Masks and metaphors: Caravaggio and the mannerist connection

Abstract

The thesis argues that clear stylistic contrast between painters Agnolo Bronzino and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio obscures what amounts to a shared understanding of, and response to, limits of representation. Drawing on theory of Jacques Lacan and texts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Bataille, as well as art historical texts and literary theory, it explores artists' ironic manner of interrogating classical conventions and engaging, always ambiguously, with erotic, in process exposing classical idiom- its matter and form- as a 'mask' concealing an instability at heart of appearances. Key aesthetic terms current at time - in particular, sprezzatura and grazia - are considered from perspective of their affinities with irony. Harnessing Lacanian notions of desire's 'impossibility' or 'desire as lack,' discussion focuses on artists' allusions to discrepancy or gap between ego ideal and lived reality. It is argued that, in giving primacy to aesthetic, these artists make a presence of absence; that is to say, desire makes its presence felt through naming effects, via metaphor. The thesis is concerned with limit to representation, explaining it as barrier to jouissance as determined by sexual difference. Every signifier carries lack. The phenomenon of repetition (Lacan's notion of drive as the mask of symbolic) informs my approach. Always more explicit than Bronzino, Caravaggio dramatizes imaginary relation - relation between self and other- for that is where gap is produced, where death makes itself felt. In demand addressed to Other there is always an element left in impasse. The thesis suggests that both artists, in confronting dilemma of naming unnameable, essentially create metaphors for emotional immobility and loss. I argue that viewer's relation to objet a or its complement, specular image i(a), is established via phantasm. The fictional nature of metonymic object is stressed. The paradox of unmoving movement, so characteristic of Bronzino's maniera, is amplified in Caravaggio's work. In both artists' work, unnameable manifests, not only as fixity of frozen form but also as a surplus, as excess - colour playing a primary role in this respect. I consider its relation to symptom. The distinction often drawn between narrative or representational and performative finds its parallel in difference between desire caught up in a dialectic - that is, mediated expression - and what is beyond conceptual, an ego-annihilating jouissance, a pleasure that does not end in harmony or resolution; in short, a nonsense sense or jouis-sens. The realm of non-meaning is evoked via rupture or disjunction in visual field.