M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio FROM OUR EDITORS
"There was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same." So wrote art critic Robert Hughes of one Michelangelo Merisi, known to some simply as M and to us as Caravaggio. As Peter Robb reminds us in his new book, M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio, sixteenth-century Italy was not known for its tolerance of iconoclasts, and the hard-living, scandal-generating M certainly was one. But he changed the art of painting in the course of his brief, violent life, a life that is ably captured in this insightful and entertaining volume.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
M threw out accepted technique and dogma to paint from life with dazzling clarity. In the process he laid bare his own sexual longings and the brutal realities of life with shocking frankness. M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio is strikingly different from the usual artist's life: The Times Literary Supplement writes, 'Its hero is wholly, richly alive.' With 'tremendous vigor, dash and swagger' Peter Robb evokes the seething and dangerous world of Italy at the end of the sixteenth century. Caravaggio is seen as a provocateur to a culture riven by the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation, Reformation, a background of ideological cold war against which, despite all odds and at great cost to their creators, brilliant feats of art and science were achieved.
M was imprisoned for criminal libel and saw his work rejected by Roman churches. A savage street fight nearly killed him and left his enemy bleeding to death. Later, with a price on his head, Caravaggio fled south to Naples and beyond, where he experienced four years of creative triumph and personal catastrophe. After being jailed in Malta for an unnamed crime, and pursued by killers through Sicily and Naples, he disappeared in the summer of 1610. Refuting standard accounts, Robb presents Caravaggio's death in a gripping scenario of sexual vendetta, betrayal, ambush and state collusion -- a startling conclusion to a groundbreaking book.
FROM THE CRITICS
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. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Of books about the art and life of the great Caravaggio, there are apparently no end. Unfortunately this comprehensive consideration of the master's life and oeuvre neither particularly expands our understanding nor further illuminates our appreciation. Attentive as he is to the immediate world around the artist, Robb's hostility to Catholicism and his insensibility to the religious content and emotion of Caravaggio's mature paintings vitiates not only the sometimes perceptive value of his analyses but also the quality of his contextual reconstruction. His evocation of qualities in the paintings are not always apparent and are at times dubiously inferred from problematic biographical data. Similarly troubling are his sexualization of the artist's content and the sometimes feverish conspiratorial nets that are educed from a limited body of documentation. "Caravaggesque" provocations, vulgarity, neologisms, colloquial jargon, Australian slang, and smart-alecky allusions mar the verve of Robb's prose. Collections desiring a contextual approach will be better served by Helen Langdon's Caravaggio: A Life (LJ 6/1/99), while those concerned with accessible formal elucidation and comprehensive illustration will wish to acquire Catherine Puglisi's Caravaggio, LJ 4/1/99. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/99.]--Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Spurling - The New York Times Book Review
Robb's prime aim in his remarkable M-- part biography, part costume
drama, part art-history manual -- is to recreate the world of an artist
whose few recorded sayings insist that he was not prepared to paint
anything but what he saw...[It is] a book that recreates the mirror Caravaggio held up to nature with singular delicacy as well as passion and panache.
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