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Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation

1976; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/468612

1080-661X

Svetlana Alpers,

Architecture and Art History Studies

HEN GIOVANNI PIETRO BELLORI, the leading Roman art critic and theorist of the second half of the seventeenth century, came to write his Lives of the greatest artists of his time, he somewhat grudgingly, and against his taste, included an account of Caravaggio. He admitted Caravaggio's greatness but disputed his art. In Bellori's view Caravaggio's art was remarkable for its descriptive or imitative powers, though it offended by its emphasis on the low and the vulgar, and it was surprising to him in at least one instance for its lack of narrative action. Bellori calls Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul (Fig. 1) a work truly without action-an istoria ... affatto senza attione,' and his observation is true of other works of Caravaggio's as well-for example, the Crucifixion of St. Peter (Fig. 2) on the opposite wall of the little Cerasi chapel. Bellori is right-and he is the only critic of the time I know who found a phrase to describe this striking aspect of Caravaggio's art. But this singular combination of an attention to imitation or description with a suspension of narrative action is not an isolated feature of some works by Caravaggio. It is also a characteristic of some of the greatest works of the other leading seventeenth-century realist painters-Velazquez, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. Further, this phenomenon seems not to be limited to the seventeenth century, for it reappears once more in French realist art of the nineteenth century-in Courbet and Manet. This pictorial point is made clearly by putting a nineteenth-century work of this kind next to Caravaggio. Compare, for example, the Crucifixion by Caravaggio with Courbet's Stone-Breakers (Fig. 3). It is not the similarity between the simple, or what we would call in the seventeenth century lowlife, aspects of the figures to which I want to call attention, but the manner of the handling. In each work there is a deliberate suspension of action achieved through a fixity of pose and an avoidance of outward expression (note that the gestures do not convey feelings and that faces are hidden in both works) combined with an attention to the description of the material surface of the world-the mottled surface of rocks, the complex life of the