Talk:Penitent Magdalene (Caravaggio)

The lead

Much of the lead was removed here under note that "The painting was not controversial when it was painted - in fact there's no contemporary record of it." Even if this is true, I'm not sure why it would necessitate removing the rest of the content. Leads are meant to succinctly summarize articles per WP:LEAD. But in this case the sentence refers to one below, which is supported by a reliable source:

It was this departure into realism that shocked its original audience who, according to Hilary Spurling in The New York Times Book Reviews (2001), "complained that his Mary Magdalene looked like the girl next door drying her hair alone at home on her night in." [1]

This quote sustains the sentence in the lead, but I've added a source for it in the lead as well, just as I earlier added a source for the description of the painting (here). I have, however, modified the wording in case "controversial" is over-stating. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 12:49, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Spurling quote

This sourced quote about the piece was removed with the note, "This is a misunderstanding of what Spurling is saying - see the original quoting Bellori, who was not a contemporary." If Spurling's note needs clarification, that's one thing, but most of that sentence is a direct quote of a reliable source, and I disagree with its outright removal. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 22:38, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Leads have to be accurate - they shouldn't tell untruths. Spurling is drawing on Bellori, who says this: "[Caravaggio] painted a young girl, seated in a chair, with her hands in her lap, in the act of drying her hair. He portrayed her in a room and, adding a small ointment jar with jewelry and gems on the floor, he pretended that she was the Magdalen." Bellori was shocked, but he was writing in 1672, long after Caravaggio's death - long after the deaths of all those who were around when the Magdalen was painted. It's true that Caravaggio's "realism" (a much-misused word - what's so realistic about the lighting in Caravaggio's work?) "shocked" some of his contemporaries, but this particular painting was done before he became famous, and went unnoticed. (The word translated "pretended", by the way, can be more accurately rendered as "presented" - Bellori is saying that Caravaggio has cheapened a religious subject by presenting it in insufficiently transcendent terms).PiCo (talk) 22:53, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

This isn't in the lead, but the body. I've amended the passage to directly quote Spurling. He says, "Contemporaries complained that his Mary Magdalene looked like the girl next door drying her hair alone at home on her night in."[2] We can contextualize this by indicating who said the actual passage (thereby allowing our readers to draw their own conclusions about how "contemporary" these people were...and the implication there is plural), but we are limited in what we can say by WP:V and WP:NOR. As a tertiary source, our job is to accurately summarize what reliable sources say about this work, and if Spurling is a reliable source, there's not really any good reason to exclude his statement. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 22:59, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Spurling seems to be interpreting Bellori as a contemporary of Caravaggio, despite the gap of almost a century. He's wrong, and I can produce even more reliable sources to say so. You need a better source. I suggest one of the leading Caravaggio scholars - try Puglisi or Spear, or almost anyone.PiCo (talk) 23:29, 1 August 2010 (UTC) (Just found another error - he says the church that commissioned the "Death of the Virgin" locked it away - no they didn't, they rejected it. PiCo (talk) 23:31, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

If you want to expand the article with content from any reliable source, that would be lovely. Generally, I don't believe we should remove sourced content, unless the sources are themselves unreliable. As WP:V says, "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—whether readers can check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true." So far as I know, The New York Times Book Reviews remains reliable. If you'd like, I can ask for feedback at WP:RSN, though. I've suggested above that we could contextualize who actually said the passage to which Spurling refers to help our readers draw their own conclusions, and at this point I personally suspect that's the best approach to take. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 23:48, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

NYT book reviews are RS, but Spurling is wrong on details. I'd rather use Robb (Spurling is reviewing Robb). I'll ask a few of the reviewers from the main Caravaggio article to come and have a look at this one. PiCo (talk) 00:00, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

That sounds good to me. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 00:12, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

"Feigning"

There's a big problem about the use of this term. It's used several times in the article, always with the sense of "pretend", which is what it means in modern English. It didn't mean "to pretend" in the 16th/17th centuries, neither in English nor in Italian. It meant "to represent." For the English we have Shakespeare, Justice Touchstone in As You Like It, who says: "The truest poetry is the most feigning." He means the truest poetry is that which most closely represents, not that which is most deceptive. Words change their meaning over time, and this one has, both in English and Italian. When Bellori, c.1670, wrote that Caravaggio fingere his model, he meant that he represented her as the Magdalen. The term is quite neutral. When I look up Anne Harris for the second passage attributed to her ("17th century art biographer Gian Pietro Bellori opined that Caravaggio had feigned religious imagery...") I find that Harris doesn't say this at all - Harris doesn't use the word "feign" at all. She refers to Bellori, who used the word "fingere," but she gives no translation. She says that Bellori's reaction to the painting was that Caravaggio "had simply posed a young woman...to convert a genre picture into a religious image." This is very judicious and perfectly defensible, but it's misrepresented in the article. PiCo (talk) 06:21, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Date

The article says c.1594-1595, quoting Varriano (I think - but Varriano must be quoting someone else?). This seems too early to me - Caravaggio didn't have a reason to do religious subjects before he joined Del Monte's household, and it has the general look of the Del Monte period. Here are some dates and sources:

• Gregori, 1594-5
• Cinotti, 1596-7
• Calvesi, 1596-7
• Marini, c.1595

Also an interesting online date: Patrick Hunt, 1596-7. (Hunt is from Stanford).

On this basis I think it's better to give the date as 1596-7, as it has more supporters. 06:57, 4 August 2010 (UTC)