Caravaggio at the edge of genres and forms: reevaluated portrait of a revolutionary painter

Abstract

This article analyzes the treatment of Caravaggio’s life and work in contemporary fiction. If by aesthetic tradition the stories about painters and painting conform and are confined to specific genres, the texts that I approach here demonstrate a generic and scriptural hybridization which brings several border spaces into contact. My remarks thus show the modalities and modulations of the intersection of biography, fiction, history and investigative narrative. Beyond the genres invoked, the pictorial reference also allows the solicitation of various iconic matrices of which ekphrasis and hypotyposis remain the most accomplished forms. By digging into the black holes of art history, La course à l’abîme by Dominique Fernandez and Solitude Caravage by Yanick Haenel offer a reading inspired by an inner experience of the writer. The idea is to propose, in this hybrid space that the text becomes, a different and original reading of the life and work of Caravaggio mediated by stories of a re-evaluation.