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The article centers on Italian artist Caravaggio's Neapolitan production, in order to show how his artworks both incorporated and propelled the epistemological shift occurring at the beginning of the seventeenth century - a shift that is understood and explained within the frame of Michel Foucault's intellectual history. In the article, it is argued that Caravaggio's Neapolitan paintings gave visual expression to that transition, by highlighting the persistence of Renaissance's symbolic strategies, all the while opening to the Baroque's predilection for an allegorical use of marginality. By focusing on the interval years between these two cultural phases and by addressing the critical conundrum generated by the recent recovery of two lost Caravaggio's paintings, the article also sheds light on the unexpected space of freedom offered to the "disenfranchised" in the first twenty years of the seventeenth century. As Caravaggio gave larger space to social outcasts and lower classes, female figures also started playing a more significant role within his art, thus reflecting women's more active presence in Italian society, as well as ensuing misogynist fears.
KEYWORDS: Caravaggio, Femme fatale, Naples, Judith, Salome, Magdalen, Works of Mercy, Foucault, Women.
The sexist backlash prompted by women's presence on the job market and in positions of influence - that is, by their enfranchisement - is not new to the western world. From the witches of the Middle Ages to the late-nineteenth-century figure of the femme fatale, even a general overview of Occidental history highlights the frequent overlap between women's increasing power and their rhetorical demonization (Hanson and O'Rawe). In the development of this imagery, women "beheaders" had a significant part to play (Janes 97-138). The study of paintings and other visual artefacts can reveal much about this dynamic, since works of art act both as synthetic texts of a given period and as screens of collective fears and unconscious drives. It is therefore through an analysis of Caravaggio's art that I will examine the epochal shift in the representation of femininity that occurred between two phases of human history, generally defined in art history as the Renaissance and the Baroque
In this study, I focus in particular on the first ten years of the seventeenth century, and I use Caravaggio's Neapolitan period as a hermeneutic key to this...