Lecture

Keith Christiansen

Monday, 16 March 2015 – 6:30pm

AAR Lecture Room

Rome

Caravaggio’s practice of working directly from posed models, dispensing with the elaborate use of drawings and cartoons, was viewed by his contemporaries as revolutionary. It opens a new chapter in the history of European painting. In this lecture Keith Christiansen will look at the tradition and circumstances of working directly from the model that impacted Caravaggio’s approach; the ways in which this practice was taken up by later artists; and its implications for painters of the next generation, with an emphasis on Valentin de Boulogne, who will be the subject of a monographic exhibition at The Metropolitan and the Musée du Louvre in 2016–2017.

Keith Christiansen is the Cynthia Hazen Polsky/Metropolitan Museum of Art Visiting Curator at the American Academy in Rome and John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.