Renaissance Things: Objects, Ethics, and Temporalities in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986) and Modern Nature (1991)

This essay revisits the question of the anachronistic props in the film Caravaggio (1986) to consider Derek Jarman’s investment in objects and the material world. Using the theories of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, it explores how the props, particularly the knife and the gold coins, become actants within the assemblage of the artist’s studio. The film’s interest in matter is even more elemental, however, in its attention both to the dust of the catacombs and the grinding of pigment for making paint: the matter out of which bodies and representations are formed. The film’s attention to matter can be linked to Jarman’s interest in the unorthodox Renaissance thinker Giordano Bruno, one of the key proponents of Lucretian materialist philosophy. The essay argues that this materialism forms the basis for an ethics of connectedness, one which we can see more fully developed in the environmental thinking of his memoir Modern Nature (1991). In Jarman’s account of making his garden at Dungeness, he uses early modern botanical treatises to rethink the plants as untimely matter; following Jacques Derrida and queer theorists of temporality, the essay argues that the plants open the garden up to be haunted by others. This willingness to be haunted, according to Elizabeth Freeman, constitutes an ethical stance; in Jarman’s case, the use of the outdated Renaissance botanical lore becomes a way of both resisting the sense of the present as inevitable, and of forging cross-temporal alliances.