The Moment of Caravaggio (A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts) [Hardcover]

Michael Fried (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 28, 2010 | Series: A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

This is a groundbreaking examination of one of the most important artists in the Western tradition by one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century. In his first extended consideration of the Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610), Michael Fried offers a transformative account of the artist's revolutionary achievement. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, The Moment of Caravaggio displays Fried's unique combination of interpretive brilliance, historical seriousness, and theoretical sophistication, providing sustained and unexpected readings of a wide range of major works, from the early Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the late Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. And with close to 200 color images, The Moment of Caravaggio is as richly illustrated as it is closely argued. The result is an electrifying new perspective on a crucial episode in the history of European painting.

Focusing on the emergence of the full-blown "gallery picture" in Rome during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, Fried draws forth an expansive argument, one that leads to a radically revisionist account of Caravaggio's relation to the self-portrait; of the role of extreme violence in his art, as epitomized by scenes of decapitation; and of the deep structure of his epoch-defining realism. Fried also gives considerable attention to the art of Caravaggio's great rival, Annibale Carracci, as well as to the work of Caravaggio's followers, including Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Valentin de Boulogne.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This extravagantly produced, scholarly study of Caravaggio's art is based on six lectures given at the National Gallery of Art. Fried is rather like an extreme docent: this is no casual stroll. A professor of humanities and art history at Johns Hopkins, he winds through Caravaggio's oeuvre and several related themes: the use of mirrors and reflection; moments of extreme concentration and absorption; and events in and around the edges of the work. Fried pulls his thread taut, starting with the self-portrait--often just a torso or head--painted in front of a mirror and ending with the sword, made of reflective metal, that beheads John the Baptist. Caravaggio's works share the page with those of Dolci, Gentileschi, Manet, Courbet, and other artists, providing a place to continue looking, as Fried asks: "which way does a painting face?" In his response, Fried dares his reader to look into these paintings and see a reflection of what exists outside the frame. 194 color illus., 9 half-tones.
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Review

[B]ased on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts that Mr. Fried delivered in Washington in 2004, is a knotty, episodic, infinitely erudite investigation of, among other things, the pervasiveness of violence in Caravaggio's painting. (Holland Cotter New York Times )

Fried is a persistent spectator, and his careful eye produces remarkable analysis that make for a thrilling read. . . . [H]is process of looking should be an inspiration to students of art history at many levels, and his observations about how viewers respond to paintings are thought-provoking. Finally, the extensive and outstanding illustrations in this handsome book are a perfect complement to Fried's interpretations. (Choice )

In this exquisitely illustrated volume, art historian Michael Fried binds Michelangelo Caravaggio's short life (1571-1610) and tumultuous times to the stirring innovations in his art, especially with regard to portraiture, violence and realism. With a little help from the master, Fried encapsulates Caravaggio's tempestuous personality, his place within the religious and political intrigues of the Baroque era, and his primary significance as an artist. (Globe & Mail )

No great surprise about my book of the year. I had been waiting for Michael Fried's The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton University Press) ever since hearing an early version of its opening ideas in Berkeley years ago, and when the volume arrived it took me by storm. So The Moment of Caravaggio stands or falls, as art history mostly should, by the intensity and detail of its accounts of specific works: by its ability to extract a painting from the ordinary round of 'formal analysis,' iconography, and 'contextualization' and put the reader/viewer almost physically in a new kind of contact with it. This happens repeatedly in Fried's new study. The book's key analyses are beautiful and, pace the critics, often profoundly surprising. I found that as the book went on they more and more offered me a way--this is regularly the case with the arc of a Fried argument--to think about questions the author himself did not quite pose, or did not pose as I might want to. . . . In a manner typical of the writer at his best (and maybe this is what so gets up the nose of normal art history about him) his book has robbed me of the common-sensical ground on which and from which I thought I could see--could 'place'--a major artist. It made me aware of what Caravaggio's excessiveness might have been about. And it reminded me of the sheer strangeness--the preposterousness--of European painting's commitment to the real. (T. J. Clark ArtForum )

