- Hardcover: 130 pages
- Publisher: The MIT Press (Sep 15 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0262024497
- ISBN-13: 978-0262024495
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 18.5 x 1.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 558 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#1,205,869 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #33 in Books > Arts & Photography > Artists, A-Z > ( A-C ) > Caravaggio, Michelangelo
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Product Description
From Amazon
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.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Critics are the Custodians of Culture,
By Bruno Gass (London, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Caravaggio's Secrets (Paperback)
Well, at least this book, which really has fallen out of circulation and is not often-read even among students of seventeenth-century Italian painting, is still being discussed in this forum. I add my voice to the list of the unenthused. The book insists on psychoanalytic readings and imports a decidely dated 1990's post-modern vocabularly that lowers a seductive, gauzy veil around Caravaggio's paintings, but absolutely does not serve to illuminate them in any way. The last reviewer, a painter, expresses a muted disregard for the work of critics; I would remind this reviewer that writers and critics are the custodians of culture, and that the job of the writer on art is to illuminate, perhaps through description, which is a form of interpretation, how a work of art lives in the world; and the job of the critic is to make distinctions. (All art is not popular culture, subject to equalizing democratic standards.) For this clear, crafted prose -- prose that is accessible both to the scholar and an intelligent audience interested in art -- is always best. Perhaps one of the reasons this book is laregly overlooked is that written for neither of the above it has failed to find an audience.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
It's moment has already passed,
By A Customer
This review is from: Caravaggio's Secrets (Hardcover)
I looked forward to this book with much anticipation, and readit carefully twice and I am not convinced by their argument, but feelthat in its trendiness it will not be a long-lasting addition to Caravaggio scholarship. In many ways, after only a few years on the market, it remains fairly unnoticed by the academy, and remains relatively untaught in graduate seminars. I can't image it is a book that will interest the general reader with its physcoanalytic interpretations and academic lingo. I feel compelled to give it one star in order to balance out the scales and alert prospective readers that there are those of us who did not find it worthwhile. END
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Have you read the new Leo Bersani??",
By A Customer
This review is from: Caravaggio's Secrets (Hardcover)
Be warned: this is a seductive book. But, alas, it is not a very good one. No doubt many urban men interested in art and gay studies and aspiring to a certain intellectual milieu have already purchased it, and it is best kept in such circles. At most, one can say that it is compelling, provocative, but within the domain of art history, rather silly, and the arguments weak. As readers of this book will see, it has no base in history. If we want to know how Caravaggio's works were received by the culture of his time we must look elsewhere. If we want to know what was going on in his mind as he worked his canvases, we must look to diaries, documents, etc., and there are few. I would say Bersani and Dutoit's book is imaginative, creative, often-times shocking in its daring, but it is not art history. They do look closely. The strongest element of their argument is their description of the interplay of gazes, between the painted boys and the viewer, and between the figures in the pictorial realm. Their reading of the David and Goliath, and their theory of "between-ness," is interesting, but it is hard to believe that Caravaggio would have ascribed to such a way of thinking in his own time. For academic purposes, this book is best consulted for its sources cited, standards like Friedlander and Askew, and for its justifiably harsh criticism and commentary on Donald Posner's subversively homophobic article on "Caravaggio's Early Homoerotic works." But, in general, this book and its ideas are best kept on the coffee tables and peppered in the conversations of the work-a-days who meet for drinks at twilight: "Have you read the new Leo Bersani??"
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