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

30.
Helmet
Venetian, late 15th
century
Museo Nazionale del
Bargello,
Florence
Photograph: Scala/Art
Resource, N.Y.
rendered or whether Paolo Savelli
acquired
it direcdy
from the
artist or on possibly
the open market after the artist's death
cannot be said, but the picture
is listed in a Savelli
inventory
in
1624. We lose track of it after 1650; three hundred years later,
following
World War II, it on
reemerged
the Neapolitan
art
? market.
Caravaggio's
late works were then still underappreci
ated: what
people
admired were his Roman
pictures
with their
naturalistic
edge.
In any event, the was painting
ascribed to the
Caravaggio
follower Bartolomeo Manfredi. It was with the pub
lication in 1980 of documents
a
concerning stylistically
related
picture showing
the martyrdom
of Saint Ursula that its place
in
career
Caravaggio's
became clear. That
painting, too, had been
ascribed to Manfredi, but the documents
proved beyond ques
tion that it was
painted by Caravaggio
in the spring
of 1610 (he
died that July).
The Denial ofSaint
Peterwas almost
certainly painted
about the same time.
Thus it became possible
to understand the radical direction
art
Caravaggio's
took in the
years following
his flight
from Rome. For one
thing, he no longer painted exclusively
from
posed
models. Rather, he had built up a repertory of figure types that he introduced into his
31.
Michael
(Flemish,
Sweerts
Brussels,
1618-1664)
An Artist's Studio,
ca.
1650
Oil on canvas, 28 x
29 % in. (71 x 74 cm)
Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam
35?