Lecture by Jean-Paul De Lucca, Sante Guido, Giuseppe Mantella
Il restauro di un dipinto tra Caravaggio e Tommaso Campanella
The restoration of the painting Paradiso by Battistello Caracciolo is a path that leads to a reflection on Caravaggio’s works of art and the philosophical thought of Tommaso Campanella. Caravaggio’s art and Campanella’s thought are the basis of the history of art which had just returned to the primitive beauty made up of light, shadows and colours.
The presence of Caravaggio in Naples, as well as in Malta, upset the cultural life of the city. His completely new style, made up of light and shadows, was like a tremor that shook the way painting was done. Among those who understood and followed ardently the revolution initiated by Caravaggio was Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, known also as Battistello, to the point that he became one of the greatest painters of the first half of the Seventeenth century.
Caracciolo, as a successful artist, painted many works combining Caravaggio’s style with his personal style such that his paintings were sought by the aristocrats and the bourgeois in Naples, in South Italy and in Malta. Among his works of art one can find Il ritorno della fuga in Egitto found in the Jesuits’ Church in Valletta and the Paradiso painted for the Cathedral of Stilo in Calabria. The renowned Renaissance philosopher Tommaso Campanella, whose philosophical and naturalist thought was strongly linked to the culture that supported the new realistic way of painting which Caravaggio and Battistello employed, studied and lived in the very important city of Stilo.