdon bridges the difference, taking the setting to be “a dark Roman street, or perhaps the courtyard of a Roman palace” (p. 174). “The gesture of Christ’s summoning hand at once calls to mind that of God the Father in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam,” Walter Friedlaender writes in Caravaggio Studies (Princeton, 1955), p. 108. For the view that Christ’s hand is more like that of Adam, see Hibbard, p. 100. The traditional identification of the bearded man as Matthew has been challenged by Pamela Askew, “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision,” in Macioce, ed., Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, pp. 248–59; Nicholas De Marco, “Caravaggio’s Calling of Matthew,” Iris 1 (1982): 5–7; Andreas Prater, “Wo ist Matthäus,” Pantheon 43 (1985): 70–75; Angela Haas, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew Reconsidered,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 245–50; and Thomas Puttfarken, “Caravaggio’s ‘Story of St. Matthew’: A Challenge to the Conventions of Painting,” Art History 21 (1998): 163–81. In support of this view, Salvatore Settis, in the fourth of his A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (unpublished; delivered in 2001), writes: “The main points for this argument are two, and both have to do with the hands of the bearded dandy at the center: first, the gesture of his left hand, which actually anaphorically reiterates those of Christ and Peter; second, what his right hand is doing. As clearly shown in a detail

[Settis is referring to a slide], the bearded figure is not a tax collector, as Matthew should be, but a tax payer. The one who greedily collects the money with his right hand, while his left firmly holds a moneybag, is the young man at our left. There is, indeed, little doubt that this is, indeed, Matthew the tax collector, just an instant before he would hear Christ’s whispering voice, and immediately follow Him.” My thanks to Professor Settis for allowing me to read his lectures and quote them here. Among those who uphold the traditional designation are Herwarth Röttgen, “Da ist Matthäus,” Pantheon 49 (1991): 97–99; Irving Lavin, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew: The Identity of the Protagonist” in Past-Present: Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 85–99; Langdon, esp. p. 175; and Robb, pp. 124– 26. See also Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London, 1998), p. 160; and Spike, pp. 95–96. Zuccaro’s comment is reported by Giovanni Baglione in Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti, published in Rome in 1642. “When Federico Zuccaro came to see this picture [Saint Matthew and the Angel in San Luigi dei Francesi], while I was there, he exclaimed: ‘What is all the fuss about?’ and, after having studied the entire work carefully, added: ‘I do not see anything here other than the style of Giorgione [il pensiero di Giorgione].’ ” For the original text and its English translation see Hibbard, p. 353.

For a moment I was unsure . . . On Ludovico’s Calling, see Gail Feigenbaum’s entry in Ludovico Carracci, exh. cat. (Bologna and Fort Worth, 1993– 94), cat. 65, pp. 141–43. My thanks to Charles Dempsey for suggesting the relevance of Ludovico’s canvas to my argument.

In this light let me offer another, . . . For Gilbert’s view that the Tobias and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Saint Matthew and the Angel were on view in the Zecca or Mint in Milan, see Creighton E. Gilbert, The Works of Girolamo Savoldo: The 1955 Dissertation, with a Review of Research, 1955–1985 (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1955; New York and London, 1986), cat. no. 33, pp. 184–85. Also p. 373. For a recent discussion of the question of the painting’s early whereabouts, see the entry on the Tobias by Andrea Beyer in Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, exh. cat. (Cremona and New York, 2004), cat. 45, p. 137. In “Caravaggio’s ‘Story of St. Matthew’: A Challenge to the Conventions of Painting,” Puttfarken stresses the immediacy of Matthew’s conversion as well as the “magnetic” character of Christ’s gesture. In choosing the passively receiving hand of Michelangelo’s Adam, rather than the precisely pointing one of

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the Father, Caravaggio has defined for us the nature of Christ’s power: it is here not the life-giving force of the Creator, but the magnetic power of which St. Jerome spoke [in a passage quoted earlier in Puttfarken’s article]. Seen together with Christ’s face the passive yet magnetic gesture visualizes the passage quoted above: The glory and majesty of the hidden God, which shone somewhat through the face of the man Jesus Christ, were enough to draw them which gazed thereon, even at first sight. For if there be in a stone a magnetic power which can make rings and straws and rods come and cleave thereon, how much more must not the Lord of all creatures have been able to draw unto Himself whom he called? (p. 169; cited both in the Golden Legend and in the Breviarium Romanum) What is not clear in Puttfarken’s argument, however, is why Adam’s hand—which on the Sistine ceiling is wholly passive—should have lent itself so well to a “magnetic” mode of efficacy.

Finally, something should be said about . . . On the “bad” everyday, see Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 159, 165, 174; and Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven and London, 2008), pp. 64–66.

It may be that the invention of that open structure . . . Emphasizing the site-specific nature of the two lateral Saint Matthew paintings, Settis observes: “[T]he implied point of view on the lateral canvases of the chapel . . . is from the altar: as the celebrating priest would turn his back to the altar, and speak to the very few people that the chapel could accommodate, he would see at his left another ready for celebration, and another priest, with bare feet but a pretty up-to-date chasuble, about to be killed for his faith. In other words, the dying saint is painted so as to face the priest, while the most remote figure, slipping out of the room with a grimace that denotes melancholy rather than horror or fear, very likely Caravaggio’s self-portrait, faces the believers assembled for worship. He leaves the scene as a despondent, unwilling witness; yet, his left hand appears close to the slayer’s dagger in a last, consciously vain gesture of restraint” (emphasis in original). This is characteristically acute; my point is simply that along with the implicit structure Settis describes goes another, in effect opposite, set of structural relationships keyed to the painter’s orientation before the canvas before it left the studio. On the Martydom’s debt to Titian’s panel, see Hibbard, pp. 106–7. On the Death of Saint Peter Martyr, see two recent

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studies, Patricia Meilman, Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge and New York, 2000; and Una Roman d’Elia, The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (Cambridge and New York, 2005), pp. 56–83.

If we now compare the finished painting . . . Robb, pp. 137–38.

Early in lecture 5 I briefly summarized . . . On the notion of metapaintings (more precisely, metapictures) as such, see W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and London, 1994), chap. 2, “Metapictures.”

Let me try to state as simply as possible . . . Apropos of the remarks by Leonardo, see Martin Kemp, “ ‘Ogni dipintore dipinge sé’: A Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo’s Art Theory,” in Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. C. H. Clough (New York, 1976), pp. 311–23; Frank Zöllner, “ ‘Ogni Pittore Dipinge Sé’: Leonardo da Vinci and ‘Automimesis,’ ” in Der Kunstler über sich in seinem Werk, ed. Matthias Winner (Weinheim, 1992), pp. 137–60; and Robert Zwijnenberg, “St. John the Baptist and the Essence of Painting,” in Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, ed. Claire Farago (Manchester and New York, 2008), pp. 96–118.

Early in lecture 4 I mentioned . . . Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, Spike, cat. 30. The rediscovery was announced by Sergio Benedetti, “Caravaggio’s ‘Taking of Christ,’ a Masterpiece Rediscovered,” Burlington Magazine 135 (November 1993): 731–41. On the painting’s relation to the northern tradition, see Kristina Herrmann Fiore, “Caravaggio’s ‘Taking of Christ’ and Dürer’s Woodcut of 1509,” Burlington Magazine 137 (January 1995): 24–27. See also Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei, exh. cat (Rome, 1995), cat. 3, pp. 124–27, entry by Sergio Benedetti; and Rudolf Preimesberger, “Un doppio diletto nell’imitazione? Qualche riflessione sulla Cattura di Cristo di Caravaggio,” trans. Mauro Tosti-Croce, in Caravaggio e il suo ambiente. Ricerche e interpretazioni, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Julian Kliemann, Valeska von Rosen, and Lothar Sickel (Milan, 2007), pp. 87–97. For a popular account of the circumstances of the rediscovery, see Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece (New York, 1995).

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit . . . Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1998), p. 56, emphasis in original.

In the first place, to start this time . . . Benedetti, “Caravaggio’s ‘Taking of Christ,’ ” p. 738. He uses the term “bifrontismo” to describe Christ’s and the fleeing

man’s pairing of crania. Bersani and Dutoit elaborate on the point, writing: “[The fleeing man] is, in some ways, a double of Christ. He seems to be a growth on Christ’s body. They have identical hair, and they seem to be attached at the head like Siamese twins. The lower part of the youth’s body fades into Christ’s lower back, and they are wearing similarly colored capes. It is as if the nonresistant Christ were also running away, rushing out from his own head to escape his imminent death only, perhaps, to meet that predestined, inescapable fate rushing toward him from the opposite direction” (Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, p. 56).

Finally, Bersani and Dutoit call attention . . . Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, p. 56.

Not that the two “narratives” are wholly disparate . . . . On the theme of Judas’s kiss, see Franco Mormando, “ ‘Just as Your Lips Approach the Lips of Your Brothers’: Judas Iscariot and the Kiss of Betrayal,” in Caravaggio and the Baroque Image, ed. Franco Mormando, exh. cat. (Boston, 1999), pp. 179–90.

