Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Gerrit van Honthorst
Dutch; 17th-century
St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts (Exhibition: In Caravaggio's Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi)
71%
Monk Reading. c1618. Oil on canvas
This painting is caught somewhere between the plastic intensity of Caravaggio and the philosophic clunkiness of his greatest and most singular follower, de La Tour. Here, miserly light doesn't quite reduce structures to their basic components (as it does in de La Tour), nor are there many surfaces that wrench against each other and their darkness to signify vibrant movement (as there are in Caravaggio). Instead, there's a primitivity to the forms and their relations with each other, and a lack of dynamism to the way illumination is at work. Light kind of clobbers the objects it falls upon, instead of lightly limning them. The monk's hands and his forehead and the book he's holding are all rather blockish, but not as a result of the application of some particular theory of lumen, but rather intrinsically so. There's a staunchness, a sense of weight, that this picture gains, but it sacrifices too much in the way of subtlety and coherence of its spatial logic. There's small wedge at the right edge of the picture that is confounding, but I wonder whether the canvas has been cropped. (TFS, 2026)