CARAVAGGIO: PERCEPTION SHIFTS THROUGH SELECTED TWENTIETH– and TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

Abstract

The focus of this thesis will be the exploration of the narrative constructs around the life and work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). This exploration will occur through the study of selected exhibitions curated on the Lombard artist from the twentieth- through twenty-first centuries. It will demonstrate how museums have played a significant role in the public’s understanding and perception of Caravaggio. In this thesis, I will argue that exhibitions on Caravaggio have supported and reshaped the general understanding and perception of the artist in crucial ways not done to the same effect in more nuanced academic scholarship. I will also argue that public exhibitions have functioned according to a different set of agendas from those addressed to academia. For example, exhibitions are conceived and function on guiding principles such as alignment with museum mission statements, audience draw and accessibility, educational outcomes, and the visitor experience. This thesis will seek to determine to what measure these principles have affected the framing of content and to clarify how in particular the selective use of Caravaggio’s biography has affected interpretation of his works within a museum context for a viewing public. The restored enthusiasm for Caravaggio in the second-half of the twentieth century also focused on his personal life due to the publication and translation by Walter Friedlaender of Lives written by his seventeenth-century biographers—Giorgio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori—as well as the publication of documents and court records, which highlighted episodes of Caravaggio’s criminality, all impinging on our interpretation of his artistic merits. Although these findings support our understanding of Caravaggio as a complex individual, they also contribute to the sensationalization and romanticization of the artist as the quintessentially bohemian figure. Furthermore, doubtful attributions and disputes over execution dates problematize our understanding of the artist’s oeuvre and have at certain points reinforced a ‘Caravaggio narrative’ of the rebellious, indecorous artist. It is my intention to show how museum exhibitions have contributed to and exploited this narrative and to determine more precisely how and to what extent they have shaped it. With this exploration of Caravaggio’s narrative construction by museum exhibitions of the twentieth- to twenty-first centuries, I aim to approach and reconsider this subject, which has been dealt with heavily in scholarship, under a different lens. In the case of Caravaggio—whose persona and works have been posthumously manipulated, admired, and condemned at the hands of biographers and critics—it is necessary to approach this subject with renewed, unbiased, and objective vigor within a new frame of understanding: the museum exhibition frame. I will use a comparative method, studying three key exhibitions over time, to show how museums have presented the artist’s career development. I pay particular attention to the incorporation of biography and to the impact the inclusion of selected aspects of his Lives have had on the public view of his works. The influential format of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists set the structure and codified the model of biographical determinism that would inform Caravaggio’s later biographers in the interpretation of his works; this has persisted through the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries with the application of psychoanalytic approaches to Caravaggio. The first of the three exhibitions I have selected is Longhi’s 1951 Milan exhibition, Mostra del Caravaggio e dei Caravaggeschi, which restored public consciousness of Caravaggio’s innovative and revolutionary style, reinserting him into the artistic canon. My second example will be The Age of Caravaggio, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985. The Met exhibition is novel for its focus on Caravaggio’s relationship with his precursors and contemporaries (the organizing committee deliberately excluded works by Caravaggio’s followers) and for its interpretation of works within their historical context. Finally, I will examine Caravaggio: L’ultimo tempo 1606–1610, held first at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples 2004–2005, then later as Caravaggio: The Final Years, at the National Gallery, London in 2005, which focused on the more enigmatic part of Caravaggio’s late career after his flight from Rome in 1606. The London 2005 exhibition provided new insight into the artist’s stylistic changes in the last years of his life. These three exhibitions will give insight about the perception shifts of the artist that have taken place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a result of scholarly research spurred by museum exhibitions centered around Caravaggio.