But probably we go wrong if we try . . . Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, pp. 57–58. The passage quoted continues: Is Judas about to kiss Christ, or has he already kissed him? This question is unanswerable because in the “region” of huddled violence Caravaggio has painted there are no temporal sequences, no before or after— just as there are no locatable identities. More exactly, we should reidentify the narrative figure of Christ as a function within a particular constellation of contracts and positionings. He receives. This function is distributed and differentiated within the paint’s space as: (1) the resigned but somewhat self-protective passivity of Christ; (2) the panicky resistance of his double, whose outstretched arms leave him more open to an onslaught than Christ who, with his slightly averted face and crossed [sic] hands, at once accepts and blocks the violence rushing toward him with a motionless yet locked-in body; and (3) the witness’s [the lantern bearer’s] optical reception of that scene and of the light that exposes him as simultaneously within the movement and staging it. All of this has never happened before; indeed, it can happen only in art. (p. 58, emphasis in original)

There is also, I want to propose . . . Poussin to the collector Paul Fréart de Chantelou in Paris: “Le petit Saint Paul veut encore deux jours de caresses . . .” (Nicolas Poussin, Lettres et propos sur l’art, ed. Anthony Blunt [Paris, 1989], p. 92). And to the same correspondent

about another work that Poussin had shipped to him from Rome: “Si d’aventure vous trouviez en icelui quelque moisissure, ne vous en étonnez point, car il n’est verni que de blanc d’oeuf, lequel vous ferez ôter avec de l’eau et une éponge, et le ferez vernir avec un vernis fin et léger. Vous savez le reste des caresses qu’il lui faudra faire pour le faire paraître” (p. 123). Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, pp. 57–58. In this connection they cite in a note my work on “instances of painters [such as Courbet and Thomas Eakins] painting themselves into their pictures.” They continue: “We share this interest, although what we do with the cutting away of distinctions between subject and object seems to us quite different from what Fried sets out to do when he takes up the same motif. Specifically, ‘relationality’ in our discussion has very different ends and structure from ‘absorption’ and ‘immersion’ in Fried’s work” (pp. 109–10). This is true.

In mid-July 1607 Caravaggio . . . On Caravaggio’s stay in Malta, see Langdon, pp. 314–63. For documentation on his stay there, see Caravaggio in Malta, ed. Philip Farrugia Randon (Malta, 1989); Stefania Macioce, “Caravaggio a Malta e i suoi referenti: Notizie d’archivio,” Storia dell’arte 81 (1994): 207–28; John Azzopadri, “Un ‘San Francesco’ di Caravaggio a Malta nel secolo XVIII: Commenti sul periodo maltese del Merisi,” in Macioce, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 195–209; David Stone, “The Context of Caravaggio’s ‘Beheading of St John’ in Malta,” Burlington Magazine 34 (1997): 161–70; Keith Sciberras, “Frater Michael Angelus in tumultu: The Cause of Caravaggio’s Imprisonment in Malta,” Burlington Magazine 144 (April 2002), 229–32; and Sciberras and Stone, Caravaggio: Art, Knighthood, and Malta (Valletta, 2006). The two citations come from Langdon, pp. 361 and 362.

The Malta Beheading . . . Caravaggio, The Beheading of John the Baptist, Cinotti, cat. 23; Spike, cat. 63. In addition to the works cited above, see Caravagio da Malta a Firenze, exh. cat. (Florence, 1996), with essays by Giorgio Bonsanti and Mina Gregori; and Bert Treffers, Caravaggio nel sangue del Battista (Rome, 2000), pp. 109–35.

Finally, though, what gives the Beheading . . . Langdon, p. 358.

The result of the commission is . . . Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, Cinotti, cat. 37; Spike, cat. 74. See also AC, cat. 101, pp. 352–53, entry by Mina Gregory; L’Ultimo Caravaggio: Il Martirio di Sant’Orsola restaurato, exh. cat. (Rome, Milan, and Vincenza, 2004); and Caravaggio: The Final Years, exh. cat.

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(London, 2005), cat. 18., pp. 144–47, entry by Ferdinando Bologna. Of particular interest are the detailed accounts of the painting’s deteriorated physical condition and its subsequent restoration in L’Ultimo Caravaggio; see Denise Maria Pagano, “La storia conservativa” (pp. 91–99) and Carlo Giantomassi and Donatella Zari, “L’intervento” (pp. 101–11). Warm thanks to Dawson Carr of the National Gallery for arranging for me to see the Saint Ursula under strong illumination at the time of the London exhibition.

According to The Golden Legend . . . Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1993), 2:259.

I think of the excruciatingly short distance . . . About the gesturing man to Ursula’s left, Ferdinando Bologna has this to say: “The beautifully executed hand of the man accompanying the Princess, which the excellent cleaning carried out by the restorer Giantomassi has retrieved from underneath old repaintings, has restored to the work and the moment it narrates an animation and an emotional immediacy which have never previously been noted, not even it seems by the most recent commentators. Clearly Caravaggio set out to exult in the commotion provoked by the flight of the arrow loosed at point-blank range, exploiting the culminating moment of the narrative. The hand fends off the posse of protagonists, giving more room to the distraught and repressed tension which is urging it forward” (“Caravaggio, the Final Years [1606–1610],” in Caravaggio: The Final Years, p. 39). The sun is the planet that rules the zodiac sign of Leo. Moreover, Ripa in his discussion of the chariots of the seven planets says that one of the youthful charioteer’s attributes is a bow and arrows; see Cesare Ripa, Iconologia: Overo descrittione di diverse imagini cavate dell’antichità, e di propria inventione (1593; Hildesheim, 1970), p. 51. Among the many illustrations that might be cited in this connection, none is richer than Pietro Testa’s etching Summer (ca. 1642–44), which centrally depicts “Apollo . . . in the sign of Leo within the full circle of the sun, about to draw an arrow from his quiver to shoot down pestilence on the earth below. [In this work] Testa shows Leo as a lion in the sky with a woman riding on his back” (Elizabeth Cropper, entry for Summer in Pietro Testa, 1612–1650: Prints and Drawings, exh. cat. [Philadelphia and Cambridge, Mass., 1988–89], pp. 165–67). On negation of sight and inimicalness to vision, cf. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s insistence that “ ‘in the beginning’ there is no one to see anything at all; there is no ‘one’ to see oneself in front of oneself in a model-image (or, as it is so aptly put in German, in a Vor-bild, a ‘picture-in-front’). . . . Where the ego forms itself in the image of the other, where it mimes the other, one can no longer speak either of ‘form’ or ‘image,’

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either of ‘self’ or ‘other.’ Where the id was (neither himself nor myself), the ‘I’ arrives. And the id can no longer be expressed in the language of the visible, of perception, of phenomenality, nor, by the same token, in any sort of theory of models and images. The other stage becomes a beyond-stage, a forestage of the primary mimesis” (The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter [Stanford, 1998], p. 118). And is there not something uncannily appropriate in the fact that Lanfranco Massa, the Doria family’s correspondent and procurator in Naples, wrote to Marcantonio Doria (for whom the painting was destined) “that he had already received the painting of Saint Ursula from Caravaggio and was waiting for it to dry. However, exposure of the picture to the sun proved deleterious, since, according to Massa, Caravaggio employed a thick varnish” (Gregori in AC, p. 352)?

A brief postscript . . . On the Maximilian project, see esp. Nils Gösta Sandblad, Manet: Three Studies in Artistic Conception (Lund, 1954), chap. 3: “L’Exécution de Maximilien”; Edouard Manet and the “Execution of Maximilien,” exh. cat., Brown University Graduate Exhibition Series, organized by Kermit S. Champa (Providence, R.I., 1981); Edouard Manet: Augenblicke der Geschichte, exh. cat. (Mannheim, 1992–93); Juliet WilsonBareau et al., Manet: The Execution of Maximilian: Painting, Politics and Censorship, exh. cat. (London, 1992); Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London, 1996), pp. 346–64; and John Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, exh. cat. (New York, 2006–7). On Manet in the Mannheim painting as being “at once everywhere and nowhere,” see Fried, Manet’s Modernism, p. 358, and for the larger passage from which this is taken, pp. 358–60. The term “indifference,” adapted from Georges Bataille’s book on Manet, is developed by me in ibid., p. 360. See Bataille, Manet (1955; Geneva, 1983).

CONCLUSION In the first half of lecture 4 . . . For Stanley Cavell on Shakespeare and skepticism, see his Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York, 1987). Caravaggio, The Toothpuller, Spike, cat. 83. The initial case in support of Caravaggio’s authorship of this painting was made by Mina Gregori in AC, cat. 98, pp. 341–44. As Gregori remarks, Francesco Scannelli in 1657 reported seeing in the collection of the Grand Duke of Tuscany “a painting with half-length figures of [Caravaggio’s] usual naturalism, which depicts a dentist who is pulling a tooth from a peasant’s mouth, and if this work were well preserved (it is in

large part very dark, and ruined) it would be one of his best” (for the Italian original and an English translation, see Hibbard, p. 359). In his recent catalogue raisonné, Spike writes: The provocative proposal by Gregori to recognize in this Toothpuller an autograph invention by Caravaggio is strongly supported by its Medici provenance by 1637 and the precise description by Scannelli in 1657. Independent confirmation of an indirect kind is provided by the presence in a Spanish collection by 1630 of a Toothpuller considered a copy after the artist. That the painting faithfully reflects the style of Caravaggio’s late work is indubitable. At the time of its 1985 exhibition, Christiansen reported that its technique is congruent with Caravaggio’s. Nevertheless the Toothpuller has failed to convince most observers, primarily because of its boring composition and numerous glaring lapses in execution. The patient’s face is monstruously [sic] distorted in ways that cannot be explained by its rapid execution. . . . The witnesses to the toothpulling occupy a large part of the canvas yet are essentially superfluous. (John T. Spike, with the assistance of Michele K. Spike, CDRom Catalogue, p. 326) Are they, though? And is the composition simply “boring”? See below. For Keith Christiansen, however, the Toothpuller “is key to understanding the shifting character of Caravaggio’s naturalism and his increasing sense of the comic as well as the tragic dimension of life” (in Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, ed. Andrea Bayer, exh. cat. [New York, 2004], cat. 68, p. 175). He notes acutely that the old hag at the right is “paired with a young man [at the left] mesmerized by the cruel pleasure the charlatan takes in his task” (p. 176). See also Christiansen, “Caravaggio and ‘L’esempio davanti del natural,’ ” Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 421–45, esp. p. 438 on the structure of incisions in the Toothpuller.

