Volume 46, Number 15 · October 7, 1999
The Real Caravaggio
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Caravaggio: A Life
by Helen Langdon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 436 pp., $30.00
M in the UK by Bloomsbury in November, and in the US by Henry Holt in February 2000.)
by Peter Robb
Potts Point, N.S.W., Australia: Duffy and Snellgrove (To be published, 568 pp., $35.00 (paper)
Caravaggio: A Passionate Life
by Desmond Seward
Morrow, 202 pp., $25.00
Caravaggio's 'Saint John' and Masterpieces from the Capitoline Museum in Rome 1999, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, July 15-September 12, 1999.
an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, April 20-June 20,, Catalog of the exhibition by Maria Elisa Tittoni, by Patrizia Masini, by Sergio Guarino
Wadsworth Atheneum, 59 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image February 1-May 24, 1999.
an exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Catalog of the exhibition edited by Mormando Franco
McMullen Museum of Art (distributed by the University of Chicago Press), 235 pp., $40.00 (paper)
More than four hundred years from the day he packed up his things and headed for Rome from the small Lombardy town in which he grew up, Michelangelo Merisi of Caravaggio (1571-1610) is still, to borrow the wording of one of his contracts, 'top painter in the City' (egregius in Urbe pictor). Recent books about the man his contemporaries called Caravaggio (to distinguish him from the other Michelangelos they knew) far outnumber those on Raphael, Titian, or Leonardo; among the old masters, only Michelangelo Buonarroti seems to share a similar degree of popularity. Caravaggio's paintings, meanwhile, are caught in a game of museological musical chairs as they pass from Rome to Hartford, Rome to Padua, Hartford to Kansas City, Dublin and Detroit to Boston, Kansas City to Milwaukee, Florence to Malta. His fortunes, however, like his notoriously prickly personality, have never stood fast. By 1660, Nicolas Poussin could claim that Caravaggio, by then dead for half a century, 'had come into the world to destroy painting.' For Stendhal he was 'a great painter, but a wicked man,' and most of the people who have loved his paintings would tend to agree. Just what made him a great painter, however, and what made him a wicked man, have been subjects for unceasing debate. Nor is it clear how much the wickedness and the painting actually bear on one another.
Review, 5073 words
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