So much has been written about the High Renaissance artist Caravaggio, it is hard to believe more could be said. But the illustrious Michael Fried, of Johns Hopkins University, manages to say considerably more in his trenchant re-examination of the dynamic painter's art. . . . Fried astounds the reader with thoughts about Caravaggio's use of the mirror in art, his fascination with the 'immersive' or 'specular' moment. . . . The book is lavishly illustrated and intellectually demanding, but given the greatness of the subject and the perspicacity of the author, both are certainly to be expected. (Tracey O'Shaughnessy Republican-American )

Specifically, Fried's concern is with the 'coming into prominence of the autonomous and independent gallery picture in the Roman art world of the 1590s and early 1600s and the internal mechanisms by which such pictures seek 'crucially to establish the supreme fiction of ontological illusion that the beholder does not exist, that there is no one standing before the canvas'. In this context, Fried's study argues across radically different artistic periods . . . the better to construct an argument that is as big as it is granular. (Angus Trumble TLS )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (July 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691147019
• ISBN-13: 978-0691147017
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 1.3 x 11 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #711,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The text's the thing; the images are accessories September 7, 2010

By J. Faulk

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Of the 201 reproductions (mostly color), 134 are by OTHER artists, and only 67 are by Caravaggio (including repeats and details) and reference only 39 of his paintings. Fried's lectures concentrate on 25 of these 39. (Sebastian Schutze's catalogue raisonne, The Complete Works of Caravaggio, 2009, comprises 67 paintings.) Fried chooses to discuss only Caravaggio's portable gallery or easel paintings and excludes works installed in churches.

Though the present volume measures 8 in. W x 11 in. H, the reproductions are about 8 in. H x 6 in. W, 5 in. x 6 in., 3 in. x 4 in., and smaller. Color accuracy is fine. These items comprise the slides in Fried's six Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in 2002. In the book, Fried preserves his lecture format, but he embellished the originals (and much expanded lectures 4 and 5) during manuscript preparation in 2007-2008.

LECTURES

(1) Boy Bitten by a Lizard [ca. 1595-96, National Gallery, London]. One of the most discussed canvases of the master. Usually considered to be Caravaggio himself. A "mirror" painting in which the hands and arms are deftly deprived of the brush and palette. Mirror self-portraits of many other artists are examined, up to Max Liebermann (1930).

(2) Immersion and Specularity. The self-portraitist engages in an ongoing, repetitive, partly automatistic act of painting--that is, immersion. Then he recoils, becomes detached from it, sees the image-artifact--thus, the experience of specularity.

(3) Invention of Absorption. In French paintings from the mid-eighteenth century on, there is the problematic of absorption--the depiction of figures so deeply engrossed in what they are doing, feeling, and thinking that they seem wholly unaware of anything else, including the presence of the viewer before the painting. Absorption fast became a major resource for Western painting in certain works by Caravaggio.

(4) Skepticism, Shakespeare, Address, Density. Caravaggio's canvases are fraught with new significance--psychological, epistemological, ontological--that bear an intimate and complex relation to the stakes of Shakespearean tragedy, underpinned by skepticism. "Absorption" in the 1590s-1600s was accompanied by an antithetical or polar emphasis on "address," the depiction of figures not only facing the viewer but seemingly confronting him with great force and specificity. As early as 1596-1597, Caravaggio's "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt" shows the artist's ability to confer on a gallery painting only about 4 feet high x 5 feet wide a "density" of depicted and implied relationships.

(5) Severed Representations. The repulsing or "severing" of the beholder from the painted image implies a very particular relationship, often associated with death-dealing violence as sublimated in Caravaggio's "Narcissus" or explicit in "Judith and Holofernes." Fried discusses the artists of the Carracci family, including the use of ellipsis, which cuts out the pictorial artifact from its surroundings by occluding some figures, as by the straight edge of the canvas. Fried also turns his attention to Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, and some artists classed together as Caravaggisti.

(6) Internal Structure of the Pictorial Act. As exemplified in The Calling... and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, The Taking of Christ, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula.

In his Introduction and his Conclusion, Fried says he can hardly compress the subject matter of this book: Read on. I found the text manageable by eye, but maybe rather complex for the ears of the lecture audience.