From my point of view, the question . . . See James Conant, “Varieties of Skepticism,” in Wittgenstein and Scepticism, ed. Denis McManus (London and New York, 2004), p. 101. In this essay Conant develops a basic distinction between “Cartesian” and “Kantian” modes of skepticism. See also Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York, 1969), pp. 238–66. On toothpullers as charlatans, see Helen Langdon, “Gypsies, Tricksters, and Whores: The Street Life of Caravaggio’s Rome,” in Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His World, exh. cat. (Sydney and Victoria, Australia, 2003–4), pp. 23– 24. Langdon writes: “The Toothpuller too may be a kind of cheat. . . . In northern European painting he is associated with folly, and was associated with the gypsy witch, ready to

offer a variety of cures, herbs and ointments. Alongside jugglers, mountebanks and charlatans with their monkeys and dogs, toothpullers entertained the crowds in the market place. They enraged more qualified physicians, as Caravaggesque painters provoked more traditional artists.” See also Piero Camporesi, The Land of Hunger, trans. Tania Croft-Murray with the assistance of Claire Foley (1978; Cambridge, 1996), pp. 114–16 (cited by Langdon).

Here, for purposes of comparison . . . On the Saint Sebastian, see Annibale Carracci, exh. cat. (Bologna and Rome, 2006–7), cat. III.4, pp. 140–41, entry by Daniele Benati. On The Toothpuller, see Gerrit van Honthorst 1592–1656 (Doornspijk, The Netherlands, 1999), cat. 275, pp. 210–12. Note in this painting the pickpocket making off with the purse of the peasant onlooker in the left foreground.

One of my main claims throughout these lectures . . . On the Tancred and Erminia, see Nicolas Poussin 1594– 1665, exh. cat. (Paris and London, 1994–95), cat. 35, pp. 187–88, entry by Pierre Rosenberg, who proposes a date of 1628–29. See Jonathan Unglaub, “Poussin’s Reflection,” Art Bulletin 86 (September 2004): 505–28. Specific citations come from pp. 506, 506, 507–8, 513, 513, and 513, respectively.

All this is to the point . . . On the importance of the painter’s studio in some seventeenthcentury painting, see Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others (New Haven and London, 2005).

Apropos of the theme of beheading . . . On The Triumph of David, see Anthony Blunt, The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue (London, 1966), cat. 33, pp. 26–27. The fragment, presumably fallen from a cornice, is interpreted by Milovan Stanic as pointing to the eventual construction by Solomon of the Second Temple in “Le mode énigmatique dans l’art de Poussin,” in Poussin et Rome, Actes du colloque de l’Académie de France à Rome, 16–18 November 1994, ed. Olivier Bonfait, Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Michel Hochmann, and Sebastian Schütze (Paris, 1996), pp. 95–96. My thanks to Ittai Weinryb for this reference.

At a point when this book was almost finished . . . On the Juno and Argus, see Horst Vey and Annamaria Kesting, Katalog der Niederländischen Gemälde von 1550 bis

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1800 im Wallraf-Richartz-Museum und im Öffentlichen Besitz der Stadt Köln (Cologne, 1967), pp. 95–98; and Matthias Winner, “Peter Paul Rubens’ Juno und Argus,” in Die Zukunft der Alten Meister. Perspektiven und Konzepte für das Kunstmuseum von heute, ed. E. Mai (Cologne and Vienna, 2001): 187–215. See Thomas Bullfinch, Bullfinch’s Mythology: The Age of Fable (1855), chap. 3, “Io and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon.” http://www.online- literature.com/bullfinch/mythology _fable. Interestingly, the Juno and Argus figures prominently in scholarly discussions of Rubens’s ideas about color. See, e.g., Charles Parkhurst, “Aguilonius’ Optics and Rubens’ Color,” Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek 12 (1961): 35–49; Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London, 1990), pp. 275–76; Winner, “Peter Paul Rubens’ Juno and Argus”; and Eveliina Juntunen, “Rubens, Van Mander und Goltzius,” Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek 55 (2004): 244–69.

What struck me in Cologne . . . Apropos of Manet and facingness, see my discussion of the eye of a peacock feather that faces the beholder in his Portrait of Emile Zola in Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London, 1996), p. 323n.

All this is to say nothing . . . Robert W. Berger, “Rubens and Caravaggio: A Source for a Painting from the Medici Cycle,” Art Bulletin 54 (December 1972): 473–77. Caravaggio, Madonna of the Rosary, Cinotti, cat. 69; Spike, cat. 51. Nothing reliable is known about the commissioning of this work, which is also to say that the date of its execution remains a matter of conjecture. Most scholars, including Cinotti and Spike, favor a date of around 1606–7. Here as elsewhere I am following Keith Christiansen, who writes: “I . . . believe it highly unlikely that the Madonna of the Rosary was painted later than c. 1602/03. I would explain its presence in Naples in 1607 by the hypothesis that it was painted for a Dominican establishment outside Rome (hence the apparent lack of knowledge of the work there), rejected, and then acquired by the painter-merchants Abraham Vinck and Louis Finson for future sale. We know that from Naples it was shipped to Amsterdam. It seems to me that the removal from consideration of [the Borghese David with the Head of Goliath and the Madonna of the Rosary] from consideration of [late works by Caravaggio] gives far greater consistency to Caravaggio’s first and second Neapolitan periods” (in Caravaggio: The Final Years, exh. cat. [London, 2005], p. 110).

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notes to pages 234–43

Rubens is also the author . . . On Rubens’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, see R. A. D’Hulst and M. Vandenven, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Borchard, 3: The Old Testament (London and New York, 1989), cat. 51, pp. 164–66.

Two other paintings of severed heads . . . On Ter Bruggen’s David Saluted by the Israelite Women, see Benedict Nicolson, Hendrick Terbruggen (London, 1958), cat. A50, pp. 82–83. The head of Goliath was first viewed as a self-portrait by Charles I. Minott in the Calendar of Art Events of the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1962. On the Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, see Francesca Baldassari, Carlo Dolci (Turin, 1995), cat. 126, pp. 151–54; and Lucy Whitaker and Martin Clayton, The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque (London, 2007), cat. 109, pp. 308–9. The phrase “melancholy distraction” comes from the latter. Baldinucci’s comment and Giordano’s gibes are quoted by Francesca Baldassari in Artists’ Self-Portraits from the Uffizi, exh. cat. (London, 2007), p. 96. An interesting if rhetorically somewhat over-the-top appreciation of Dolci’s particular brand of intensity is Piero Bigongiari, “Silenzio e azione in Carlo Dolci,” in Baldassari, Carlo Dolci, pp. 11–12. It goes without saying that I am not claiming that Dolci was unique in his perfectionism and inability to finish; Leonardo, notably, is another painter famously reluctant to leave the realm of the immersive.

On October 22, 1960, in Darmstadt . . . Paul Celan, “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Manchester, England, 1973), pp. 42–43. (I replace “most intimate” with “most inward.”) In the original: Lenz, also Büchner, hat, “ach, die Kunst,” sehr verächtliche Worte für den “Idealismus” und dessen “Holzpuppen.” Er setzt ihnen, und hier folgen die unvergesslichen Zeilen über das “Leben des Geringsten,” die “Zuckungen,” die “Andeutungen,” das “ganz feine, kaum bemerkte Mienenspiel,”—er setzt ihnen das Natürliche und Kreatürliche entgegen. Und diese Auffassung von der Kunst illustriert er nun an Hand eines Erlebnisses: Wie ich gestern neben am Tal hinaufging, sah ich auf einem Steine zwei Mädchen sitzen: die eine band ihr Haar auf, die andre half ihr; und dans goldne Haar hing herab, und ein ernstes bleiches Gesicht, und doch so jung, und die schwarze Tracht, und die andre so sorgsam bemüht. Die schönsten, innigsten Bilder der altdeutschen Schule geben kaum eine Ahnung davon. Man möchte manchmal ein

Medusenhaupt sein, um so eine Gruppe in Stein verwandeln zu können, und den Leuten zurufen. Meine Damen und Herren, beachten Sie, bitte: “Man möchte ein Medusen haupt” sein, um . . . das Natürliche als das Natürliche mittels der Kunst zu erfassen! Man möchte heisst es hier freilich, nicht: ich möchte. Das ist ein Hinaustreten aus dem Menschlichen, ein Sichhinausbegeben in einem dem Menschlichen zugewandten und unheimlichen Bereich—denselben, in dem die Affengestalt, die Automaten und damit . . . ach, auch die Kunst zuhause zu sein scheinen. (Paul Celan, “Der Meridian. Rede anlässlich der Verleihung des Georg-Büchner-Preises,” in Ich hörte sagen, Ausgewählte Gedichte, Zwei Reden [Frankfurt am Main, 2001], pp. 137–38)

