Caravaggio's Coroner: Forensic Medicine in Giulio Mancini's Art Criticism

The physician Giulio Mancini, Caravaggio's highly influential early biographer and contemporary, famously criticised the painter for using a prostitute as the model for his Death of the Virgin. The persistence of the anecdote in subsequent historical accounts tends to obscure the specific cultural and historical underpinnings of Mancini's reception of the work. This paper explores the pressures exerted by Mancini's social theory, anatomical knowledge, unpublished medical treatises, and clinical practice on his own art criticism.