Moral choice in some paintings by Caravaggio and his followers

In that great compendium of Renaissance temperance imagery that is Book Two of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser provides us with the means to interpret Hendrick ter Brugghen's painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum as an allegory of Excess. This painting, moreover, can be connected with a group of related pictures, including Caravaggio's Uffizi Bacchus, that display cognate subjects. All draw on widely canvassed ideas concerning the nature of virtue, and all structure a formal situation in which the viewer is confronted with familiar temptations. Thus the viewer's relation to the image becomes a calculated part of its meaning, and his response recreates the moral choice between reason and desire that is the abiding condition of continence.

COPYRIGHT 1991 College Art Association
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