I do not have the heart at this point to try to read a problematic of the “uncanny” back through my account of Caravaggio in these lectures. Suffice it to say that for Büchner as interpreted by Celan it seems crucially to do with the condition that the lifelikeness of art is necessarily a kind of death, however “turned toward the human” it may also be. Cf. the extended discussion of “automatonity” in Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Cambridge, New York, and Oxford, 1979), part 4: “Skepticism and the Problem of Others.” My thanks to Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus and Antjie Krog for intense discussions of “Der Meridian” and individual poems by Celan (and others) in weekly meetings at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin during the year 2007–8.

notes to pages 243–44

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Photography and Copyright Credits Permission to reproduce illustrations is provided by the owners and sources as listed in the captions. Additional copyright notices and photography credits are as follows. Numbers refer to figures, unless otherwise indicated. Frontispiece Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 1.1 © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York. 1.2 © Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi. 1.3 Claude Gaspari. © 2010 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 1.4 Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; photographer: Thierry Le Mage. 1.5 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 1.6 Uffizi Museum / Photo Index, Florence-Vasari, Rome. 1.7 © The Trustees of the British Museum. 1.8 Scala /Art Resource, New York. 1.9 Bernd Peter Keiser. 1.10 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1.12 Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 1.13 Graydon Wood. 1.14 Scala /Art Resource, New York. 1.15 Photography © Luciano Pedicini. 1.16, 1.19 under license from the Italian Ministry for Cultural Goods and Activities. 1.17 Photo Alessandro Vasari, Rome. 1.20 Photograph by Luigino Visconti. 1.21, 1.22, 1.24 Finsiel / Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 1.23 Photo Alessandro Vasari, Rome. 1.25 The Royal Collection © 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 1.26 Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln. 1.28, 1.30 The Bridgeman Art Library. 1.31 Finsiel / Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 1.32, 1.33 Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York. 1.34 Scala /Art Resource, New York. 1.37 Lukas–Art in Flanders VZW. 1.39 photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; photographer: Michele Blot. 1.40 Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago. 1.43, 1.44 Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln. 1.45 photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York; photographer: Fritz Escher. 2.1 © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York. 2.2 Scala / Ministero per I Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 2.3 image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2.4 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 2.5 photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; photographer: H. Lewandowski. 2.6 Foto Marburg / Art Resource, New York. 2.7 photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art

Resource, New York; photographer: Thierry Le Mage. 2.8 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 2.9 Fotografia d’Arte–Paolo Tosi, Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 2.10 © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York. 2.11 Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 2.12 image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2.13, 2.14 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 2.15, 2.16 Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 2.17 © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York. 2.18 © Patrimonio Nacional. 3.1, 3.2 images courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 3.3 © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York. 3.4–3.8 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 3.9 Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 3.10 Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 3.11 Arti Doria Pamphilj srl. 3.12 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 3.13 photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; photographer: R. G. Ojeda. 3.14 photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; photographer: Daniel Arnaudet / Jean Schormans. 3.15 Alinari / The Bridgeman Art Library. 3.16 The Bridgeman Art Library. 3.17, 3.18 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 3.19 Bernd Peter Keiser. 3.20 Fotografia d’Arte–Paolo Tosi, Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 3.21 Alessandro Vasari, Rome. 3.22 © 2003 Museum Associates / LACMA. 3.23 Blauel / Gnamm / ARTOTHEK. 3.24 Prudence Cumming Associates Limited. 3.25 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 3.26 photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; photographer: Bulloz. 4.1 Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 4.2 Alessandro Vasari, Rome. 4.3 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 4.4 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 4.5 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 4.6 Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York. 4.7 Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 4.8 photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York; photographer: Jörg P. Anders. 4.9 Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York.4.10, 4.11 images courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 4.12 Kimbell

Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas / Art Resource, New York. 4.13 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 4.14 image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 4.15 Arti Doria Pamphilj srl. 4.16 Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 4.17 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 4.18 © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / The Bridgeman Art Library. 4.19 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 4.20, 4.21 © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York. 4.22 Alinari /Art Resource, New York. 5.1 Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 5.2 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 5.3 Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 5.4 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 5.5 Alessandro Vasari, Rome. 5.6 © SMK Foto. 5.7, 5.8, 5.9 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 5.11 Jacques Lathion © Nasjonalmuseet 2010. 5.14 photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; photographer: René-Gabriel Ojéda. 5.15 photo: Alessandro Vasari, Rome. 5.17 Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città Roma. 5.20 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 5.21 Scala / Ministero per I Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 5.22 Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città Roma. 5.25 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 5.26 The Royal Collection © 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 5.27 reproduced by courtesy of Trafalgar Galleries, London. 5.28 photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York ; photographer: Thierry Le Mage. 5.30 Scala /Art Resource, New York. 5.32 photograph and digital image © Minneapolis Institute of Arts. 5.33 © SMK Foto. 5.34 photo: Réunion des Musées

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Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; photographer: Gérard Blot / Christian Jean. 5.35 under license from Italian Ministry for Cultural Goods and Activities. 5.36 from Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, commentary and translation by Anne Summerscale, Penn State Press. 5.37, 5.38 property of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, Bologna. 5.39, 5.40 © Foto Marco Baldassari. 5.41 Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 5.42 Alessandro Vasari, Rome. 5.43 image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 5.44, 5.45, 5.46, 5.47, 5.48 images courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 5.49 Vanni / Art Resource, New York. 5.50 Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 6.1 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 6.2 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 6.3 The Bridgeman Art Library. 6.4 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 6.5 Fotografia d’Arte–Paolo Tosi. 6.6 Scala / Ministero per I Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 6.7 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 6.8 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, New York. 6.10 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 6.11 Scala / Art Resource, New York. 6.12, 6.13 photographs courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland. 6.14, 6.15, 6.16 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 6.17, 6.18, 6.19 photography © Luciano Pedicini. 6.20 © Ursula Edelmann–Artothek. C.1 Scala / Art Resource, New York. C.2, C.3 E. Estel © SKD. C.4, C.5 Scala / Art Resource, New York. C.7 Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln. C.8 photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; photographer: Ojéda / Le Mage. C.9 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. C.10 Bernd Peter Keiser. C.12 The Royal Collection © 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Index Note: Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. absorption: address in relation to, 2, 69, 117–39, 141, 147, 165, 171, 180; in Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures, 180; and antitheatricality, 179n; artist’s intentions and, 122; beholder’s projection as element of, 77, 99, 103, 106–7; beholder’s response to painted figures’, 95, 102, 262n; in Büchner’s Lenz, 244; in Caravaggio’s work, 69, 73–96, 99–103, 122–39, 141–42, 147, 165; in Caravaggisti’s works, 171; Carracci’s Sleeping Venus and, 162n; Crowning with Thorns and, 86–96; in David’s Oath of the Horatii, 178; David with the Head of Goliath and, 63; Death of the Virgin and, 79–83; Incredulity of Thomas and, 83–86; invention of, 2, 69–96; Leonardo on, 263n; painting technique/practice and, 78, 81; Penitent Magdalen and, 73–78; in pre-Caravaggio art, 69–73; realism and, 78, 83, 102; skepticism and, 270n; in tableaux, 1–2, 44. See also immersion Absorption and Theatricality (Fried), 1, 44, 121, 175, 262n address, 115; absorption in relation to, 2, 69, 117–39, 141, 147, 165, 171, 180; in Annibale’s Self-Portrait with Figures, 180; in Caravaggio’s work, 69, 109–17, 122–39, 141–42, 147, 165; in Caravaggisti’s works, 171; in gallery pictures, 2, 69; in Ludovico’s Chess Players, 119–20; Petrarchan poetry and, 112; in Rubens’s paintings, 236, 238; in Western artistic tradition, 108–9. See also specularity; theatricality Aertsen, Pieter, 153 Ages of Man, 23 Agucchi, Giovanni Batista, “Description of Annibale Carracci’s Sleeping Venus,” 159n Albani, Francesco, 245n Alberti, Leon Battista, 73, 84, 85, 135, 141, 175, 247n, 276n; On Painting, 12, 248n Allori, Alessandro, Self-Portrait, 19–20, 20 Allori, Cristofano, 208; Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 27, 27; Self-Portrait, 25, 26, 27 altarpieces, 4–5, 102, 164 Andrea del Sarto, Self-Portrait, 19, 19, 250n Anguissola, Sofonisba, Self-Portrait at the Clavichord, 20, 20

antitheatricality, 176, 178 Antonello da Messina, 108 armor, 63, 96, 216, 230–31 artists, their relationship to paintings. See painters, their relationship to paintings; painting, the act of artist-sitter, 13, 180 artist-viewer, 13, 44, 203, 233 Askew, Pamela, 82, 134 autonomy, of gallery pictures, 1, 3, 83, 142, 155, 159, 174, 180, 207–8, 214, 233, 243n. See also severing, of painting from environment autonomy without unity, 174 aversion, 207, 214–15 Baglione, Giovanni, 7, 55, 142, 247n, 277n Bailly, David, Vanitas Still Life, 31, 32, 33 Baldinucci, Filippo, 27, 241 Bann, Stephen, 109, 135, 137 Barberini, Maffeo, 164 baroque art, 122, 179n, 187 Bassani, Riccardo, 247n Bedoli, Girolamo, 14 beheading. See decapitation beholders: of absorptive works, 95, 102; Boy Bitten by a Lizard and, 10; of Caravaggio’s works, 10–12; Conversion of Saint Paul and, 148; Crucifixion of Saint Peter and, 148; emotional appeal to, 178n; of gallery pictures, 2, 142, 178n; nonexistence of, 1–2, 44, 69, 120; projection of mindedness by, 77, 99, 103–4, 106–7; relationship of, to paintings, 143–44; tableaux and, 1–2, 44, 69. See also address; artist-viewer belief, 103–4 Bellini, Fiora, 247n Bellini, Giovanni, 108 Bellori, Giovanni, 74, 89, 122, 124, 142, 174, 245n, 260n, 266n, 276n Belting, Hans, 108 Benedetti, Sergio, 213

