Caravaggio on the frontier

Abstract

The established and widely-recognised art historical reading of Caravaggio’s Maltese period refers to a relatively calm interlude during which the artist produced some of his best works. This paper seeks to trace and examine the evidence for theorising Caravaggio’s Maltese period. It reviews the core elements of the Mediterranean frontier on which early seventeenth-century Malta stood and the varied values which shaped the context for Caravaggio’s brief stay. It also considers some of Caravaggio’s paintings, commissioned and painted in Malta during his brief but eventful ten month stay, as containing evidence of the artist’s interface with the frontier as deined through Frederick Jackson’s Turner original frontier thesis and its varied reviews. Caravaggio’s paintings are thus securely qualiied as the very evidence on which to build a theoretical model for his brief stay in Malta.