Abstract
This chapter is written as if standing in front of Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid (1608), in the Lampedusa exhibition “Towards the Museum of Trust and Dialogue for the Mediterranean.” It describes the installation constructed around the painting in the island museum and reflects critically on the juxtaposition introduced in media discourse between Caravaggio’s painting and the photograph of Alan Kurdi as well as on the iconography of childhood in humanitarian communications. The chapter examines the potentialities and limits of efforts by scholars, exhibitions, and communications to engage the history of art with current events in the news and on the world geographic and political scene.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Giovanni Fragapane, Lampedusa. Dalla preistoria al 1878 (Palermo: Sellerio, 1993).
- 2.
Olga Mugnaini, “L’Amorino di Firenze a Lampedusa. ‘Caravaggio messaggero di pace’,” La Nazione, June 1, 2016, http://www.lanazione.it/firenze/cultura/amorino-lampedusa-1.2216221.
- 3.
See the data available on the UNHCR portal, http://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean and on that of the International organization of migration: https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean.
- 4.
For more details, please refer to the exhibition catalog, Eike Dieter Schmidt and Moncef Ben Moussa, eds., Verso il Museo della Fiducia e del Dialogo per il Mediterraneo. Catalogo della Mostra. Lampedusa, 3 giugno—3 ottobre (Bologna: Pendragon, 2016).
- 5.
For a study on the trans-historical and transcultural aspects of ex votos as well as for an extensive bibliographic overview on the topic, see Ittai Weinryb, ed., Ex Voto: Votive Giving Across Cultures (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2016).
- 6.
See Eike Dieter Schmidt, “L’Amore che dorme,” in Verso il Museo della Fiducia e del Dialogo per il Mediterraneo, 64.
- 7.
For a critical reflection on these operations, see the portal of Forensic Oceanography https://deathbyrescue.org.
- 8.
Alessandro Triulzi, “Working with Migrants’ Memories in Italy: The Lampedusa Dump,” Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 7, no. 2 (October 2016): 161.
- 9.
On the possibilities and limits of processing traumatic events through museum exhibitions and interventions on public space, see Patrizia Violi, Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Space, History (Oxford: Peter Lang 2017).
- 10.
Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, 279.
- 11.
See Rosita De Luigi, “The Traces of Journeys and Migrants’ Perspectives: The Knots of Memory and the Unravelled Plans,” in Border Lampedusa: Subjectivity, Visibility and Memory in Stories of Sea and Land, eds. Gabriele Proglio and Laura Odasso (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 13–31.
- 12.
See the association’s web page, https://askavusa.wordpress.com.
- 13.
For a historical reconstruction of Askavusa’s activity and the positions it has taken, see Ilaria Vecchi, “The Experience of the Askavusa Association: Migrant Struggle with Cultural Activities,” Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 7, no. 2 (October 2016): 165–179, and Federica Mazzara, “Objects, Debris and Memory of the Mediterranean Passage: Porto M in Lampedusa,” in Border Lampedusa, 153–173.
- 14.
The text is available in its entirety on the collective’s web site: https://askavusa.wordpress.com/con-gli-oggetti.
- 15.
See Paolo Cuttitta, Lo spettacolo della frontiera. Lampedusa tra produzione e messa in scena della frontiera (Milan: Mimesis, 2012).
- 16.
- 17.
Bal, Double Exposures, 3–4.
- 18.
Emmanuel Plantade and Nadima Palntade, “Lybica Psyche: Apuleius’ Narrative and Berber Folktales,” in Apuleius and Africa, eds. Benjamin Todd Lee, Ellen Finkelpearl, and Luca Graverini (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 174–202.
- 19.
Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 95–128.
- 20.
Ibid., 121.
- 21.
See Janet Huskinson, Roman Children’s Sarcophagi: Their Decoration and Its Social Significance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41.
- 22.
Carlos Hugo Espinel, “Caravaggio’s ‘Il Amore Dormiente’: a sleeping cupid with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis,” The Lancet 344 (1994): 1751.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Schmidt, L’Amore che dorme, 63–64.
- 25.
Ibid., 65.
- 26.
Magnus Wennman, Where the Children Sleep (Heidelberg and Berlin: Kehrer, 2017).
- 27.
Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 153.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Ibid., 160.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
For a theoretical reflection on the iconographic theme of sleep in a variety of artists, from Picasso’s work to Baroque painting, where a “helpless sleeper is exposed to the omnipotence of an intruder; and the imbalance of power provides the whole plot,” see Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 101.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zucconi, F. (2018). Caravaggio on Lampedusa. In: Displacing Caravaggio. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93378-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93378-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93377-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93378-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)