Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles

A great little book that covers what is known about a true bad boy of art, a tormented genius that challenged the accepted art of his time and changed the direction of painting, not something lightly done in those times. For this he was applauded, sought out, paid very well; he respond with bad judgment and madness. This book hits all the highlights and story points a non-art professional would want with being bogged down in too much 'art philosophy' that books on artists sometime drop into making it hard for an amateur to wade through. This is an excellent intro to Caravaggio. You should read this and then follow it up with The Lost Painting: A Quest For A Caravaggio Masterpiece, the amazing and true story of how one of Caravaggio's lost paintings was found in the 1990s.

I have had a long interest in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and over the years have had the pleasure of seeing the retrospective held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the late 1980's and seeing his paintings in Rome and Naples. I heard of Francine Prose's book in a review and was drawn to read it. I do not have any other books solely devoted to Caravaggio but have several on his time period. First, the book is a small format which may be surprising but for me was not a huge drawback. The only problem with the size of the book is that the illustrations are smaller than some people may like. I found Ms. Prose's text to be the focus of this book, not the illustrations. I liked her writing and overall presentation. I did not find her adjectives redundant and the complaining quotations by other reviews I think are out of context. For me, Ms. Prose presents the life and times of Caravaggio with as full a presentation that I wanted, delving into what it was like to be a painter in his times and giving us as much detail as there is about her subject. I thought she created excellent work pictures of Caravaggio's paintings. The only problem is that many are not reproduced in her book so I had to go to other sources. However, I think that if one is interested in Caravaggio you will want to read Ms. Prose's book and find the missing paintings elsewhere. This book may not be an exhaustive study of Caravaggio but it is an excellent introduction to the painter with many thought provoking observations.

This is one of several volumes in the HarperCollins Eminent Lives series. Each offers a concise rather than comprehensive, much less definitive biography. However, just as Al Hirschfeld's illustrations of various celebrities capture their defining physical characteristics, the authors of books in this series focus on the defining influences and developments during the lives and careers of their respective subjects. In this instance, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Because I think so highly of this volume, I think it would be most helpful to others who have not as yet read it to provide a few brief excerpts. Hopefully this will encourage them to obtain a copy. According to Francine Prose, "Caravaggio speaks to us directly, without any need of translation from a distant century or a foreign culture. His voice is eloquent and strong, resonant with emotion. We feel we understand him, though we can never paraphrase what we intuit he is saying....Yet only lately, since we have learned to accept the idea of art without conventional beauty, art that is rough and strange and disturbing, can we tolerate art that is this [in italics] honest [end italics] about the nature of suffering and divinity, about the way in which a painting is created, about human nature, and the nature of art itself." How modern he now seems centuries later. Consider these remarks: "The life of Caravaggio is the closest thing we have to the myth of the sinner-saint, the street tough, the martyr, the killer, the genius -- the myth that, in these jaded and secular times, we are almost ashamed to admit that we still long for, and need." As I read that passage and as Prose then examined more closely Caravaggio's personal life, I saw similarities between him and the character Tony Montana as portrayed by Al Pacino in Brian De Palma's film Scarface (1983). For example: "Belligerent, contemptuous, competitive, Michelangelo Merisi would soon be drawn into the whirlwind of insults, attacks, retaliations, and vendettas that passed for nightlife in the Campo Marzio, the raffish neighborhood in which many artists, including Caravaggio, lived." Indeed, he was only thirty-nine when he died in the summer of 1610 and had been a fugitive in exile for the last four years of his life. In an article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal (October 15 and 16, 2005), Prose discusses "The Martyrdom of St. Peter" (1600), noting that "Caravaggio not only rejected the idealizations of his contemporaries but set his religious scenarios in dark rooms and alleys much like the ones in which ordinary Romans lived, and cast these sacred dramas with local prostitutes and laborers costumed as holy virgins and martyrs....The key to the painting's power lies in the horrifying naturalism of the way in which Peter holds his body, resting awkwardly on one elbow, and his head, lifted slightly off the cross." I include this quotation to indicate that Prose is quite capable of discussing in detail each o