Conference theme: Caravaggio

The Centre d'Art Sébastien invites you to a lecture on the theme of "Caravaggio: Revolt against an Ideal."

At the turn of the XVIIᵉ century, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio profoundly upset Italian painting. Reversing the ideal of beauty inherited from the Renaissance, he introduced raw human truth into religious art: imperfect bodies, scarred faces, gestures suspended in dramatic light.

By drawing his models from the street and capturing the most intense moments of the narrative, Caravaggio transformed painting into a living scene, where the sacred emerges at the heart of reality. This lecture looks back at this major breakthrough, which marked the beginning of the Baroque sensibility and redefined the representation of the world and of man.