Caravaggio
A Life Sacred and Profane
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. The worlds of Milan, Rome and Naples through which Caravaggio moved and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and whores, prayer and violence. On the streets surrounding the churches and palaces, brawls and swordfights were regular occurrences. In the course of this desperate life Caravaggio created the most dramatic paintings of his age, using ordinary men and women - often prostitutes and the very poor - to model for his depictions of classic religious scenes. Andrew Graham-Dixon's exceptionally illuminating readings of Caravaggio'spictures, which are the heart of the book, show very clearly how he created their drama, immediacy and humanity, and how completely he departed from the conventions of his time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The life of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (1571 1610), writes British art critic Graham-Dixon in this masterful biography, was like his art: "a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights." Graham-Dixon's briskly and elegantly composed study thoroughly contextualizing the artist's early life in the town of Caravaggio and in Milan, a city dominated by Archbishop Carlo Borromeo, whose fearsome doctrine of mass repentance and the selective role of visual spectacle influenced Caravaggio. By the time the artist left Milan for Rome, he had decided to become an artist. The author then chronicles Caravaggio's artistic success in Rome, where, at the age of 24, he found patronage by Cardinal del Monte. He created many masterpieces there, but the rejection of The Death of the Virgin by its ecclesiastical commissioners, the author argues, may have prompted Caravaggio to commit murder. He fled to Naples, then to Malta; he died at age 38, after a troubled and "disordered" life. That Graham-Dixon (Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel) took a decade to research and write this insightful and fascinating book shows in the depth of its research, the skillfulness of its historical and artistic analysis, and the deft fluidity with which it is expressed. This is a rare tour-de-force. 40 pages of color illus.; 4 maps.
