Caravaggio
Seminário: Caravaggio. Pesquise 862.000+ trabalhos acadêmicosPor: allaraujos • 11/11/2014 • Seminário • 504 Palavras (3 Páginas) • 296 Visualizações
Tratado sobre Caravaggio
Mahon, formerly attache at the National
Gallery in London, has specialized in
research on the Italian seventeenth century.
He is at present preparing the catalogue of
the Guercino drawings at Windsor Castle.
The Metropolitan Museum has recently secured
an example of the relatively rare work
of a great artist who had a profound impact
on European painting and who has often been
hailed as "the first modern painter." As I have
already discussed The Musicians in some detail
elsewhere,1 with the full art-historical apparatus,
I shall limit myself here to repeating that
I identify this remarkable canvas with Caravaggio's
painting of young musicians which
his contemporary, Giovanni Baglione, records
as having been executed for the art-loving
Cardinal del Monte immediately after the latter
had taken the destitute young genius under
his protection: an early work therefore,
painted in the fifteen-nineties-to be dated
about 1594-1595, according to my interpretation
of the very complex chronological problem
of the youthful group to which it must
belong.
On the present occasion I should like to
touch on some aspects of the background,
both general and particular, which a picture
of this kind reflects. Perhaps it is necessary to
insist from the start on the regrettably limited
scope of our knowledge and understanding of
seventeenth-century Italian painting, of which
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was one
of the founding spirits. The time is long overdue
for a much wider recognition of the fact
that, under the facade of smooth-but superficial
and outdated-text-book generalizations,
1 The Burlington Magazine, xciv (1952), pp. 3 ff., and
Paragone, no. 25 (Jan. 1952), pp. 20 ff. For information
on the recent provenance see also The Burlington
Magazine, xciv (1952), pp. 119 f.
there exists (particularly as regards the early
phases of Seicento painting) a multiplicity of
intricate problems which are but rarely posed,
much less solved. Specialists who have to
wrestle with these questions in detail are only
too well aware of the extent of the groundwork
which remains to be done, but many art
historians are still to be found who, having
no
...