Caravaggio's Sick Bacchus

In her Untitled #224, Cindy Sherman takes Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus and not only replicates and modernizes the meaning behind Caravaggio’s work, but expands the message behind her photograph so that it holds even more significance than the original painting she copied. At first sight, the most obvious difference between Sherman and Caravaggio’s works is the medium. Caravaggio’s work is done in oil paint while Sherman’s is a photograph. This is a blatant example of Sherman modernizing the image for the current time period. Caravaggio’s work is done in the medium of the time period and so is Sherman’s. Their styles are also reflective of their time periods. The baroque style of Caravaggio’s work stands out against Sherman’s post-modern work, even though the contents and set up of the images are basically the same. Cindy Sherman’s photograph portrays her pretending to be the sick

Sherman’s ability to find and create humor out of serious old master’s works is commendable. She uses imagination and ideas to interpret real life and the world around us in a more understandable way. With Untitled #224, Sherman created a fake piece with obvious inauthenticity to it in order to make an example out of Caravaggio’s work. One main way that illustrates how she makes an example out of Caravaggio’s work is that she takes the implied sexual and homoerotic undertones that Caravaggio’s piece holds due to his expression and pose in the painting and completely makes a political statement out of it. During the time when Cindy Sherman was creating this photograph in 1990 there was a prominent anti-gay culture lead by U.S. Senator at the time Jesse Helms. Sherman took Caravaggio’s painting and reenacted it specifically as a response to this movement. Although Sherman was a woman, she dressed herself as a male to ensure the homosexual theme was still