Practice question · Multiple choice
Caravaggio lights a saint with a hard beam from outside the frame while the rest falls into darkness. What is the light doing theologically?
Hints
- Ask where the light source is, and whether it is inside the depicted world.
- The scene is a conversion. What does the light do to the person it strikes?
Show the answer
B. Making grace visible as an intervention from beyond the picture
Why
The source is outside the frame and unexplained, so illumination becomes an event rather than a condition, grace as something that happens to a person. It is why the Calling of Saint Matthew works on a viewer who could not read the Latin, which is exactly what Trent had asked images to do.
Practise Baroque Art and the Counter-Reformation
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Baroque Art and the Counter-Reformation
- The daylight falling on Bernini’s Saint Teresa comes from a concealed window built into the chapel.
- Match each term to its meaning.
- Order these events in the Baroque century.
- What does tenebrism accomplish in a dim seventeenth-century chapel?
- Why do Bernini’s sculpted Cornaro family lean from carved theatre boxes on the chapel’s side walls?
- Trent asked for images that would teach and move the unlettered. Why did that produce Caravaggio’s…
- Sort each choice: Caravaggio’s method or the decorum his patrons expected?