A richly illustrated reevaluation of Caravaggio from one of today's
leading art historians
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.
