UD professor to study Caravaggio mysteries
Contact: Barbara Garrison, (302) 831-1964, [email protected]
The only signature Michelangelo da Caravaggio ever put on one of his paintings appears as a flow of blood oozing from the neck of a partially decapitated St. John in Caravaggio's greatest work, "The Beheading of St. John the Baptist."
Why the newly knighted Baroque artist chose this bloody dedication, why he was defrocked in abstentia six months after entering the Knights of Malta Order of St. John, why he created some of his best works during the 15 months he lived on the island of Malta and how each painting was influenced by that experience are at the heart of the mysteries David Stone of Newark, assistant professor of art history at the University of Delaware, says he hopes to solve as a winner of the 1997-98 Rome Prize Competition.
Born in 1571, Caravaggio went to Malta, the home of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta, in 1607, shortly after murdering a man in Rome, Stone explains. Caravaggio wanted to receive a knighthood in order to win a papal pardon for the crime. During the time that he was completing his novitiate, Stone says, Caravaggio painted five of his best works, including "The Beheading of St. John."
Three months after he was accepted into the order and gave the painting to the knights, Caravaggio was thrown into prison for an as yet unknown crime. Four months after he escaped from prison and fled to Sicily, he was defrocked in absentia. The knights expelled him in the Church of St. John in front of his masterpiece, Stone reports, declaring that Caravaggio be "thrust forth ... like a rotten and fetid limb."
Stone received one of only two postdoctoral fellowships in art history awarded by the American Academy in Rome, the foremost overseas American center for advanced research in the fine arts and humanities.
The prestigious competition attracts thousands of applicants, and winners receive stipends and full room and board at the academy's main building, which sits on Janiculum hill, the highest spot in Rome. Notable past winners include writers Robert Penn Warren and Nadine Gordimer; composers Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber; architects Robert Venturi and Michael Graves; painters Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella and art historians Howard Hibbard and Richard Krautheimer.
Stone leaves for Italy in September, 1997.
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