Caravaggio: The Pleasure/Pain principle

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in height; yet remains bound classically to the trope of beautiful youth.

Where castration or self annihilation may have been the cumulative outcome of the Medusa painting David & Goliath potentially posits a different interpretive representation. It is one in which Caravaggio himself dies - perhaps more like that of the fin-de-siecle phrase of� Le petite Mort�. The proximity of both head and mouth to the shadowed crotch of David is an indicator of this, it is the only or one commonly identifiable body parts. Where if Caravaggio acknowledges he perhaps services a lover, or object of desire - he no longer is the autonomous masculine figure - but that other man, one whom cannot be in a historical sense: Man. painting maybe acts as

It is this then, that the

an acknowledgement of although

socially progressing, the inability to truly autonomise self - or


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