L'effetto Caravaggio nella cultura letteraria del Seicento fra Italia e Paesi Bassi: The Caravaggio Effect in Seventeenth-Century Literature Between Italy and the Low Countries

Abstract

This essay assesses the impact of Caravaggio's legacy in Dutch seventeenth-century literature. While briefly reconstructing the strong connections between Italian and Dutch visual arts of the period, it particularly concentrates on the first three decades of the century, partly coinciding with the return to the Low Countries of a group of influential painters that in Rome had learned to appreciate and imitate Caravaggio's experimentalism. Their continuous engagement with caravaggesque expression was welcomed also beyond the artistic sphere, as a discussion of the Dutch pastoral indicates. Emerged primarily as a theatrical genre inspired by Italian models like Guarini, the Dutch pastoral in the 1620s and 1630s developed into a comprehensive and hugely fashionable phenomenon that in its visual expression integrated several elements clearly depending on Caravaggio's model, as a discussion of the highlighting of dirty feet in the rendering of shepherds and other protagonists indicates.