Caravaggio's Secrets (October Books) [Hardcover]

Leo Bersani (Author), Ulysse Dutoit (Author)

Book Description

Series: October Books | Publication Date: September 15, 1998

Many critics have explored the homoerotic message in the early portraits of the baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610). In Caravaggio's Secrets, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit emphasize instead the impenetrability of these portraits. The tension between erotic invitation and self-concealing retreat leads Bersani and Dutoit to conclude that the interest of these works is in their representation of an enigmatic address that solicits intimacy in order to block it with a secret.

Bersani and Dutoit offer a psychoanalytic reading of the enigmatic address as initiating relations grounded in paranoid fascination. They study Caravaggio's attempts to move beyond such relations, his experiments with a space no longer circumscribed by the mutual and paranoid, if erotically stimulating, fascination with imaginary secrets. In his most original work, Caravaggio proposes a radically new mode of connectedness, a nonerotic sensuality relevant to the most exciting attempts in our own time to rethink, perhaps even to reinvent, community.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 130 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; An October Book edition (September 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262024497
• ISBN-13: 978-0262024495
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,087,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely worth reading., December 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Caravaggio's Secrets (October Books) (Hardcover)

I disagree with the other reviewer -- this *is* art history. Yes, art history relies on documents, history, even x-radiography, but it is equally reliant on models of analysis and new ways of looking. Caravaggio's work has begged a critical approach like this one, and while I may not agree with the authors' conclusions, their discussion is provocative and inspiring. If you want a survey of Caravaggio's career, choose one of the many books out there that satisfy this niche. If you want to deepen your perspective of Caravaggio, and of art in general, read this book. It will give you something to think about.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Creative meditation on sociality, April 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Caravaggio's Secrets (October Books) (Hardcover)

It is sad to see how this book has been misunderstood. This book is not about "art history" or even "criticism." But it is a creative attempt to affirm one's experience through Caravaggio's paintings as inventing different "forms" to relate to others (both human and non-human).

Bersani and Dutoit, in such a poetic way, challenge how we look at art in general--. We interpret it instead of experiencing it. As a practioner of painting, I feel that they wrote this book NOT from the position of a critic, who often tries to be a custodian of culture.

15 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Have you read the new Leo Bersani??", May 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Caravaggio's Secrets (October Books) (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??"