Excerpt from Michael Fried’s new book After Caravaggio published by (Yale University Press).

The excerpt focuses on the painter Valentin de Boulogne. Fried writes: “I want to use Valentin’s canvas [Valentin de Boulogne, Fortune Teller, c. 1620s (Musée du Louvre, Paris)] as point of reference for a series of remarks about what I take to be a distinctive Caravaggesque pictorial “system” or, perhaps more accurately, pictorial poetics, one which I want to suggest possesses an internal consistency and rationale such as have never, to my mind, been fully acknowledged. “