Caravaggio's Diptychs

INHA - Salle Fabri de Pereisc  -  2, rue Vivienne  -  75002 Paris
For although Caravaggio doesn't seem to have painted any diptych in the literal sense, Hubert Damisch was right to suggest that some of his paintings may be described as latent diptychs for formal and semantic reasons. They are characterized by certain kinds of symmetries and (imaginary)hinges. As a painter, he also seems to have been very fond of things consisting of two parts, especially if they were both symmetric and foldable (such as pairs of wings, opened books, faldistoria and so on), and he liked to play with intricate pairings and/or chiasmic correlations of such things, problematizing their unity. How should we describe and interpret these phenomena? Can we say that, in Caravaggio's art, something like a dissemination of the diptych-form is taking place? And that this happens in the context of a culture in which foldable images had become a marginal phenomenon?
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  • le mardi 12 mars 2013 à 09h
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