Caravaggio Seminars: Of Fingers and Feet: Caravaggio's Madonna of the Rosary, Saint Peter Martyr, and Haptic Devotion

Jonathan Unglaub (Brandeis University)

More than decade into his Roman career, Caravaggio suddenly became a painter of the large-scale Marian devotional altarpieces, which were astonishing, even scandalous, for the physical immediacy of their depictions of the Virgin.  The Madonna of the Rosary, a work whose scale and renown belies its still mysterious origins, is only seemingly the most conventional of the group. This paper investigates how Caravaggio employs a network of gestures, the corporeal connection of the Virgin and Christ child, the embedded worshippers, and Saint Dominic's dissemination of devotional aids to thematize the incarnation through touch. The prominent intermediary role given to Saint Peter of Verona, whose martyrdom images were a constant inspiration for the artist, exemplifies the ultimate haptic profession of faith in carnal terms.

Jonathan Unglaub is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis University, where he teaches European art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. He is the author of Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (2006) and Poussin's Sacrament of Ordination: History Faith and the Sacred Landscape (2013) among many other publications, recently oriented toward the intersection of poetics and devotional art in Italy. In 2014, he published the essay “Caravaggio and 'Truth in Pointing.’”

Please join us for this engaging seminar. Dinner to follow. RSVP to hilary_field@fas.harvard.edu.

Supported by the Committee for the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities and the Department of History of Art and Architecture.