Wednesday 5th November, 5pm – 7pm , KLT5
Art History and Visual Cultures Research Seminar
Professor Clare Robertson, University of Reading
Caravaggio: Rejection and Censorship in Context
Caravaggio’s religious works have been regarded as controversial since they were first displayed, and his seventeenth-century biographers argued that many works were rejected, usually for lack of decorum. This paper argues that Caravaggio himself often chose to rework some of his compositions for artistic reasons, and that fewer works were rejected by his patrons than is usually supposed. It also seeks to put those works that actually were rejected into a broader context of attitudes to censorship in late Cinquecento Rome.
Clare Robertson is Professor of History of Art at the University of Reading. Her publications include ‘Il Gran Cardinale’: Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts (Yale, 1992), and The Invention of Annibale Carracci. Studi della Bibliotheca Hertziana, 2008, as well as numerous articles on aspects of art, mostly in Rome, during the 16th and 17th centuries.