L’Ecole du regard Caravaggio and the Caravaggio painters in the Roberto Longhi collection

L’École du regard Caravaggio and the Caravaggio painters in the Roberto Longhi collection

A prominent art historian Roberto Longhi (1890-1970) devoted most of his studies to Caravaggio and the artists who assimilated his lesson. He was one of the first to define the direct and naturalistic style of the Lombard master, to evoke his poetic universe and the fundamental role that light plays in his paintings, to finally grasp the revolutionary scope of an art that was adopted and disclosed by many Italian and foreign painters. At the same time as his research, Roberto Longhi gathered from the 1920s a collection dedicated naturally and essentially to Caravaggio painters, a real school of the gaze, declining in about fifty paintings the formulas initiated by Caravaggio. In 2021, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen pays tribute to this major figure in the history of art and unveils its unique collection of Caravaggio masterpieces.