The suspended spectacle of history: the tableau vivant in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio.

In the mid 1980s Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's work experienced a renaissance, as a major exhibition in New York in 1985 and a series of critical studies returned the artist to the centre of European and American art historical discourse. A new generation of artists and critics was forced to reconsider the painter's relevance, after an era dominated by minimalism and abstract expressionism, to the broader social project of discovering alternative histories of the early modern world. Debates amongst artists and critics surrounding the Metropolitan exhibition asked whether Caravaggio is a tutor figure for the successors of abstract expressionism, or a poor draughts man with a worse disposition, whose revival merely confirms that "375 years have not dimmed [his work's] power to be showy, pushy, and hollow," or one of the last exponents of a tradition of artistic craftsmanship, which, far from contemporary, "sadly is now past beyond recall." Despite the vast separation in time between Caravaggio's late 16th-century and early 17th-century Italy and the moment of his revival, his artwork and biography were conscripted into a variety of contemporary struggles.