GOING FOR BAROQUE Into the Bin - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

l6. (opposite)
Sofonisba
Anguissola
(Italian, Cremona, ca.
1532-Palermo, 1625)
Boy Bitten
Crayfish,
Black
by a
ca. 1554
chalk and charcoal
on brown paper, 12% x
14 ^ in. (32.2x37.5 cm)
Gabinetto
Stampe,
Nazionale
monte,
Disegni
Museo
Naples
Photograph:
Soprintendenza
per
Napoletana
17
di Capodi
e
Fototeca
il Polo Museale
Sp?ciale
Caravaggio
Death of the Virgin,
1605-6
Oil on canvas, 144 x 96 in.
(369 x 243.8 cm)
Mus?e du Louvre, Paris
and artists, who had declared the practice
of painting directly
from posed
models in an
unpolished,
sketchlike
style
suitable for the workshop
but not for public display
in a church.
As his later pictures testify,
Annibale never abandoned the practice
of sketching
from models,
but this method became one
only
element in a more
complex,
elevated visual
language.
Caravaggio
had a similar
experience
in Rome with his first some altarpieces,
of which were
rejected and had to be
replaced.
Such was the case with his celebrated Death of the Virgin
(fig. 17), for which was substituted a work by Carlo Saraceni (fig. 18). A variety
of factors
entered into the rejection?theological
subdeties that went well
beyond
the issue of artistic
style, though that, too, a
played part. Caravaggio
had shown the Virgin
dead rather than "in
transit" from her
earthly
to heavenly life, as the contract had required.
It was a theological
point
that may well have as
escaped Caravaggio,
it did Carlo Saraceni, who had to modify
his
i8.
Carlo
Saraceni
(Italian,
Venice, 1579?-i62o)
Death of the Virgin,
ca. 1612
Oil on canvas, 120 V% x
91 in. (305.1x231.1 cm)
Richard L. Feigen,
New
York,
Metropolitan
of Art
on loan to The
Museum
Photograph: Alinari/Art
Resource, N.Y.
21