Peter J. Burgard (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures)
Wednesday, 12-2:30 CANVAS SITE
First-Year Seminar 64R 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Prerequisites: None. No experience in the study of art is required or assumed.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known simply as Caravaggio, in a career of less than two decades at the turn of the 17th century, revolutionized the art of painting: 1) through his dynamic naturalism — the extraordinary plasticity of his figures, the psychological authenticity of their expression; 2) through his extreme exploitation of the deception inherent in naturalism; 3) through his chiaroscuro, a radical new use of light and dark in both harmony and tense conflict with one another; and 4) through a number of novel compositional methods that break the boundary between painted scene and viewers, thus involving the viewer in his works in a way no artist before him had. These artistic practices lend his figures and his canvases an unheard-of presence, bringing them to life for us. His art paved the path for countless artists central to Western and contemporary art, including Rubens, Vouet, Ribera, de la Tour, Bernini, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Goya, David, Turner, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Sargent, Picasso, Hopper, Schiele, Dali, Scorsese, Jarman, Placido, Sherman, Fischnaller, Doig, Dalla Venezia, Collishaw, and O’Connor.
In this seminar, besides working on how to analyze paintings, we will examine the majority of Caravaggio’s oeuvre, from the early secular paintings through his revolution in religious painting, which reached its height in Rome between 1598 and 1606 and then took on other characteristics as he moved to Naples, then Malta, then Siracusa, then Messina, then back to Naples, before he died in 1610 at the age of 39. We will be primarily concerned with 1) the nature and art of his naturalism, 2) how he disturbs that naturalism even as he creates it, 3) how his naturalism itself becomes disturbing, and 4) how this disturbance, particularly in the religious paintings, takes on the quality of double entendre, as the eroticism that characterizes his work from early on develops into sometimes shockingly sexualized treatments of religious scenes and narratives, so that, rather than occupying a “middle ground between the sacred and the profane,” as a seventeenth-century bishop said of his work, Caravaggio can be seen to have inflected the sacred with the profane, producing a frisson that — along with his brilliant, and dark, naturalism — makes him ever of current interest.