Volume 30, Number 8 · May 12, 1983
Secrets of Caravaggio
By Francis Haskell
Circa 1600:A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting
by S.J. Freedberg
Harvard University Press, 88 pp., $25.00
Caravaggio
by Alfred Moir
Abrams, 168 pp., $40.00
Caravaggio
by Howard Hibbard
Harper and Row, 404 pp., $40.00
'There is no secret of the psyche that Caravaggio cannot find out,' writes Professor Freedberg of the artist's Death of the Virgin, which now hangs in the Louvre, disfigured by dark varnish. Although he elaborates on his meaning, this is the most surprising sentence in his book—indeed, the most surprising sentence in any of the three books under review. Was Caravaggio trying to find out the psyche's secrets? Did artists ever try to do this, even in portraiture (a branch of painting, incidentally, in which Caravaggio seems to have been singularly unsuccessful), before the middle of the last century? And even if we assume that artists can find out the secrets of the psyche, how do they reveal them to us?
Review, 3159 words
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