Volume 52, Number 8 · May 12, 2005
The Battle of Light with Darkness
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Caravaggio: The Final Years
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Nicola Spinosa
An exhibition at the National Gallery, London, February 23–May 22, 2005.
Electa Napoli, 191 pp., £25.00 (paper)
Caravaggio: L'ultimo tempo 1606–1610
An exhibition at the Museodi Capodimonte, Naples October 23, 2004–January 23, 2005
The murder that sent Michelangelo Merisi of Caravaggio on the run in 1606 proved, if anything, that life was not so cheap after all in Baroque Rome—at least for an artist of talent. Small-time local street bosses like his victim, Ranuccio Tomassoni, were not much missed, but no one could paint like the man everyone simply called 'Caravaggio,' and that fact saved his life as he made his way from Rome to Malta and then to Sicily. It was not so much his skill at what he called 'imitating nature' that saved him, although his talent for painting fruit had once been enough to earn him a modest living. It was not even his bold experimentation with light and shadow, although this was the aspect of his painting that his imitators grasped first. What kept Ca-ravaggio alive over the next few years was an ability he shared with his fellow countryman Leonardo: the ability to capture life itself in a painted image.
Review, 4835 words
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