Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Language: English
Pages: 544
ISBN: 039334343X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“This book resees its subject with rare clarity and power as a painter for the 21st century.”―Hilary Spurling, New York Times Book Review
In a bravura performance, Andrew Graham-Dixon explores Caravaggio’s staggering artistic achievements, delving into the original Italian sources to create a masterful profile of the mercurial painter. This New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of the Year features more than eighty full-color reproductions of the artist’s best paintings. 40 pages of color illustrations; 4 maps
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Florentine humanist, this picture was inspired by a celebrated sculpture of the same subject by Michelangelo. 70. The Seven Acts of Mercy. ‘This one dark street, scene of desperation and pain and death, is the painter’s microcosm for the brutality of existence itself.’ 71. Roman Charity (detail) by Pierino del Vaga. 72. The Flagellation. Torture as a misbegotten act of intimacy. 73. The Crucifixion of St Andrew. The painting does not show Andrew being bound to the cross, as some have
important commissions to profess, as it were, in subtle code, his heretical non-belief in God. The prime example given to me by Pacelli of a supposedly atheist painting infiltrated by Caravaggio into a Catholic church was The Seven Acts of Mercy. I am grateful to him for sharing his theories with me, but I have to say that I find them implausible. 153. I am indebted to the Maltese naval historian Joseph Scibberas for explaining how transport by felucca really worked in early seventeenth-century
took place in broad daylight. Death by execution was a grim public spectacle, a theatre of retribution designed to instil fear and the spirit of penitence into all who witnessed it. In 1581 Montaigne had observed the last moments of ‘a famous robber and bandit captain’ by the name of Catena: they carry in front of the criminal a big crucifix covered with a black curtain, and on foot go a large number of men dressed and masked in linen, who, they say, are gentlemen and other prominent people of
to become a distinguished mathematician and the author of a treatise on perspective – were educated at the courts of the della Rovere family in Pesaro and Urbino. They also studied at Padua, long established as a centre of humanist learning, which was where Prince Francesco Maria della Rovere himself received his education.3 Del Monte had been named in honour of Prince Francesco Maria. But he later switched allegiances and eventually travelled to Rome, in 1572, in the service of a Sforza
to the forms. He went so far in this style that he never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark. The painters then in Rome were greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the
