Art historian to discuss paintings of Caravaggio

Influential art historian Michael Fried will visit campus Oct. 16-17, and lecture on “Caravaggio: The Invention of Absorption” at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 16, in room L160 of the Elvehjem Museum of Art.

Fried, the Boone Professor of the Humanities and director of the Center for the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, has been engaged in a major re-examination of post-enlightenment painting that has changed how people look at realism in painting.

In his work on 16th-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Fried explores the roots of realism in painting in the way Caravaggio represents his subjects as absorbed in their worlds and lives. Fried is often considered a radical and free-thinking art historian because his interdisciplinary work draws from literary theory, philosophy and social history, and challenges commonly held views.

Considered a revolutionary artist and an iconoclastic personality, Caravaggio helped to transform painting from an art of idealization of gilded figures rendered in two dimensions to one of depiction, recognition and realism.

Fried will discuss Caravaggio’s innovations in the context of “absorption,” a term he invented to identify a relation between the ways in which a viewer is drawn into a painting — becoming absorbed in the experience of viewing the painting — and the ways in which the subjects of the paintings are themselves absorbed in the context of their lives as depicted. Fried says this innovation is crucial to realism.

Information: http://www.humanities.wisc.edu.