Les Ténèbres, signe d'une vision du monde au temps du Caravage / The Darkness, sign of a worldview at the time of Caravaggio

Can man, by his own light, have a Destiny outside the gaze of Providence? At the crossroads of the 16th and 17th centuries, in the temporal window that saw the birth of the Caravaggesque revolution, this question revived an ancient concern of Western Christianity. If the Renaissance gave rise to an art of light and vision, the metaphor of Darkness on the other hand was summoned at the end of the sixteenth century to make a sign towards what is hidden in man and beyond the world. Whether it was expressed through chiaroscuro painting, a liturgy of "occultation" or a spirituality of uncertainty: the poetics of darkness was a key to access the secrets of the soul and the intuition of God rather than the Harmony of a clear and visible world. This doctoral work describes the tormented encounter between a sensibility inherited from a ten centuries old Augustinianism and the new language of the Renaissance, a language through which this millenary sensibility reformulated its own tears. The darkness formed in this sense at the same time the standard of a resistance to the visionary ideals of the "Renaissance man" as the unsatisfied reformulation of a tragic Christianity. The latter never fully succumbed to the luminous enthusiasm of a modernity at the dawn of its triumph and painfully resigned itself to the chiaroscuro of the intuition of God. In the post-Tridentine era, the metaphorical field of darkness and the absence of God served as a prism for this ancient sensibility and allowed it to unfold with a new expressive audacity in fields as varied as music, theology and painting. At the time of Caravaggio, the aesthetics of mystery re-emerged in an era in search of the obvious.