Berger, Robert W., 236 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 122 Bersani, Leo: Baudelaire and Freud, 50–51; Caravaggio’s Secrets, 212–16, 274n, 287n Bianchini, Anna, 76 binocularism, 148 bodily modes of experience, 23, 25, 35–36, 44–45, 48, 56, 76, 134, 142–43, 148, 165, 216 Bologna, Ferdinando, 95, 268n, 279n, 288n Bond, Anthony, 249n Boneri, Francesco. See Cecco del Caravaggio Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 51–52, 54, 63, 65, 94, 288n; The Emotional Tie, 256n; The Freudian Subject, 51, 256n, 288n Bordone, Paris, Chess Players, 117–18, 119 Borghese, Scipione, 260n Borgianni, Orazio, 4, 159, 208; Self-Portrait, 25, 26 Boy Bitten by a Lizard (Caravaggio): address in, 109; and the beholder, 10; Florence version, 8; foreground of, 50; glass vase in, 54–55, 55; London version, 6, 38 (detail), 40, 55 (detail); Matisse’s Self-Portrait compared to, 9–12; scholarship on, 7–8; as self-portrait, 9–10, 16, 116; sexuality in, 8, 10; time in, 9; use of mirror for painting, 9–10, 25, 35, 37, 180 Ter Bruggen, Hendrick, 159; Christ Crowned with Thorns, 91, 93, 267n; David Saluted by the Israelite Women, 238–40, 240 Büchner, Georg: Danton’s Death, 244; Lenz, 243–44 Bulfinch, Thomas, 235 Butor, Michael, 109 Caillebotte, Gustave, 78; Self-Portrait at the Easel, 35, 37, 37 Calling of Saint Matthew (Caravaggio), 196, 199 (detail); chiaroscuro in, 81; commissioning of, 195; composition of, 165, 201; controversies about, 195–99, 285n; creation of, 195; sources for, 196–97, 199–200 Calvesi, Maurizio, 257n Cambiaso, Luca, Portrait of the Artist Painting a Portrait of His Father, 25, 26, 251n Campin, Robert, 12, 134 canvas, limits of. See limits of the canvas Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), 83, 102, 201, 256n; Amor Vincit Omnia or Eros Triumphant, 113, 114, 143–44, 187n; Bacchus, 9, 56, 58, 59–61, 60 (detail), 63, 109, 192, 208, 209, 217, 222, 258n, 259n; Basket of Fruit, 109, 110; Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 217–18, 219, 219 (detail), 220 (detail), 220; Boy Bitten by a Lizard (Florence), 8, 246n; Boy Bitten by a Lizard (London), 6, 7–12, 25, 35, 37, 38 (detail), 40, 50, 54–55, 55 (detail), 109, 116, 180, 206, 217, 246n; Boy with a Basket of Fruit, 109, 110; Calling of Saint Matthew, 4, 81, 165, 195–201, 196, 199 (detail), 212, 285–86n; Cardsharps, 11, 122–24, 123, 130, 141, 273n; characteristics of art of, 3, 61; complexity of paintings of, 61, 133; Conversion of Saint Paul, 147–48, 150;

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Courbet compared to, 45, 48–50; criticisms of, 3, 74, 76, 88, 101, 142, 175, 276n; Crowning with Thorns, frontispiece (detail), 86–96, 89, 90 (detail), 95 (detail), 99–104, 107, 147, 165, 199, 206, 210; Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, 157, 158, 228, 279n; Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 147–48, 149; David with the Head of Goliath, 27, 61, 62, 63–64, 64 (detail), 113, 117, 147, 153, 192, 209, 217, 221, 222, 226 (detail), 260n; death of, 61, 223–24; Death of the Virgin, 79, 80, 81–83, 82 (detail), 86, 99– 100, 102–3, 123, 147, 176; Eros Triumphant (see Amor Vincit Omnia or Eros Triumphant); Fortune Teller, 124, 125, 273n; as fugitive, 218, 220–21; Head of Medusa, 9, 64, 115, 115–17, 153, 209, 232, 273n; homicide by, 61, 217; Incredulity of Thomas, 11, 79, 83–86, 85, 99–100, 102, 109, 123, 131, 147, 187n, 264n, 265n; Judith and Holofernes, 11, 63, 81, 116, 140 (detail), 153–57, 154, 156 (details), 186, 207 (detail), 207, 208, 214, 218; Lute Player, 111–13, 112, 271n; Madonna of the Rosary, 236, 237, 290n; Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, 4, 81, 165, 195, 197, 201–6, 202 (detail), 203 (x–ray photograph), 204 (detail), 209, 211, 214, 217; Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 217, 221, 221–24, 223 (details), 244, 287n; Medusa (see Head of Medusa); moments in paintings of, 3–4, 39, 48–50, 54–56, 59–61, 63–65, 108; Musicians, 55–56, 57, 124–26, 126, 130, 141–43, 258n; Narcissus, 134–35, 136, 137–39, 141; patrons of, 69–70, 83, 102, 109, 264n; Penitent Magdalen, 68 (detail), 73–74, 75, 76–78, 99–100, 107, 123, 127, 263n; Penitent Saint Jerome, 102; psychology of the works of, 54, 77, 79, 81, 88–90 (see also inner life, representation of); relation of self to paintings, 12, 108; Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 98 (detail), 126–31, 127, 141–43, 193, 203, 274n; Resurrection of Christ, 221; Sacrifice of Isaac, 113, 165, 167; Saint Francis in Meditation, 86, 87, 99; Saint Jerome Writing, 99, 100; Saint John the Baptist with a Ram, 109–10, 111, 113, 130, 270n; Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist (London), 64–65, 66, 117, 130, 147, 153, 202, 207, 221, 222, 260n; Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (Madrid), 65, 67, 67, 153, 202, 221, 260n; Self-Portrait as Bacchus, 109; self-portraits by, 3, 9, 12, 48–50, 56, 60, 63, 108, 116–17, 139, 205–9, 216–17, 222, 232, 247n, 273n; Sick Bacchus (Self-Portrait as Bacchus), 9, 55–56, 57, 257n; Supper at Emmaus (London), 86, 131–34, 132, 141, 143, 147; Supper at Emmaus (Milan), 228; Taking of Christ, 108, 162, 194 (detail), 209–17, 211, 212 (detail), 221; teacher of, 21, 201, 250n; Toothpuller, 228, 228–29, 289n Caravaggisti, 3, 4, 159, 171, 174, 236 Careri, Giovanni, 40–43 caress, painting as, 216, 233 Carr, Dawson, 260n Carracci, 2, 4, 181–87, 236, 277n Carracci, Agostino, 180; Flight of Romulus and Remus, 182, 184; Self-Portrait, 25, 26

Carracci, Annibale, 4, 110, 233, 284n; An Allegory of Truth and Time, 284n; Assumption of the Virgin, 148; Bean Eater, 145, 146; Butcher Shop paintings, 187; Dead Christ, 185; Rinaldo and Armida, 40, 43, 43, 52, 284n; Romulus and Remus Suckled by a She-Wolf, 182, 185; Saint Catherine, 277n; Saint Margaret, 184, 186, 245n; Saint Sebastian, 229–30, 230; scenes from the Jason cycle, 182, 183; Self-Portrait, 279n, 283n; Self-Portrait with Figures, 23, 24, 25, 159, 180–81, 181, 190, 207; Sleeping Venus, 159n, 161, 284n; Venus Adorned by the Graces, 187–93, 189, 190 (detail), 191 (detail); Venus and Satyr with Two Cupids, 144, 144–45, 182 Carracci, Antonio, 180 Carracci, Ludovico, 4, 43, 145; Calling of Saint Matthew, 199, 199; Chess Players, 117–20, 118, 142, 180; Dream of Saint Gregory, 162n; Lamentation, 184, 186; Rape of the Sabines, 182, 184; Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, 163–64, 166, 185 Cartesian skepticism, 229 Catena, Vincenzo, Saint Jerome in His Study, 70, 71 Catholic Church, 107 Cavell, Stanley, 104–7, 227, 263n, 269–70n; The Claim of Reason, 105–6; Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare, 104–5 Cecco del Caravaggio (Francesco Boneri), 4, 113, 159 Celan, Paul, “The Meridian,” 243–44 Cellini, Benvenuto, 116; Perseus and Medusa, 115, 192, 192–93 Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, 151 Cervantes, Miguel de, 125 Cesari, Giuseppe, Cavaliere d’Arpino, 7 Cézanne, Paul, Self-Portrait, 35, 36 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 78, 178, 187n; Card Castle, 120–22, 121 Chassériau, Théodore, 34 Christiansen, Keith, 61, 88, 153, 157, 186, 228, 257n, 260n, 266n, 274n, 281n, 289n, 290n Cigoli, Ludovico, 208; Self-Portrait, 25, 26 Claesz, Pieter, Still Life, 12 Cole, Michael, 192 collectors, 83, 102, 132–33, 178n Conant, James, 229 Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, 195 Corinth, Lovis, Self-Portrait in a White Smock, 35, 36 Corot, Jean-Baptiste, 34 Correggio: Martyrdom of Four Saints, 116; Portrait of a Man (or A Monsignore Reading His Breviary), 73, 74 Costa, Ottavio, 83 Council of Trent, 107 Counter-Reformation, 107 Courbet, Gustave, 3, 12, 35, 43–54, 78, 90; Cellist, 48n; Desperate Man, 45, 46; Man with the Leather Belt, 45, 47, 48, 50; Painter at His Easel, 48n; Painter’s Studio, 45; Portrait of Baudelaire, 96, 97; Self-Portrait with a

