ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of naturalism in Caravaggio’s early religious painting. It argues that the tendency to freeze images, to use tenebrism and to truncate traditional images through narrow framing were modes of abstraction that suggested that material reality had its meaning elsewhere, and not in the objects naturalistically depicted. These were developments that closely echoed new idealizing tendencies in Galileo’s mathematical physics. The rhetoric of the early religious paintings seems to be closely focused around a Johannine divide between kinds of vision (the people of the light vs. the people of the world). This reflects his intentions in other pictures that underline the dubitability of merely material experience and the capacity of merely naturalistic painting, like the Narcissus and the Doubting Thomas.
