Abstract
This work investigates the presence of aesthetic dissonance in the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, examining how the artist breaks with traditional harmony by incorporating the ugly, the violent, and the disturbing as structuring agents of his painting. Starting from the origin of the term “aesthetic” to modern Adornian concepts about dissonance and the understanding of the ugly as the limit of aesthetic experience, the research analyzes how Caravaggio displaces Baroque visual conventions by revealing, with radical honesty, what culture tends to mask: suffering, raw corporeality, death, and moral contradictions. With contemporary thinkers like Umberto Eco, the ugly gains autonomy of form, revealing itself in concepts such as the grotesque and the sublime. The work delves, above all, into Theodor W. Adorno’s theory, which criticizes the commodification of art by the Culture Industry (a process called Entkunstung or de-artification). Adorno argues that true art must adopt “dissonance” — the tension between beauty and the cruelty of reality — to act as a denunciation and social critique. The study demonstrates that the so-called “Caravaggian horror” is not mere dramatic exaggeration, but an artistic strategy that tensions the viewer and calls them to a deeper sensory and ethical experience connected to the ugliness of reality.