Representing the poor in early modern Rome : the social functions of Caravaggio's images of poor types (1592-1606)

Higginson, Peter (2005) Representing the poor in early modern Rome : the social functions of Caravaggio's images of poor types (1592-1606). University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

The thesis sets out to investigate Caravaggio’s representations of poor types within the specific context of his Roman art production. It begins with an overview of the discussions on this topic to date with the aim of identifying what further course of research might be taken.

The investigation begins with an analysis of the state of affairs regarding poverty in Rome around 1600, a time, it will be shown, when conditions had reached a point of crisis. The causes were inflation, taxation and unemployment, all of which were very much driven by the papacy’s development of a modern financial economy, coupled with a series of local calamities such as famine and flood. The result was a level of poverty that contemporise agreed was unprecedented. Control of the problem was compromised by the need in Rome, as the centre of Catholic belief, to encourage a public poor in order to facilitate the practice of good works, and to welcome visitors, high and low, to the mother city. Under Clement VIII (1592-1605), a period that, significantly, coincides with Caravaggio’s stay in the city (1593-1606), conspicuous poverty was especially sanctioned, and was further endorsed by the pope’s own public displays of himself as a friend of the poor. Analysis of artistic representations of the poor commissioned by the papal administration show how closely they conformed to the Clementine ideology.

The discussion will go on to analyse alternative modes of representing the poor by artists of the Bolognese reform, and by Caravaggio as the representative of a more radical naturalism. Discussion will centre on ways in which artistic experimentation and competition at the time, as well the art criticism that was antagonistic to Caravaggio’s approach, were informed by contemporary social conditions and values.

This will be followed by an examination of the core network of Caravaggio’s Roman patronage, made up from the emerging class of lay professionals and financiers that were benefiting from the papacy’s burgeoning monetary economy.

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