CARAVAGGIO'S SELF-PORTRAITS

Rarely have a painter's life and art contrasted so starkly as is the case with Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. After an eventful life full of violence and conflicts with legai authorities, the artist died - not by another's hand, but "marked by the knife." There have been many attempts to find self-portraits of the artist in his paintings. The beheaded giant, Goliath, in a picture in the Galleria Borghese is supposed to be a selfportrait. Some people have seen a second self-portrait in the face of the youthful David who is offering the bloodsoaked head to the viewer, as if Caravaggio was expressing his own contradictory nature in this painting. This presupposes an extraordinary age-difference, though other speculations about Caravaggio's selfportraits also take little notice of facial changes as the artist grew older. Yet a drawing by Ottavio Leoni (1509 -1590) of Goliath's head offers posterity the best available picture of how Caravaggio looked. [..]

CONTENTS

In Search of the Artist

Essential Features of Caravaggio's Art

Inset: The Imitation of Nature, the Ideai, and the Hierarchy of Genres

Arrangements of Objects and Figures

Inset: Caravaggio and the Grapes of Zeuxis

Caravaggio's Contribution to Genre-painting

Inset: On Deciphering the Pictures of the Rest during the Flight into Egypt. A Pastoral or Caravaggio's First Great Work?

Caravaggio as Narrator: History Paintings in Rome

The Altarpieces for Rome

The Altarpieces of Caravaggio's First Stay in Naples

On the Run in Malta and Sicily

Retrospective

Chronology

Glossary

Selected Bibliography