THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Jason Farago
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| Valentin de Boulogne’s “Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian” (1629-30). Credit Vatican Museums, Vatican City |
NEW YORK---A canon is not a static list of dead white men. It’s an assertion of who from the past can speak to the present, and its shape is always up for negotiation. “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio,” a big Baroque blast of a show at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first exhibition anywhere devoted to a French painter whose theatrically lit tableaus of musicians, cardsharps and saints now stand in slight obscurity. Toward the end of his short life Valentin got his most important commission, for an altar of the recently completed St. Peter’s Basilica. [
link]
Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio” (Ends January 16, 2017); 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY; (212)535-7710; metmuseum.org
