Caravaggio. A sacred and profane life

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived the darkest and most dangerous life of all the great masters of painting. The milieux of Milan, Rome and Naples in which Caravaggio moved, and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes magnificently in this book, are those of cardinals and prostitutes, of prayer and violence. In the streets surrounding churches and palaces, fights and duels were commonplace. 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 have puzzled researchers for years. She reveals the identities of the ordinary people - often prostitutes and beggars - whom the painter used as models for his depictions of classical religious scenes; she describes what actually happened during that fateful duel; and she offers the most convincing account published to date of the extraordinary circumstances of his death. And at the heart of this account is Graham-Dixon's revealing interpretation of Caravaggio's paintings to show how he created their drama, immediacy and humanity, and how he broke dramatically with the conventions of the day.

• Paperback
• Pages: 544
• Language: Spanish
• Author: Andrew Graham-Dixon
• Year: 2022
• MODEL: 9788430626014

Publisher: Taurus