Sketchbook, 48n, 49; Self-Portrait with Black Dog, 45, 46; Stonebreakers, 45, 47, 48 Courbet’s Realism (Fried), 2, 44, 48, 121 Cropper, Elizabeth, 1, 95, 111–13, 117, 131, 143, 165, 249n, 268n, 280n cutting off, of painting from environment. See severing, of painting from environment Czobor, Ágnes, 259n Damisch, Hubert, 138 Daumier, Honoré, A Frenchman Painted by Himself, 34, 35 David, Jacques-Louis, 34, 177–78; Death of Socrates, 177; Oath of the Horatii, 177–78, 179 decapitation, 115, 117, 153–57; and the act of painting, 193, 209, 236; and the autonomous gallery picture, 3, 155, 218, 220, 232–33, 238; in other artists’ works, 159, 192–93, 232–33, 235–36, 238–41, 244; and specularity, 63, 155. See also severing, of painting from environment Delécluze, Etienne-Jean, 265n Della Porta, Giovan Battista, 247n Del Monte, Francesco Maria, 54, 83, 102, 113, 122, 124, 195, 210, 256–57n, 258n, 264n Del Pozzo, Cassiano, 178n Dempsey, Charles, 1, 4, 49–50, 78, 102, 108, 142, 175, 184, 216, 227, 245n, 255n, 277n density of pictorial relationships, 128, 142, 171, 174 Descartes, René, Meditations, 104–6 Diderot, Denis, 2, 44, 78, 101, 176, 178 dispositif: defined, 9; of Matisse and Caravaggio selfportraits, 9–12; right-angle, 15–37, 56, 147, 165, 180, 249n distance, 142–43 divinarelli pittorici (pictorial riddles), 181 Dolci, Carlo: preparatory drawing for Self-Portrait, 52, 53; Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, 240–41, 242; Self-Portrait, 30–31, 31, 52, 53, 241 Domenichino, 43 Donatello, Judth and Holofernes, 115, 192, 193 Doria, Marcantonio, 221, 224 drapery: Boy Bitten by a Lizard, 54, 59; Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, 158; Death of the Virgin, 82; Incredulity of Thomas, 86; Judith and Holofernes, 156–57; Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 127, 128, 131; Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist, 82; Taking of Christ, 213 Drost, Willem, Self-Portrait, 29, 30 Dürer, Albrecht, 209n, 217n, 266n; Melancolia I, 231; Passion, 257n Dutoit, Ulysse, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 212–16, 274n, 287n Van Dyck, Anthony: Self-Portrait, 28, 28; Self-Portrait with Sunflower, 28, 28–29 Eakins, Thomas, 78 ears, in Caravaggio’s paintings, 55 easel painting, 1–2, 84, 120–21, 151–53, 178, 239, 265n

index

297

edge of the canvas, 10, 16, 18, 27, 54, 135, 180–82, 201, 212. See also limits of the canvas Elias, Norbert, 42 elision, 180–82, 187, 187n, 233, 284n ellipsis, 181–82, 184–85, 187, 187n empathic projection, 105–6, 269n expressive minimalism, 76–77, 81, 88–90, 94–95, 99, 102, 106 Van Eyck, Jan, 134, 232; Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, 12; Van der Peale Madonna, 12 facingness, 236 facing of painting. See orientation of painting Fantin-Latour, Henri, 48n; Homage to Delacroix, 253n; Self-Portrait, 34, 35 Feigenbaum, Gail, 118 Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, 18–19, 250n finitude, 104–6 Florence, Grand Duke of, 113, 115 foreshortening, 182, 184–85, 187 Freedberg, S. J., 81–82, 100, 109–10, 117; Circa 1600, 12, 79, 271n Freud, Sigmund, 238; “Economic Problem of Masochism,” 51; “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 51 Friedlaender, Walter, 9, 196, 247n Friedman, Hannah, 241n Fumaroli, Marc, 233; “Rome 1630,” 178n Galileo Galilei, 95, 107, 257n, 268n gallery pictures: absorption and address in, 2, 128; altarpieces vs., 102, 164; autonomy of, 1, 3, 83, 142, 155, 159, 174, 180, 207–8, 214, 233, 243n; Caravaggio’s new paradigm for, 2, 83–84, 103, 142, 153, 155, 174–76, 178, 178n, 207–8; characteristics of Caravaggisti’s, 171, 174–75; collectors and, 83, 102, 178n; easel pictures in relation to, 83–84; factors in emergence of, 264–65n; subjectivity in, 174 Gauna, Chiara, 49 genre painting, 119 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 4, 78, 88, 159; Conversion of the Magdalen, 165, 169, 207–8; Judith and Her Maidservant, 165, 168; Judith Slaying Holofernes, 116; Lucretia, 165, 168, 207–8, 281n; Saint Cecilia, 165, 168; Self-Portrait as Female Martyr, 165, 168, 207–8; Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), 165, 170, 281n Gentileschi, Orazio, 4, 70, 78, 88, 159; Christ Crowned with Thorns, 91, 92, 206; David Slaying Goliath, 116; Judith and Her Maidservant, 159, 160; Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, 159, 160; Lot and His Daughters, 159, 161; Lute Player, 187n, 188; Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 159 Géricault, Théodore, 78 Gijsbrechts, Cornelius Norbertus, Reverse of a Framed Painting, 152, 152, 153

298

index

Gilbert, Creighton, 8, 13, 200, 247n Giordano, Luca, 241 Giorgione, 12–13, 142, 198; Adoration of the Shepherds (Allendale Nativity), 70, 71, 261n; Education of the Young Marcus Aurelius, 128, 129; Self-Portrait, 18–19, 19; Self-Portrait as David, 18, 18; Self-Portrait as Orpheus, 250n Giustiniani, Benedetto, 83 Giustiniani, Vincenzo, 69, 83, 86–87, 94, 102, 113, 178n, 210, 264n God, faith in, 104–5, 107 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 243 Golden Legend, 222 Gregori, Mina, 8, 9, 59–60, 113, 228, 246n, 247n, 289n Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 44, 178 Hals, Frans, 55 Hammershøi, Vilhelm, 78 handedness, 20, 35 Haskell, Francis, Patrons and Painters, 83 Hegel, G.W.F., 258n Heidegger, Martin, 105 Hibbard, Howard, 7, 9, 84, 197, 202–3 Hockney, David, Secret Knowledge, 133–34 Hollar, Wenceslas, Self-Portrait as David (engraving after Giorgione), 18 homosexuality, 8 Van Honthorst, Gerrit, 159, 238; Mocking of Christ, 91, 93, 267n; Toothpuller, 230 Hopper, Edward, 78 human finitude, 104–6 illusionism, 185, 187 immersion, 3, 39, 42–43, 49–50, 52, 54–55, 59–60, 63–65, 94, 116–17, 137–38, 155, 157, 207–9, 218, 220, 222–23, 241, 244, 254n, 275n. See also absorption; reimmersion Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 134 inner life, representation of, 77–78, 81, 88–90, 94–95, 99–103, 106, 119–20 instantaneous, the, 9, 59–60, 110 internal structure of the pictorial act, 61, 206, 209, 217 invention of absorption, 69–96 invisibility, of elements in Caravaggio’s paintings. See nonvisibility, of elements in Caravaggio’s paintings Janssen, Emil, 34 Jesus Christ, 88–91, 94–95, 106–8, 131 Koerner, Joseph Leo, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, 209n, 217n Langdon, Helen, 76, 124, 130–33, 197, 218, 220, 223, 273n Lapucci, Roberta, 247n La Tour, Georges de, 78

