HAA 259G - Caravaggio: Light and Shadow, Life and Death

Shawon Kinew

He came into the world to destroy painting, Nicolas Poussin was recorded to have said of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Caravaggio emerges as a painter in Rome in the 1590s with a radically different take on painting, what subjects were worthy of depiction and how they ought to be conveyed. Nevertheless, he was branded derivative and iconoclastic by his contemporaries. His biographies characterize him as a violent anti-intellectual brute. The paintings show another side. He was a brilliant observer of the natural world, of human emotion, of humility, barbarism and redemption, a kind of chiaroscuro in itself. This seminar will investigate the oeuvre of one of the period’s most compelling artists through the lens of artistic theory and close readings of paintings and texts.