Caravaggio
Painter of Miracles
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Matching gorgeous prose to gorgeous artworks, Prose responds to each image as a moment of theatrical revelation, sensual or spiritual, and frequently both.” — Boston Sunday Globe
In Caravaggio, New York Times bestselling author Francine Prose offers an enthralling account of the life and work of one of the greatest painters of all time.
Caravaggio defied the aesthetic conventions of his time; his use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed—street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged—was a profound and revolutionary innovation that left its mark on generations of artists. His insistence on painting from nature, on rendering the emotional truth of experience, whether religious or secular, made him an artist who speaks across the centuries to modern day.
Called “racy, intensely imagined, and highly readable” by the New York Times Book Review, Caravaggio includes eight pages of color illustrations, and is sure to appeal to art enthusiasts interested in one of history’s true innovators. Caravaggio is part of the “Eminent Lives” series from HarperCollins, a selection of biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.
While his art is immortal, his life was a whirlwind of genius, violence, and exile.
A Revolutionary Realism: See how Caravaggio defied convention by using prostitutes, street boys, and the poor as his models for saints and martyrs, forever changing the face of religious art.The Sinner-Saint: Explore the paradox of a man whose divine masterpieces were created amidst a life of brawls, duels, and exile.Art and Crime: Delve into the dramatic story of a celebrated artist who was also a fugitive, wanted for murder and constantly on the run from the law.An Enduring Legacy: Discover why this master painter, ignored for centuries, now speaks with such power to the modern world in this compelling work of art history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first thing to know about this life of the Italian baroque painter Caravaggio is that it is not a proper biography but rather an informal appreciation by novelist and occasional art critic Prose (Blue Angel). As with the other volumes in the Eminent Lives series, groundbreaking research is not expected. Fair enough. Yet despite her obvious love for the artist, Prose has little of substance to say about him. Once she dispatches with the basic points of the artist's life that Caravaggio defied the fashion for mannered, pious painting with a gritty but theatrical realism that mirrored the artist's turbulent life she resorts to the puffed-up style of a student trying to reach a term paper's required length. She stuffs her pages with redundant adjectives ("wan, exhausted, used up," "constant and unchanged") and finds no point too trite to repeat three times: "You can watch an artist realizing that what he is doing is succeeding, that the paint is doing precisely what he wants it to do, that his intention and purpose are finding their way onto the canvas." Even those with only a casual interest in the artist would be better served by Helen Langdon's 1998 biography Caravaggio: A Life, which is as accessible as it is scholarly and is now out in paperback.
