Description:
Historian Desmond Seward has written an indispensable book on Caravaggio--equally balanced and historically double-checked. But even with all its references, dates, names, quotes, and careful scholarship, this biography reads like a novel that is impossible to put down. Caravaggio, of course, with his "wild, wild spirit" and "very strange temper," according to contemporary accounts, is a natural subject for a galloping narrative. Caravaggio's religious and social status as a Knight of Malta, his protection by a famous cardinal, his street fighting, his fine silk clothes worn until they rotted away, his prostitute models and lowlife friends, his repeated failure to win a commission for St. Peter's, and his bitterness at the rise of mediocre rivals are just some of the ingredients of this good read. What Seward does, to riveting perfection, is convey 16th-century life to the reader. He takes Caravaggio's renowned naturalism and shows us where it came from. He transports readers to Rome in the 1590s, where they explore the old stones of the ancient empire, step over the human excrement in the streets, and witness the pageantry of luxurious horse-drawn carriages promenading through the mud. Readers lurk with Seward in the darkness, light lamps and candles, and feel the damp as the Tiber rises, leaving behind more than a thousand corpses when it finally recedes after a terrible flood. They stand in the crowd and watch as the heads and bodies of decapitated criminals are quartered and hoisted on spears and ramparts for display. Gradually readers get the feeling that Caravaggio's predilection for severed heads was less the product of a tormented imagination than it was simply all in a day's observation for an unwavering realist. --Peggy Moorman
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