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Historian Desmond Seward has written an indispensable book on Caravaggio--equally balanced and historically double-checked. But even with all its references, dates, names, quotes, and careful scholarship, this biography reads like a novel that is impossible to put down. Caravaggio, of course, with his "wild, wild spirit" and "very strange temper," according to contemporary accounts, is a natural subject for a galloping narrative. Caravaggio's religious and social status as a Knight of Malta, his protection by a famous cardinal, his street fighting, his fine silk clothes worn until they rotted away, his prostitute models and lowlife friends, his repeated failure to win a commission for St. Peter's, and his bitterness at the rise of mediocre rivals are just some of the ingredients of this good read.
What Seward does, to riveting perfection, is convey 16th-century life to the reader. He takes Caravaggio's renowned naturalism and shows us where it came from. He transports readers to Rome in the 1590s, where they explore the old stones of the ancient empire, step over the human excrement in the streets, and witness the pageantry of luxurious horse-drawn carriages promenading through the mud. Readers lurk with Seward in the darkness, light lamps and candles, and feel the damp as the Tiber rises, leaving behind more than a thousand corpses when it finally recedes after a terrible flood. They stand in the crowd and watch as the heads and bodies of decapitated criminals are quartered and hoisted on spears and ramparts for display. Gradually readers get the feeling that Caravaggio's predilection for severed heads was less the product of a tormented imagination than it was simply all in a day's observation for an unwavering realist. --Peggy Moorman
From Publishers Weekly
Seward's passionately partisan life of the painter Michel Angelo da Caravaggio presents the master of chiaroscuro as a figure maligned by art historians and laymen (such as the late Derek Jarman), who have, Seward claims, mistakenly held him up as a darkly glamorous, homosexual and antisocial icon. Seward downplays Caravaggio's duels and deals with criminals, considering them reactions to the violence of 17th-century Rome. Caravaggio served as artist-in-residence to Cardinal Francesco del Monte, who was rumored in his lifetime to be homosexual, and who sponsored several of Caravaggio's more romantic paintings of young men; his servitu particulare is adequately defended here as a business relationship between a heterosexual painter and his celibate patron. In focusing on Caravaggio's artistic triumphs rather than his personal idiosyncrasies, Seward portrays the painter as a man of strong faith; according to the author, his art exemplifies the Counter-Reformation's exaltation of both the theatrical and the humble, while his realistic depictions of people and his dramatic, unnatural lighting anticipate later painters' realism. Caravaggio joined the Catholic order of the Knights of Malta (which Seward depicted in The Monks of War) only to be imprisoned in a Maltese dungeon after a duel with a higher-ranking Knight. From there, his life slid further into misery. It's a tragic tale, from what we can know of it; Seward's trail of evidence runs cold at times, reducing him to conjecture such as "All we can be sure of is that [Caravaggio's motif of decapitation] reflected some hidden anguish." Seward apologizes, excuses, exonerates Caravaggio too often (contrast Johanna Falk's treatment of the pedophile Egon Schiele in Arrogance); were it not for that narrative tendency, this look at late Renaissance Umbria and one of its most powerful artists, would be a truly engaging contribution to the field. 16 photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
