The painters, sculptors, and architects of the Baroque period often wished to engage the viewer in innovative ways. Using one work of art by Caravaggio and one work of art by Bernini, explain the role of the viewer in the Italian Baroque. Be specific in your analysis of the way each artist wished the viewer to respond or interact with his art.
Respond to at least one of your classmates who wrote about works by Bernini and Caravaggio other than those you selected.

While Michelangelo’s David is today set on a platform in an interior space, where viewers are able to walk around the work and see it from all angles (from ground level), the statue was originally intended to be standing “…on a pedestal highup by Florence Cathedral’s dome… .” (http://news.discovery.com/history/michelangelos-david-as-it-was-meant-to-be-seen.html) Thus, for the most part, the statue was intended to be viewed frontally (ignoring the possibility of walking from side to side at street level).
Bernini’s answer to Michelangelo’s David demands that the viewer to walk around the sculpture –not merely to appreciate it, but also to experience the action that is taking place (i.e., David’s launching of a stone at Goliath). Below appears the Bernini David from multiple angles:

Walking around and the statue multiple times would permit the viewer to absorb not merely the image of battle –but also to feel the moment of battle, to feel in his or her own body the strain of throwing the deadly projectile, and to experience emotionally the total mental focus of battle, and to experience fear: fear of the enemy, fear of death. Bernini wants the viewer to feel like he or she was there, when David slew Goliath. This visceral experience reinforces the viewers’ knowledge of –and belief in—the underlying Biblical story.
Viewers were not asked by Caravaggio to circumambulate his painting Entombment:

Rather, the original viewers of Entombment (workshippers at the Chapel of Pietro Vittrice at Santa Maria in Rome) were invited to “participate in the scene” (Kleiner, p.539). Art scholars point to the elements of the painting that achieve this effect: the ultrarealism of the scene, the contemporary faces, hairstyles, costumes of the figures –and the three-dimensional effect of the slab upon which Jesus is being laid, specifically, the successful illusion that the slab is extending out of the plane of the painting, into the space occupied by the viewers. One more element may have contributed to the lifelike effect: if the original setting of the painting, that is, the chapel, was dark like the background of the painting, then the dramatically lit figures, especially that of Jesus, would all the more have seemed really there, amongst the worshippers.