Caravaggio's Americas

Abstract: This paper relocates the where and when of the baroque to the sixteenth-century Americas, arguing that the anxieties of eroded sovereignty amidst legal heterogeneity that gave rise to the baroque began not in Counter-Reformation responses to Protestantism but earlier in encounters with the legal and cultural others of the Indigenous Americas. In this account, the spirit of the Counter Reformation precedes the Reformation and is, in its expression as the baroque, inescapably entangled with Indigenous cultures and polities of the Americas. In turn, this view of the baroque from the Americas helps to recast, interpret, and re-visualize the works of the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs Caravaggio.