In the preface to this enthralling life of Caravaggio (1571-1610), the greatest Italian painter of his time, Andrew Graham-Dixon invokes as one of his touchstones Charles Nicholl’s “The Reckoning,” a prizewinning biography of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). It’s easy to see why. Both the Italian painter and the English playwright were shadowy, prickly characters, with a liking for lowlife and street violence; both appear to have been sexually adventurous (prostitutes, boys); and both were often in trouble with the law. Marlowe was finally murdered in a quarrel over a tavern bill (i.e., the reckoning), while Caravaggio killed a man in a sword fight, eventually dying himself at the age of 38, at least in part from the aftereffects of a vendetta-like ambush.
Not much is known about Caravaggio’s personal life, and so Graham-Dixon — taking his cue from Nicholl, who faced the same problem with the secretive Marlowe — makes up for the biographical scarcity through an intense use of archival information about the people the painter knew, a close attention to contemporary events and social currents, and, not least, probing analyses of the artist’s major works. Insights are also drawn from Caravaggio’s near contemporaries, among them the essayist Montaigne and the painters Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia (Graham- Dixon transcribes her account of being raped).
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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As a result, “Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane” reads like a historical-swashbuckler-cum-detective-story while also providing an up-to-date introduction to some of the most admired paintings in Western art. Early on, Graham-Dixon acknowledges the excellence of Helen Langdon’s 1998 life of the artist (and reveals that Langdon put some of her own research at his service) but points out that new archival discoveries have affected her account of the painter’s later years. Throughout, he takes pains to counter any reductionist views of Caravaggio’s art as fundamentally homosexual in character. Most important of all, though, Graham-Dixon writes with verve and clarity about the work as well as the man and his times. When describing Christ and an angel descending from heaven in a rather weak painting, for example, he notes that they “lean awkwardly across a snapped branch of a laurel, like a pair of parachutists stuck in a tree.”
The son of a stonemason, Michelangelo Merisi grew up near Milan in the town of Caravaggio; hence his later name. It was an era of the deepest religious fervor. Carlo Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, was promoting a return to an extreme Christian piety. Between 1576 and 1578, the bubonic plague wiped out a fifth of the population of the diocese of Milan. Popular religious tableaux of the time emphasized a stark, even gruesome realism in contrast to the ethereal and metaphysical art favored by Florentine aristocrats. Caravaggio — “the first self-conscious primitivist in the entire history of post-classical Western art” — pushed an intense naturalist aesthetic to its limits.
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