Book Description
Of all the great Italian painters, the
seventeenth-century master Caravaggio speaks most clearly and
powerfully to our time. His early paintings of cardsharps,
musicians, and street vendors convey his fascination with the
Roman demimonde; his stark and brilliant religious paintings
convey the world of the poor and the outcast and the
religious experience of the individual with a directness our
age can recognize.
Caravaggio lived hard and died young, having fled Rome for
Sicily, apparently after murdering another man in a dispute;
his life is one of the most colorful of any artist's. In this
vivid and beautifully written biography, Helen Langdon tells
the story of the great painter's life and times in a way that
leaves the reader with a renewed appreciation of his art.
Caravaggio painted a fairly small number of works, many of
them for settings in Rome, Naples, and Sicily, where they
remain today; and he painted directly from human models. So
the story of his life and times reveals Italian society of
the period-involving powerful patrons, sybaritic cardinals,
and saints, as well as street boys, prostitutes, and
rivalrous painters.
Langdon has spent a lifetime studying Caravaggio; this
biography, the first in English in two generations, shows us
Caravaggio's genius with the striking clarity of his own
paintings.