A poet himself, Michael Fried, Ph.D., ends the book with a lengthy anecdote about Paul Celan, Georg Buchner, J. M. R. Lenz, and J. F. Oberlin. Just so he can say that Caravaggio, with his antagonism toward idealism and the puppets of mannerism, was prompted to go beyond what is human, into a realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny, as done with greatest lucidity in The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula.

AUTHOR

Born 1939 in New York City, Michael Fried is a wide-ranging art historian, critic, and theorist with extensive writing credits. But controversial, as evidenced by Amazon reviews of his previous books. His trilogy--Absorption and Theatricality (1980), Courbet's Realism (1990), Manet's Modernism (1996)--influence the present Caravaggio book.

READERS

Many of us are immediately gripped by the obvious: the artist's chiaroscuro, decapitations, sexual orientation, troublesome temper, tragic death. But Fried takes us well beyond such, into the dozens of perceptions that the paintings yield up (such as small distorted reflections of the artist's face in a glass object or polished armor, or the subtle clues in the darkened milieu of The Calling of Saint Matthew). And be reminded: Over the centuries, some of these paintings have undergone multiple repairs or cleanings, possibly sometimes not to best effect; for example, in the eighteenth century some were varnished, resulting in a yellowing. Surprises await you.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Better for the Lecture Hall than for the art lover's library December 29, 2010

By Grady Harp HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

That Michael Fried is a learned scholar is well known and probably understated. His lectures here for the National Art Gallery are rich in intellectual research and challenge for discovering the motivations and comparisons of the work of Caravaggio. And while there is much to be learned form this hefty book, the information seems a bit heavy for the reader who wants to further explore the genius of the great Italian painter. The portions that approach Caravaggio's enhancement of the concept of the self portrait is fascinating as is his drawn out study of the artist's 'obsession ' with violence.

The problem with the book is that in the end it feels less about Caravaggio than about the period in which he painted and the influences that both preceded and proceeded painter - even to the amount of visual space allotted to the works of Caravaggio. The quality of the book is excellent in design and in production and no one will argue that the information within the covers is instructive. For those who are already committed admirers of the artist and are looking for fresh information about this controversial artist, this book will probably seem too heavily weighted in academic glossolalia. But for the university or art school library this is a worth addition. Grady Harp, December 10

5.0 out of 5 stars Caravaggio April 9, 2012

By toronto

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is obviously a book for the academic scholar working on Caravaggio, not for someone who wants a standard biography or even a straightforward critical appraisal. It is essentially the fourth in a series that Fried has been working on for many years on the question of the relationship between the viewer and the work of art (and of course the artist). Fried is famous for the concept of "theatricality" : the demand that a work (and/or its content) have a viewer or audience present. This is compared to what we could call "overhearing" or "absorption" where we are not so much spectators, as drawn in and involved -- the painting and its subjects are autonomous in a sense. (A good example of this would be one of Georges de La Tour's Mary Magdalene pictures, where she stares at a candle or a skull, pondering her sins. We are asked to consider the mystery of her being. These kinds of paintings derive from Caravaggio's own early Magdalene). Caravaggio plays back and forth with theatricality and absorption: his characters stare out at us, challenging or seducing us: or they don't; and sometimes they do or don't do both in one painting. This is all in aid of raising fundamental questions about the arrival of the modern self in the early 17th century and its depiction.

While (contrary to other reviewers) I believe the book is clearly and well written, there are parts of it that are truly wearying. The initial chapters on whether or not self-portraits disguise the brush or the easel or whatever are just not very interesting. He is making some crucial point that is important to him as a basis for some argument that never gets clearly stated to the rest of us lesser mortals. Fried also tends to slay dragons that only one or two other art critics can possibly be interested in. One wonders how many people came back for the subsequent lectures......The book picks up as it goes along: the later chapters are full of insights. The best thing about the book by far (and well worth the effort) is the fact that Fried is one of the best readers of a painting there is: the book is an education in how to pay careful attention to the smallest details of a great master's work.

It is coming clearer as time passes that Caravaggio is in the same exalted category as Rembrandt and Poussin: a revolutionary artist with immense influence. Anything about him is worth the trouble.