Beschreibung:
Sophie Couëtoux : Caravaggio in 17th Century Texts : the effects of the affects. Based on various types of 17th century texts written on Caravaggio, including biographies, poems and epistolary documents, we are given an insight into how his paintings were received. Beyond the question of style and form, the emotional relationship between the spectator and the paintings must, also, be taken into consideration. To reveal in a critical text the effect a painting had on its author’s emotions meant that he was able to emerge from the impasse in which he found himself when attempting to describe an art that appeared to him to be unconventional. This aspect, also, helps to understand the uneasiness, as well as, perhaps, the pleasure, of a theoretician and defender of Classicism, such as Bellori.