preview

Essay On Caravaggesque

Decent Essays

Artemisia Gentileschi and her art are finally receiving deserved scholarly attention. While much remains to be written about her, a great deal has been done to clarify her oeuvre since Roberto Longhi’s pioneering efforts in 1916. Some of the underlying assumptions that guided Longhi in his evaluation of Artemisia Gentileschi and his attempt to set forth an oeuvre for her still dominate our thinking about her art. Primary among them is Artemisia’s role as a caravaggesca, that is, her place as a follower of Caravaggio. In fact, initial viewing and evaluations of her work were done in the context of Caravaggio: before 1991, her work was seen almost exclusively in exhibitions devoted to assessing Caravaggio’s influence and in surveys of his followers.
Caravaggio was a revolutionary artist who used nature as the primary model in his paintings by recording the imperfections of the physical world and its inhabitants. Caravaggio’s influence is credited with luring other artists to follow him in his use of darkened grounds and the substitution of the commonplace for more nobly conceived figures in idealized settings. The term caravaggesque, however, encompasses a range of qualities, including the recreation of tactile surfaces, the use of focused light sources that penetrate darkened interiors to bring isolated figures and objects into raised relief, the practice of designing and then painting compositions directly onto the canvas without preparatory drawings, and the

Get Access