Caravaggio: 9 works

'The dramatic lighting of the scene creates a chiaroscuro effect characteristic of Caravaggio, whose approach to light and volume--evident in this canvas--was to have considerable impact both in Italy and throughout Europe.'

'The subject of the painting reveals Caravaggio's new interest in scenes taken from the street.'

'In 1598 Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte gave this painted shied to the Grand Duke Ferdinando I. It was put in the Armory of the Uffizi without any attribution; in 1631 it was registered as a work by Caravaggio and was displayed as part of a suit of Persian Armor worn by a mannequin seated on a wooden horse.'

'Apprenticed in Milan in 1584, Caravaggio came to Rome in the early 1590s. There his early masterpiece The Cardsharps came to the attention of the influential Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who not only purchased it but also offered the artist quarters in his palace.'

'The chiaroscuro and the incredibly natural quality of the figures are typical of Caravaggio.'

'The most convincing elements for such attribution are the modernity of the shadow projected diagonally on the wall, now visible once again, and the supposed protagonist as Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, one of the central figures in Caravaggio's life and one of the leading art collectors of his time.'

'This painting which represents the test of Abraham's faith in which he is asked by God to sacrifice his only child, a child he had at a very advanced age, is the only painting by Caravaggio with a landscape in the background.'

'Evidence of Caravaggio's working method, in which he incised lines into the gesso ground to guide his hand while painting, can be easily seen along the sitter's left leg in the right corner. Caravaggio most likely borrowed the Baptist's pose from one of Michelangelo's seated prophets and sibyls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, Rome.'

'He subtly makes the objects of their desire, the rosaries, more abstract by putting them in the shadows, making the brightly illuminated hands all the more dominant.'