Spring 2021 Digital Research Seminars

Filmed as part of the Spring 2021 Digital Research Seminars presented by scholars affiliated with the O’Donnell Institute’s Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities in Naples.

7 May 2021

CHRISTOPHER BAKKE

Christopher Bakke

École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris

The body and Battistello: the motif of the upraised shoulder in Caracciolo's painting and a new date for his voyage to Rome

This talk explores the recurring motif in the painting of the Neapolitan caravaggesque painter, Battistello Caracciolo. Although the southern painter effectively borrowed many of Lombard master's naturalistic features, such as accurately rendered still-lives and realistic bodies modeled in chiaroscuro, the figures in Battistello's work repeatedly display a usual visual tic: a prominently upraised shoulder. Rarely mentioned in the literature, though occasionally glossed over as mere poor draughtsmanship, Bakke proposes that Battistello's signature pose is both a form of religious symbolism and related to the painter's personal deformity mentioned in the sources. Moreover, Bakke suggests that the appearance of this motif in Battistello's earliest work is evidence of the painter's knowledge of Caravaggio before his Neapolitan period.

BIO

Christopher Bakke has been a friend of La Capraia for three years now. He is currently a doctoral student in the history of art at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, where he is working on a dissertation on the Neapolitan painter Battistello Caracciolo. From 2018-2020, he was an American Friends of Capodimonte Fellow, working in close collaboration with one of our previous digital seminar speakers, James P. Anno. Together James and Chris wrote the catalogue for the Capodimonte Museum travelling show held at the Seattle Art Museum and the Kimbell Art Museum in 2019-2020.