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Caravaggio in film and literature: Popular culture's appropriation of a Baroque genius

Rorato, Laura

Authors

Laura Rorato



Abstract

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor and Francis 2014. All rights reserved. The idea of writing a book about fictional representations of Caravaggio came to me as far back as 2004 when I was writing a paper on art as inauguration in Pino Di Silvestro's novel La fuga, la sosta for the Romance Studies Colloquium on the theme of 'Celebration', which took place in Newark, New Jersey. Di Silvestro's book can be considered a 'celebration' of a fragment of Caravaggio's life, namely the few weeks the painter spent in Syracuse, between the beginning of October and the end of November 1608 when, after f leeing Malta, he landed in Sicily and painted his controversial The Burial of St Lucy.1 It was on that occasion that I discovered that Di Silvestro's interest in Caravaggio was part of a much larger worldwide phenomenon. It became very quickly apparent to me that although fictional responses to the painter's life and works have been a fairly regular feature over the centuries, during the second half of the twentieth century, but particularly since the 1980s and even more so during the 2000s, we see a real boom in the interest in Caravaggio outside the world of art history, a trend which is still very much alive today. Despite this wealth of material, it also became clear that there was a gap in the existing Caravaggio scholarship. To date, no real effort has been made to study the impact of the Baroque painter across various artistic genres and in different contexts. Whilst the inf luence of Caravaggio on contemporary painters and photographers is well documented thanks to the seminal work of Mieke Bal, studies of responses to Caravaggio's life and works in film or literature are rarer and usually tend to focus solely on an individual artist (e.g. Martin Scorsese, Derek Jarman, and Michel Ondaatje). This monograph addresses such a gap in the field of Caravaggio studies. Given this dearth of scholarship, a panoramic overview of the appropriation of Caravaggio by popular culture seemed most fitting. The true extent of the Caravaggio myth can be fully appreciated only by bringing together a series of case studies that include authors and directors from different countries (Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, and the United States) and literary and filmic texts belonging to different genres (e.g. fictional biographies/docudramas, crime fiction/ noirs, homoerotic literature/film and postcolonial literature).

Citation

Rorato, L. (2014). Caravaggio in film and literature: Popular culture's appropriation of a Baroque genius. Maney Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315095967

Book Type Book
Online Publication Date Oct 25, 2017
Publication Date Nov 30, 2014
Deposit Date May 29, 2020
Publisher Maney Publishing
Pages 1-236
Series Title Italian perspectives
Series Number 30
Book Title Caravaggio in Film and Literature: Popular Culture's Appropriation of a Baroque Genius
ISBN 9781351572682; 9781909662001
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315095967
Public URL https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3513546