Lavin, Irving, 197 Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude, 259n Lebrun, Charles, Evrard Jabach and His Family, 30, 30 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold, 243 Leonardo da Vinci, 12, 13, 78, 208, 262n, 263n, 290n; Female Head (La Scapigliata), 70, 73, 74 Leys, Ruth, 256n, 259n; Trauma, 256n, 273n Liebermann, Max, 36, 78; Self-Portrait, 35, 36 limits of the canvas, 159, 162–65, 162n, 181–82. See also edge of the canvas; ellipsis; nonvisibility, of elements in Caravaggio’s paintings Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 246–47n; Self-Portrait as Abbot of the Accademia della Valle di Bregno, 20, 21 Longhi, Roberto, 8, 9, 102, 109, 134, 139, 211, 247n lower right-hand corner, as privileged spot in Caravaggio’s paintings, 110–11, 123, 125, 130, 202–3, 234, 274n Magni, Giovanni, 79 Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, 145, 162n, 181–82, 187, 277n; Life of the Carracci, 145, 162n, 182 Mancini, Giulio, 83, 102, 178n, 266n Van Mander, Karel, 88 Manet, Edouard, 2, 34, 44, 176, 178; Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 121; Execution of Maximilian, 224, 225; Old Musician, 121, 121; Olympia, 121; Self-Portrait with a Palette, 35, 36 Manet’s Modernism (Fried), 1, 2, 35, 121, 224 Manfredi, Bartolomeo, 4, 159, 174; Bacchus and a Drinker, 171, 173; Crowning with Thorns, 91, 92; A Reunion of Drinkers, 171, 172 Manfrediana Methodus, 159 Mantua, Duke of, 103 Marangoni, Matteo, 135, 259n Marin, Louis, 1, 9, 30, 115, 116, 247n, 272–73n; To Destroy Painting, 247n, 254n, 259n, 272–73n Marino, Giovanni Batista, 101, 112, 131, 143, 178n; Sacred Discourses, 90–91 Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (Caravaggio), 197, 202 (detail), 203 (x–ray photograph), 204 (detail); chiaroscuro in, 81; commissioning of, 195; composition of, 165, 201, 205; creation of, 195, 203–4; and internal structure of the pictorial act, 206, 209; self-portrait in, 205 masochism, 51 Matisse, Henri, Self-Portrait, 9–12, 11, 15, 23, 25, 59 Mattei, Asdrubale, 83 Mattei, Ciriaco, 83, 102, 109, 131, 210, 264n Mattei, Francesco, 43 Mattei, Girulamo, 83, 102 Mazzafirri, Maria di Giovanni, 27 Meissonier, Jean-Louis-Ernest, 78 Melandroni, Fillide, 76 Melville, Stephen, 9 Menzel, Adolph, 78 merger, of artist with painting, 3, 44, 48, 50, 52 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 134, 274n, 278n

metapainting, 151–53, 193, 205 Michelangelo, 227; Creation of Adam, 196–97, 198 (detail), 286n; David, 115; Erithrean Sybil, 70, 72; Isaiah, 70, 72; Joel, 70, 72; Night, 70, 72; Zachariah, 70, 72 Millet, Jean-François, 44, 78 Millon, Henry C., 1 mimesis, 51–52, 54, 63, 65, 94, 96, 117, 156–57, 199, 239, 288n mind, knowledge of another’s, 77, 103–4, 227–29, 269n minimalism, expressive. See expressive minimalism mirroring vs. painting, 3, 49, 61, 96, 139, 180, 216 mirrors: in Annibale’s Venus Adorned by the Graces, 188–91, 193; in Artemisia’s work, 165; availability of, 13–14; Boy Bitten by a Lizard and, 9–10, 180; Caravaggio’s work and, 9–10, 48–50, 59, 61, 65, 96, 247n; convex, 13–14; in Courbet’s work, 48; flat, 14; Matisse’s Self-Portrait and, 10; normalization of images portrayed with aid of, 20, 25, 34, 48, 251n; for purposes of realism, 247n, 249n; Renaissance/post-Renaissance art and, 12–14; reversal of images in, 25–37, 48, 180, 190; self-portrait paintings in relation to, 15–16. See also mirroring vs. painting; right-angle mirror representation Mitchell, W.J.T., “Metapictures,” 286n models, use of, 74, 78, 88, 94–96, 107, 113, 154, 206, 266n Moffitt, John M., 8 moments, in paintings: in Annibale’s Rinaldo and Armida, 43; in Caravaggio’s work, 3–4, 39, 48–50, 54–56, 59– 61, 63–65, 108, 116–17, 137–38, 155, 157, 207–9, 215, 218, 222–23, 244, 259n, 275n; Celan’s “The Meridian” and, 244; in Courbet’s work, 44–45, 48, 50; defined, 3, 39, 94; in Dolci’s Self-Portrait, 31, 52; immersive, 3, 39, 42–43, 49–50, 52, 54–55, 59–60, 63–65, 94, 116–17, 137–38, 155, 157, 207–9, 218, 220, 222–23, 241, 244, 275n; psychoanalysis and, 50–51; reflective, 233; self-portraits and, 63; specular, 3, 39, 42–43, 45, 48–49, 52, 54–55, 59–60, 63–65, 94, 116–17, 138, 155, 157, 207–9, 215, 218, 222–23, 241, 244, 259n, 275n; Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and, 41–42; temporal aspects of, 50–51 Montaigne, Michel de, 105 Most, Glenn, 84; Doubting Thomas, 265n Nagel, Alexander, 73 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 263n Narcissus, 134–35, 137–38 naturalism, 44, 49–50, 256n, 268n. See also realism natural philosophy, 268n nearness, 142–43 Neer, Richard, 282n nonvisibility, of elements in Caravaggio’s paintings, 147, 185, 187. See also ellipsis; limits of the canvas normalization of images portrayed with aid of mirrors, 20, 25, 34, 48, 251n northern painting, 151–53

index

299

optical modes of experience, 23, 25, 35–36, 54, 78, 134, 142–43, 148, 216. See also specularity Order of St. John (Knights of Malta), 217–18 orientation of painting, 143–45 other, self in relation to, 51–52, 105, 106 Ovid, 116–17, 134, 138 Pacheco, Francisco, 102 Paggi, Giovanni Battista, Self-Portrait with Architect Friend, 21–22, 22, 25, 250n pain, 229–30 painters, their relationship to paintings, 3, 13, 39, 44–54, 145, 147, 155, 205–9, 214, 278–79n. See also painting, the act of; severing, of painting from environment painter-sitter. See artist-sitter painter-viewer. See artist-viewer painting, the act of: Artemisia and, 280n; as caress, 216, 233; direct representations of, 10, 14–15, 19, 21–23, 25, 30–31, 34–35, 37; disguised representations of, 10, 12–13, 16–20, 27–30, 33, 39, 45, 54, 56, 59–60, 63, 65, 67, 108, 130, 138, 154–55, 191, 208, 222, 232, 238; internal structure of, 61, 206, 209, 217; Manet’s Execution of Maximilian and, 224; Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and, 206, 209; Martyrdom of Saint Ursula and, 222–23; mirroring vs., 3, 49, 61, 96, 139, 180, 216; Narcissus myth and, 135; Stoichita on, 278–79n; Taking of Christ and, 216–17. See also painters, their relationship to paintings; severing, of painting from environment paragone, 13 Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 14, 15, 16, 278n Passerotti, Bartolomeo, 119 patrons, Caravaggio’s, 69–70, 83, 102, 109, 264n Peeters, Clara, 12 Perrault, Claude, 152 Peterzano, Simone, 21, 201, 250n; Self-Portrait, 20–21, 21 Petrarch, 112 Philostratus, 137 pictorial riddles, 181 Pietro Berretini da Cortona, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 162, 164 Piles, Roger de, 101, 103 Pino, Paolo, Dialogue on Painting, 12–13 Plotinus, 138 Pointel, Jean, 30 Pontormo, Jacopo: Self-Portrait, 16, 17; Self-Portrait Study, 16–17, 17, 249n Posner, Donald, 8, 10, 187–88, 192, 283n Poussin, Nicolas, 3, 85, 175, 178n, 216, 230, 282n; Death of Germanicus, 175–76, 176; Israelites Gathering Manna in the Wilderness, 288n; Landscape with a Snake, 179n; Landscape with Diogenes, 179n; SelfPortrait, 30, 30; Tancred and Erminia, 230–33, 231, 232 (detail); Testament of Eudamidas, 176–78, 177, 179n; Triumph of David, 233–34, 234

