LGBT Studies presents Robert Mills, Reader in Medieval Art at University College London and director of UCL’s LGBTQ research network qUCL.

Caravaggio is a fictionalized biopic, made in 1986 by the British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, about the Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio. Jarman’s fifth feature, the film is notorious for its manipulations of time and history. Whether deployed as a visual device, or as an interpretive framework that serves to connect aspects of Caravaggio’s paintings and biography, anachronism is deliberately cultivated by Jarman as a representational strategy. Also, taking inspiration from Caravaggio’s own approach to the classical and biblical subject matter of his paintings, Jarman develops an approach to temporality in his films that is, he posits, rooted in the aesthetic codes of the Middle Ages.