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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
From Library Journal
The fascination of the turbulent life of brilliant Baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610) cannot be denied, and British historian Seward's brief biographical study efficiently encapsulates what is known about the artist's sordid existence. But the derivative, fragmentary, and inadequate discussion of the artist's work vitiates his efforts. Seward slips into the common fallacy of assuming that the painter's subject matter is a reflection of his psychic state, though he never characterizes the nature of Caravaggio's psychological perturbation. Like other biographers of inadequately documented historical figures, Seward on occasion will allow an earlier hypothesis to become the foundation for a later argument. Although not as up to date, Howard Hibbard's Caravaggio (LJ 5/15/83) remains the requisite foundation study. Employing a "methodology" that blends an ahistorical pastiche of critical theory, uncritical psychoanalytic assertion, and a touch of muddled Marxism, Bersani and Dutoit?academics but not art historians?have postulated a reading of Caravaggio's works that alternates between the unevidenced and the unintelligible. The obscurity of their language combined with the ludicrous modernity of their analysis evokes an art that exists merely to serve as a plaything for literary pyrotechnics. The past, language, humanistic scholarship, and common sense are traduced in the service of post-rational subjectivity and obscurantism. Thus, the demented but inspired genius becomes the object of pseudo-thoughts like "Caravaggio is a crucial figure in the history of a suspicion fatal to the procedures and the confidence of philosophy: the suspicion that truth cannot be the object of knowledge, that it cannot be theorized." That a major university has placed its imprimatur on such pretentious rubbish can only serve to besmirch liberal studies. Neither book is recommended.?Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
