Word: caravaggio
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cristofano Allori of Judith, attended by her nurse, holding the decapitated head of her would-be rapist Holofernes. (The model for Holofernes was Allori himself; for Judith, his real-life lover, known as La Mazzafirra). Far from being etiolated or artificial, it is almost as realist as a Caravaggio, though much classier in the opulence of Judith's robes...
...mysteries of Caravaggio's inventive, rootless and miserably destructive life quickly pull the reader into this biography, which reads as much like a Simenon detective tale as it does the deeply researched work of art history that it is. Even the painter's name is up for grabs, reduced here to M (it's worth reading the book to find out why). One thing is not mysterious: painting was irrevocably changed by the drama and limpid sexuality of Caravaggio's pictures--boys with eyes of precocious longing, fruit heavy with a ripeness so perfect as to be forbidden even...