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Portraits and Portrayals

/ The Caravaggio Moment, Volume 20. Number III. 2010 / /

by John VARRIANO

Portraiture is perhaps the most natural challenge to the realist painter. Alone of the genres, it combines spirit with substance and focuses directly on living individuals. It would seem particularly natural that Caravaggio be moved to paint portraits since he was instinctively drawn to the human figure and the expressive psychology of the mind. Portraiture, moreover, was renowned among his predecessors and contemporaries in Lombardy and Rome. Painters in the north like Moroni, Lotto, and Cavagna, or Romans like Pulzone or Ottavio Leoni had fashioned highly realistic likenesses that Caravaggio could hardly have failed to notice. His principal patrons in Rome were enthusiastic collectors of portraits and their palaces were full of such pictures. Indeed, more than half of the 600 paintings in the Del Monte Collection were portraits.

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Performing the Paintings: A contemporary artist inhabits the Baroque realist’s paintings in a work entitled “Cara Viaggio”

/ The Caravaggio Moment, Volume 20. Number III. 2010 / /

by John KELLY

My performance work evolved out of a background in dance and visual art, and has remained essentially ephemeral. I’ve retained a long-standing desire to merge these two disciplines into a tangible synthesis. This impulse resulted in a studio practice I recently implemented while a Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

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The Quoted Artist: Contemporary fascination with Caravaggio is, in itself, Baroque

/ The Caravaggio Moment, Volume 20. Number III. 2010 / /

by Mieke BAL

Like any form of representation, art is inevitably engaged with what came before it, and that engagement is an active reworking. It specifies what and how our gaze sees. Hence, the work performed by later images obliterates the older images as they were before that intervention and creates new versions of old images instead. This process is exemplified by an engagement of contemporary culture with the past that has important implications for the ways we conceive of both history and culture in the present.

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Reverberations of Realism: “Caravaggismo” in 17th-,18th- and 19th-century art

/ The Caravaggio Moment, Volume 20. Number III. 2010 / /

by Genny DI BERT

From 1600 until the present, Caravaggio’s work has influenced many trends in art, including that of Cezanne. Caravaggio’s breakthrough was his sharp realism: Saints shown as average people and religious experiences as ordinary human drama – expressed through emotions, theatre and allegory. He depicted idealized concepts as manifested in the visible world. Though an extraordinary colorist, he was selective in his compositions – each detail of his paintings corresponds to reality and the models he used.

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Speaking of Realism: A show of Czechoslovakian Realism 1948-1989 looks to debut in New York. An interview with director Francesco Augusto Razetto

/ The Caravaggio Moment, Volume 20. Number III. 2010 / /

by Genny DI BERT

Realism in Socialist Czechoslovakia was shown at the Gallery Mánes, the museumm of modern art in Prague in December 2009. The exhibition comprised over 70 works revisting the period of Czech realism through a selection of paintings, sculpture, graphics and photography, many previously unpublished or unseen. The curator of architecture of the Prague Foundation Eluetheria, Francesco Augusto Razetto, along with the show’s other curators, including his brother Ottaviano Maria Razetto, are working on bringing the exhibition to Italy and New York.

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Sacred, Profane Naples: In her collection of short stories, Italian novelist Valeria Parrella catches the intrinsically Baroque side of Naples and its inhabitants

/ The Caravaggio Moment, Volume 20. Number III. 2010 / /

by Laura GIACALONE

With its colourful carnival of clothes and bed sheets hanging from the windows, its maze of narrow streets and secret corners, its roaring chaos of motorbikes and shouting vendors, its inebriating mixture of coffee aromas and pizza flavours, Naples is by its nature a Baroque city.

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