Per ricordare Caravaggio: Il dono di saper vivere vs. Fluturele negru
Remebering Caravaggio: Il dono di saper vivere vs. Fluturele negru

Summary/Abstract: The present work aims to make a comparative analysis between two contemporary novels that propose the figure of the genius of Baroque painting that was Michelangelo Merisi called Caravaggio as we celebrate in 2021 450 years since his birth. The novels are: Il dono di saper vivere by Tommaso Pincio published in 2018 by Einaudi and the novel Fluturele negru by the Romanian prose writer, Radu Paraschivescu, published by Humanitas in 2010 and republished in 2019. These are two very different novels, but united by an extremely interesting narrative structure and by the fact that both stories, even if they don’t pretend to be novels about Caravaggio or biographical books, they both take the figure of the great painter and his complicated times and bring it back to the present in a new light. In different languages and different but somewhat similar styles, the two novels are witnesses of a past collective memory reconstructed from paintings, legends, myths, chronicles on the life of the seventeenth century that rewrite with a new language, a rhythm and a present liveliness that make us remember the charm of painting and of life of the Baroque century.

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