Archaism and the Critique of Caravaggio in the Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen

• Main Author: Seaman, Natasha
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Digital Commons @ RIC 2005
• Subjects: Hendrick ter Brugghen; Caravaggio; religious painting; devotional images; post-Reformation; Ancient; Medieval; Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture; Northern Archaic
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/facultypublications/618; https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1621&context=facultypublications

During his twelve-year career, the Utrecht painter Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588-1629) embedded northern archaic content into works otherwise remarkable for their aspirations to contemporaneity and cosmopolitanism. Although ter Brugghen's archaism has been long noted, its study has been arrested at its diagnosis. My dissertation considers these elements as having an interpretive as well as a formal impact. Ter Brugghen's secular oeuvre is sizable, but archaism occurs uniquely in his religious works. This specificity of application not only connects these major works to the complex religious climate of Utrecht, well known for its confessional diversity after 1581, but also sheds light on broad questions of the function and form of devotional images in art after the Reformation.