Giovanni Careri

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) (France), Instituto di Architectura di Venezia, IUAV

The painter as butcher: vivo and carne in early modern Italian painting

2024–2025: Spring

Giovanni Careri is Directeur d’études at the EHESS (the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris and Professor of Art History at IUAV University in Venice. His research focuses on singularly complex objects involving theoretical, anthropological and semiotic approaches: the “montage” of the arts in Bernini's Baroque chapels (Bernini, Flights of Love. The Art of Devotion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); the place of the beholder in Caravaggio’s painting (Caravaggio. La fabbrica dello spettatore, Milan, Jaca Book, 2017); the representation of the affetti in the network of paintings, plays, and ballets related to Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (The Making of the Affetti. Tasso’s Jerusalem delivered from Carracci to Tiepolo, Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2022); and the construction of Christian history and the representation of alterity in the Sistine Chapel (Christians and Jews in the Sistine Chapel, Brepols, forthcoming in 2024). He has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, the Wissenschaftskolleg Bildevidenz in Berlin, and the Académie de France – Villa Medici in Rome. During his stay at the Italian Academy, he will explore the concept of the “living” (il vivo) as related to the concept of the “true” (il vero), focusing on a corpus of genre paintings by the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci (1560–1609).