M
The Man Who Became Caravaggio
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A bold and provocative biography that captures the dark, violent spirit of Caravaggio, the world's first modern painter.
In M, Peter Robb presents the wild and tempestuous life of Caravaggio, an artist who threw out Renaissance dogma to paint with dazzling originality and fierce vitality. Set against the backdrop of the sixteenth century, marked by the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation, Caravaggio's art and life were a provocation to the culture of his time.
Robb's skilled prose echoes the qualities of Caravaggio's art, arresting and suspending time to reveal what the author calls "the theater of the partly seen." Caravaggio, known variously as Marisi, Moriggia, Merigi, and sometimes simply M, leaps through these pages like quicksilver, an immensely attractive character with an astonishing connection to the glories and brutalities of life.
As art critic Robert Hughes has said, "There was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same." M is a must-read for anyone interested in the fascinating world of Italian Renaissance art, offering a fresh and provocative perspective on one of history's most brilliant and influential artists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Recognized now as a peer of 17th-century masters Rembrandt and Vermeer, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted notoriously provocative religious and classical tableaux, yet left few traces ("no letters, no table talk, no notebook or treatise") of his life beyond his art. Australian -born Robb, whose ex-pat tour-de-force Midnight in Sicily: On Art, Food, History, Travel, & La Cosa Nostra took readers through that fascinating island, has created an idiosyncratic but dazzling biography of Caravaggio by exploiting almost every extant fragment, including a handful of sightings by friends and enemies, and the scanty Italian police files. More audaciously, Robb spreads through the life many pages on every known canvas, leaving appropriately theatrical description in his wake. Robb's Caravaggio--or "M," as he insists on calling the multimonikered and aliased painter--was a violent man of "hairtrigger touchiness," who fueled the passionate intensity of his painting with his professional and emotional frustrations, managing to register raw life in a religious culture that demanded, according to Robb, vapid holiness. Bisexual, he painted and loved pubescent boys, and patronized the female prostitutes he used as models. To great effect, Robb inserts reflections by the painter's contemporaries within his own sentences, offsetting them with italics rather than quotation marks: "M's repeated and humiliating requests for small advances from Masetti confirmed the need. That wasn't his style and he reddens whenever he sees me." He studs his own descriptions with odd words, obscenities and anachronistic, out-of-place contemporary references ("... like Ronald Reagan playing the cowboy"). Yet it all works--Robb's flawed, melodramatic, swollen biography is crammed with more about the dark, driven Caravaggio than any previous life. Just as Caravaggio took art to the edge, Robb takes biography there. 16 pages of illus., 8 in color, not seen by PW.
