| PODCASTS/BOOK: FIFTY-FIRST A. W. MELLON LECTURES IN THE FINE ARTS | | |
| | |  |  BOOK: The Moment of Caravaggio
Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor and director of the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University
This is a groundbreaking examination of one of the most important artists in the Western tradition by one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half century. In his first extended consideration of the Italian baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), Michael Fried offers a transformative account of the artist's revolutionary achievement. Based on the 51st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered in 2002 at the National Gallery of Art, The Moment of Caravaggio displays Fried's unique combination of interpretive brilliance, historical seriousness, and theoretical sophistication, providing sustained and unexpected readings of a wide range of major works, from the early Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the late Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. And with close to 200 color images, The Moment of Caravaggio is as richly illustrated as it is closely argued. The result is an electrifying new perspective on a crucial episode in the history of European painting.
Focusing on the emergence of the full-blown "gallery picture" in Rome during the last decade of the 16th century and the first decades of the 17th, Fried draws forth an expansive argument, one that leads to a radically revisionist account of Caravaggio's relation to the self-portrait; of the role of extreme violence in his art, as epitomized by scenes of decapitation; and of the deep structure of his epoch-defining realism. Fried also gives considerable attention to the art of Caravaggio's great rival, Annibale Carracci, as well as to the work of Caravaggio's followers, including Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Valentin de Boulogne.
Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XXXV: 51
Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington
328 pages, 194 color illustrations, 9 halftones, 8 x 11 inches, $49.50
shop.nga.gov/nga/category.cgi?item=410000390504 (book) |
| | | | Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 1975. Dr. Fried has held fellowships with the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has served on the editorial board of numerous journals and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, PEN, and the American Philosophical Society, and is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. In 2006, Dr. Fried received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Chicago.
Among his prize-winning books are Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980); Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987); Courbet's Realism (1990); To the Center of the Earth (poems, 1994); Manet's Modernism, or the Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996); Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998); Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002); The Next Bend in the Road (poems, 2004); and Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). The Moment of Caravaggio received the 2010 American Publisher's Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Art History and Criticism. |
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