Caravaggio's
Secrets (October Books) by Leo Bersani, Ulysse Dutoit
Many critics have
explored the homoerotic message in the early portraits of the
baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610). In this book,
Bersani and Dutoit study Caravaggio's attempts to move beyond the
tension between erotic invitation and self-concealing retreat as
he proposed a radically new mode of connectedness: a non-erotic
sensuality relevant to the most exciting attempts in our own time
to rethink, perhaps even to reinvent community. 26 illustrations,
8 in color.
Caravaggio's Secrets
begins with the painter's supposedly homoerotic work and moves
from there into a discussion his art in a psychoanalytic context.
One of the coauthors is a professor of French, the other, a
teacher of film, and they join many other non-art historians who
have offered critical commentary on Caravaggio's work.
"Castration/decapitation has left David in a state of
between-ness," they write of David with the Head of
Goliath (1609-10), "not only between gendered identities
but also between existential violence and what Caravaggio appears
to conceive of as the aesthetic consequence of that violence....
In Goliath's head, David-Caravaggio has painted his own
castration."
This book is probably not for general readers,
but those whose interest in Caravaggio is not fully sated by some
of the other, more general books on the market will likely find
their fill here. --Peggy Moorman
M
: The Man Who Became Caravaggio by Peter Robb
Australian writer Peter Robb blasts the dust off
art history with M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio, his
flamboyant biography of a painter as notorious for his personal
life as for his revolutionary art. Known to posterity as
Caravaggio (1573-1610), for the Italian town where he spent his
boyhood, the painter went by so many different names during his
life that Robb chooses simply to call his subject M. But that was
the least of M's unconventionalities. He painted with a juicy
realism that enthralled collectors and fellow artists bored with
the tapped-out stylization of the mannerist school. He portrayed
prostitutes and sexy, menacing boys, denizens of the street life
he knew so well, at a time when militant, Counter Reformation
church authorities decreed that artists must devote themselves to
ethereally religious subjects. He was a violent misfit given to
public brawls, one of which forced him to flee Rome in 1606. Even
the circumstances of his death were a mystery, though Robb
suggests some fascinating possibilities. This is a provocative
book, carefully researched but written in vivid, aggressively
colloquial prose. The overall effect is to recapture M's
thunderous impact as a painter of unflinching personal honesty and
visual rigor, a peer of Shakespeare, Galileo, and all the other
geniuses who created "the brief amazing moment in Europe's
history when ... the modern mind was born." --Wendy Smith
