Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Valentin de Boulogne
French, Italian; 17th-century
St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts (Exhibition: In Caravaggio's Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi)
88%
Denial of St. Peter. c1615-17. Oil on canvas
First off, it's pretty fucking crazy that Boulogne would have not only couched this Denial in a cardshaps image, but actually minimized the biblical portion of the scene and crammed it into just the upper left quadrant of the picture. I'm sure there's iconographical significance to this that's beyond my knowledge, but I'm also sure that the tension between these two modes, religious and secular, was at a very basic level intentional and intended to shock, aesthetically — it still manages to do so. Not only that, but the strange marginality of the picture's ostensive focus (Peter) casts itself over the whole rest of the scene and animates the configuration of bodies and objects throughout it. Peter's hand, hovering in space just inside of the picture's left limit, is about the only thing here that isn't implicated in some sort of grabbing, crossing, twisting, flipping, jostling, or pointing motion (even the relief figures on the sarcophagus are in a complex state of physical interaction): that hand is a node of stillness that sets off the barrage of chiasms leading to it from the opposite edge of the painting, through all those knotted limbs and glances. It might be said that Boulogne spells things out more than Caravaggio ever needed to — his forms actually collide instead of implying collision — but while this is a limitation on his art it's also a highly developed visual language. (TFS, 2026)