The sources are unequivocal about Caravaggio's "realism". Gian Pietro Bellori - one of his earliest biographers - tells us that:
"Proposing to his brush only the imitation of nature (si propose la sola natura per oggetto del suo pennello), he did not look at and even depreciated the marvelous marbles of antiquity, and the paintings so famous of Raphael."
Carel van Mander is even clearer:
"His maxim is that, if what has been painted and figured is not drawn from the truth, it can only be childish and trifling; that, then, it doesn't matter what has been painted, or who has painted. For him, there is nothing good or better than following nature... There is not a single stroke that he does not execute directly from the living model."
As the herald of a new aesthetic, Caravaggio had to bend to the imperatives of the thematic repertoire of his time, but this was not enough to save him from all his problems. What place could the angel still hold in a painting that sought to "mirror reality"? In an attempt to answer this question, this conference will examine angelic representation at one of its most critical moments, and thus perhaps one of the most significant in the history of painting. This approach concerns a problem of pictorial representation that has all the hallmarks of a paradox. One could rightly speak of a "paradox of the angel" in Caravaggio's painting. The conference focused on a brief but fundamental period in Caravaggio's career, namely his early years in Rome, 1592-1602. Famous works such as the paintings for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of St. Louis of the French in Rome, St. Francis in Ecstasy in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 1596, and The Rest of the Flight into Egypt in the Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome, were re-analyzed.