300

index

Preti, Mattia, 43 projection: and absorptive painting, 77, 99, 103–4, 106–7; and intersubjectivity, 105–6 psychoanalysis, 50–51, 54 psychology, of Caravaggio’s works, 54, 77, 79, 81, 88–90. See also inner life, representation of Puttfarken, Thomas, 198, 286n Raimondi, Marcantonio, Judgment of Paris, 257n, 274n Raphael Sanzio, 227; Self-Portrait, 18, 18, 249n Raupp, Hans-Joachim, 251n realism: absorption and, 78, 83, 102; Caravaggio and, 3, 50, 74, 76, 78, 83, 86, 108, 131–34, 142, 256n; Courbet and, 3, 50; details and, 86; mirrors used in service of, 247n; self-portraiture and, 227; of Supper at Emmaus, 131–34. See also naturalism Rearick, Janet Cox, 17 reflections. See mirrors reflective moments, 233 Régnier, Nicolas, 4, 159, 174; Cardplayers with Fortune Teller, 171, 173, 174 reimmersion, 208–9, 214, 218, 220 Rembrandt van Rijn, 78; Self-Portrait, 29, 29 Reynolds, Joshua: Self-Portrait (Florence), 34, 253n; SelfPortrait (London), 253n Ribera, Jusepe de, Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 241n Richter, Gerhard, 78 right-angle mirror representation, 15–37, 56, 147, 165, 180, 249n right-handedness, 20, 35 right near foreground, as privileged spot in Caravaggio’s paintings. See lower right-hand corner Robb, Peter, 77–78, 88–89, 94, 101, 103, 107, 197, 205 Rosa, Salvator, Self-Portrait, 29, 29–30 Rota, Martino, after Titian, Death of Saint Peter Martyr, 202, 203 Rubens, Peter Paul, 79; Apotheosis of Henri IV and the Proclamation of the Regency, 236, 237; Head of Medusa, 238; Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 238, 239; Juno and Argus, 234–36, 235; Self-Portrait in a Circle of Friends, 27–28, 28, 251–52n Savoldo, Girolamo: Portrait of a Man in Armor (so-called Gaston de Foix), 13, 14, 14, 232, 248n; Tobias and the Angel, 200, 200–201 Scannelli, Francesco, 276n, 288n seeing, limitations of, 148, 223 self, in relation to other, 51–52, 105, 106 self-portraits, 10–37; Boy Bitten by a Lizard as, 9–10, 16; Ter Bruggen and, 238; Caravaggio and, 3, 9, 12, 48–50, 56, 60, 63, 108, 116–17, 139, 205–9, 216–17, 222, 232, 247n, 273n; Courbet and, 3, 44–45, 48, 50; depicted subjects of, 13; of German Renaissance, 209n; implicit/ expanded, 3; mirrors in relation to, 15–16; normalization of mirror images in, 20, 25, 34, 48, 251n; painters

in relation to, 13; Poussin and, 230–33; Stoichita on, 278–79n Serodine, Giovanni, 4, 159; Parting of Saints Peter and Paul Being Conducted to Their Martyrdoms, 162, 164; Tribute Money, 162, 163 Settis, Salvatore, 198 severing, of painting from environment, 3, 55, 63, 138, 155, 159, 180, 193, 208–9, 214, 220, 232, 233, 243n. See also autonomy, of gallery pictures; decapitation sexuality: in Amor Vincit Omnia, 113; in Annibale’s Rinaldo and Armida, 43; in Boy Bitten by a Lizard, 8, 10; Caravaggio’s, 113; in Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 86 Shakespeare, William, 104–8, 227, 229 Shearman, John, 74, 109, 250n, 262n skepticism, 86, 103–7, 227, 229, 269–70n sleep, 70, 128, 159, 159n Spada, Lionello, Crowning with Thorns, 91, 92, 267n Spanish painting, 151–53 Spear, Richard, 8, 155 specularity, 3, 39, 42–43, 45, 48–49, 52, 54–55, 59–60, 63–65, 94, 116–17, 138, 155, 157, 205, 207–9, 215, 218, 222–23, 241, 244, 259n, 275n. See also address; optical modes of experience Spezzaferro, Luigi, 247n Spike, John, 263n, 288n Van Steenwinkel, Antonie, Portrait of the Artist and a Youth, 33, 33–34, 253n, 278n Steinberg, Leo, 148 Stoichita, Victor I., 175, 193, 253n, 278–79n; The SelfAware Image, 151–53, 205 Stone, David, 61 subjectivity, 174 tableaux, 1–2, 175, 177–78. See also easel painting Tasso, Torquato, Gerusalemme liberata, 40–43, 52, 230 Terborch, Gerard, 78 theatricality, 2, 44, 81, 120–22, 178n. See also address; antitheatricality “Thoughts on Caravaggio” (Fried), 1, 232 three-quarter-length format, 84, 87 time. See instantaneous, the Tintoretto: Annunciation, 284n; Self-Portrait, 19, 19

Titian, 14, 50, 142, 266n; Bravo, 129, 129, 274n; Concert, 128, 129; Death of Saint Peter Martyr, 203; Martino Rota after, Death of Saint Peter Martyr, 202, 203; Saint Mary Magdalen in Penitence, 76, 77; Tribute Money, 129, 129, 274n; Venus at Her Toilet with Two Cupids, 190 (detail) Tomassoni, Ranuccio, 61, 217 Tournier, Nicolas, 159 Turchi, Alessandro, Christ and the Samaritan Woman, 162–63 Unglaub, Jonathan, 230–33 unity, pictorial, 2, 3, 174, 175, 201 Valentin de Boulogne, 4, 159, 174; Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, 162, 163, 174; Concert with Bas-Relief, 171, 172, 174; Crowning with Thorns, 91, 93; Samson, 175 Valéry, Paul, 134 Valesio, Giovanni Luigi, Seated Philosopher (Diogenes), 69, 71 Vasari, Giorgio, 70, 201 Velásquez, Diego, 50, 78, 153; Las Meninas, 30 Vermeer, Jan, 78 Vien, Joseph-Marie, Sleeping Hermit, 159n viewers. See address; beholders violence, 3, 39, 48, 63, 184–85, 206–8, 212, 214 vision. See seeing, limitations of Vouet, Simon, 159 Wall, Jeff, 78 Whistler, James McNeill, 34; Artist in His Studio, 35, 36 Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (Fried), 153 Wignacourt, Alof de, 218 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 254n, 257n Wittkower, Rudolf, 247n Woods-Marsden, Joanna, 19 Zapperi, Roberto, 23, 180, 181; Annibale Carracci, 251n Zuccaro, Federico, 198 Zurbarán, Francisco de, 78

index

301

The Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1952–2009 1952

Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

1968

Stephen Spender, Imaginative Literature and Painting

1953

Sir Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form

1969

1954

Sir Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture

Jacob Bronowski, Art as a Mode of Knowledge (published as The Visionary Eye)

1955

Etienne Gilson, Art and Reality (published as Painting and Reality)

1970

1956

E. H. Gombrich, The Visible World and the Language of Art (published as Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation)

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Aspects of NineteenthCentury Architecture (published as A History of Building Types)

1971

T.S.R. Boase, Vasari: The Man and the Book (published as Giorgio Vasari: The Man and the Book)

1972

Ludwig H. Heydenreich, Leonardo da Vinci

1973

Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art

1974

H. W. Janson, Nineteenth-Century Sculpture Reconsidered (published as The Rise and Fall of the Public Monument)

1957

Sigfried Giedion, Constancy and Change in Art and Architecture (published as The Eternal Present: A Contribution on Constancy and Change, 1962)

1958

Sir Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin and French Classicism

1975

1959

Naum Gabo, A Sculptor’s View of the Fine Arts (published as Of Divers Arts)

H. C. Robbins Landon, Music in Europe in the Year 1776

1976

Peter von Blanckenhagen, Aspects of Classical Art

1960

Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, Horace Walpole

1977

André Chastel, The Sack of Rome: 1527

1961

André Grabar, Christian Iconography and the Christian Religion in Antiquity (published as Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins)

1978

Joseph W. Alsop, The History of Art Collecting (published as The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting)

1962

Kathleen Raine, William Blake and Traditional Mythology (published as Blake and Tradition)

1979

1963

Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Artist and Individual: Some Aspects of the Renaissance Portrait (published as The Portrait in the Renaissance)

John Rewald, Cézanne and America (published as Cézanne and America: Dealers, Collectors, Artists, and Critics, 1891– 1921)

1980

Peter Kidson, Principles of Design in Ancient and Medieval Architecture

1964

Jakob Rosenberg, On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence, Past and Present

1981

John Harris, Palladian Architecture in England, 1615–1760

1965

Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sources of Romantic Thought (published as The Roots of Romanticism)

1982

Leo Steinberg, The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting

1966

Lord David Cecil, Dreamer or Visionary: A Study of English Romantic Painting (published as Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters, Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones)

1983

Vincent Scully, The Shape of France

1984

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art 1985 James S. Ackerman, The Villa in History (published as The Villa in History: Form and Ideology of Country Houses)

1986

Lukas Foss, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Composer

1967

Mario Praz, On the Parallel of Literature and the Visual Arts (published as Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts)

1987

Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons

1998

Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art

1988

John Shearman, Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (published as Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance)

1999

Carlo Bertelli, Transitions

2000

Marc Fumaroli, The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns in the Arts, 1600–1715

1989

Oleg Grabar, Intermediary Demons: Toward a Theory of Ornament (published as The Mediation of Ornament)

2001

Salvatore Settis, Giorgione and Caravaggio: Art as Revolution

1990

Jennifer Montagu, Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Metal Sculpture of the Roman Baroque

2002

Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio

2003

1991

Willibald Sauerländer, Changing Faces: Art and Physiognomy through the Ages

Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock

2004

Irving Lavin, More Than Meets the Eye

1992

Anthony Hecht, The Laws of the Poetic Art

2005

1993

John Boardman, The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity

Irene Winter, “Great Work”: Terms of Aesthetic Experience in Ancient Mesopotamia

2006

1994

Jonathan Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe

Simon Schama, Really Old Masters: Age, Infirmity,and Reinvention

2007

1995

Arthur C. Danto, Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (published as After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History)

Helen Vendler, Last Looks, Last Books: The Binocular Poetry of Death (published as Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill)

1996

Pierre M. Rosenberg, From Drawing to Painting: Poussin, Watteau, Fragonard, David, Ingres

2008

Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel: Parallel Worlds

1997

John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

2009

T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth

304

the andrew w. mellon lectures in the fine arts 1952–2009