Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . 1 FOREWORD Caravaggio and the Istoria . 3 PART ONE A Matter of Optics and Rhetoric: The Aporia of Pictorial Narrative Before, During, and After Caravaggio’s Time Caravaggio’s Nonsense . 15 Chapter 1 The Glitches in Alberti’s Istoria: The Human Figure Between Beauty and Reality . 35 Chapter 2 The Glitches in Alberti’s Istoria: Time and Action . 67 Chapter 3 The False Dichotomy Between Telling and Showing: Beyond Alberti’s Istoria . 93 PART TWO Blending Genres: Lyrical and Comical Interactions in Caravaggio’s Early Paintings Comedy of Errors . 121 Chapter 4 Money and Seduction: Narrative Patterns in Caravaggio’s Two Versions of The Fortune Teller . 135 Chapter 5 Behind the Comical Trick: Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps and Giovan Battista Marino’s “Gioco di Primera” . 157 Chapter 6 Love in the Mirror: A Comparative Reading of Titian’s Woman at Her Toilet and Caravaggio’s Conversion of Mary Magdalene . 177 V TABLE OF CONTENTS PART THREE The Misplaced Hero: The Challenge of the Istoria in Caravaggio’s Early Religious Narratives Truth in Painting . 199 Chapter 7 The Calling of Saint Matthew in Retrospective: Experimenting with Narrative Disconnections . 211 Chapter 8 “Completely Bereft of Action”: Narrative Blindness and the Heroic Horse in the Cerasi Conversion of Saint Paul . 243 Chapter 9 Visualizing Appearance and Disappearance: Caravaggio’s Two Versions of The Supper at Emmaus . 265 PART FOUR “With the Mind’s Eye”: Self-Representation and Self-Referentiality in Caravaggio’s Pictorial Narratives The Shaman Painter or The Metaphysics of Pictorial Invention . 297 Chapter 10 Zuccari’s Lantern: The Blind Spot of Painting in Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ . 311 Chapter 11 The Other Michelangelo: The Weight of Composition and Artistic Paragone in Caravaggio’s Entombment . 343 Chapter 12 The Impossible Banality of Representing Christ: Self-Parody and Tragicomedy in Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo . 375 PART FIVE The Work of Memory: Variations on Themes and Telescopic Parallels in Caravaggio’s Late Pictorial Narratives Artistic Memory and the Invention of the Istoria . 403 Chapter 13 Narratives of the Non-Finito: On Caravaggio’s Denial of Saint Peter, The Burial of Saint Lucy, and The Resurrection of Lazarus . 415 Chapter 14 Piercing the Canvas: Painting and Meta-Narrative in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas and The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula . 447 VI TABLE OF CONTENTS PART SIX Reaction to Change: The Afterlife of Caravaggio’s Poetics of Dislocation The Black Tide of Caravaggio’s Painting . 481 Chapter 15 Blind and Deaf Actions: Cecco del Caravaggio’s Chicago Resurrection . 495 Chapter 16 The Antichrist of Spanish Painting: Diego Velázquez’s Supper at Emmaus and the Two Versions of La Mulata . 517 Chapter 17 Without a Plot: Valentin de Boulogne’s Liechtenstein Merry Company with Fortune Teller . 539 EPILOGUE The End of Narrative? Afterthoughts on the Definition and Function of theIstoria in an Age of Subjectivity . 559 TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS . 573 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 589 INDEX . 675 VII.