Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived the darkest and most dangerous life among the great masters of painting. The environments of Milan, Rome and Naples in which Caravaggio moved, and which Andrew Graham-Dixon magnificently describes in this book, are those of cardinals and prostitutes, those of prayer and violence. In the streets that surrounded churches and palaces, fights and duels were common currency. In one of these disputes, the impetuous Caravaggio killed another man and had to flee to Naples and then to Malta, where he escaped from prison after being involved in another violent episode. He himself was the victim of an assassination attempt in Naples some time later. He died while returning to Rome seeking papal pardon for his crimes. He was 38 years old. Andrew Graham-Dixon spent a decade piecing together the surviving evidence of Caravaggio's life to answer in this book many of the questions that had baffled researchers for years. It reveals the identities of ordinary people - often prostitutes and beggars - that the painter used as models for his depictions of classical religious scenes; he describes what really happened during that fateful duel; and offers the most convincing published account to date of the extraordinary circumstances of his death. And at the center of this story is Graham-Dixon's revealing interpretation of Caravaggio's paintings to show how Caravaggio created his drama, immediacy and humanity, and how he dramatically broke with the conventions of the time.