Word: caravaggio
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...Caravaggio was “mercurial, hot-tempered, violent,” according to his contemporaries. Eventually, he was also a convicted murderer, and spent the last four years of his life in exile outrunning the charges: “he slept fully clothed, with his dagger by his side,” and wandered across an Italy in full bloom, “painting almost constantly...
Prose does not hide that Caravaggio killed people during the tavern-fights which he loved to instigate, and that his competitive spirit—particularly with other artists—earned him an incredible collection of enemies. But somehow these behaviors get lost in the magnificent descriptions of the artist’s work. Somehow, in Francine Prose’s biography, the violence of the character is camouflaged in the tumult of Renaissance Italy...
...behavior really be forgiven, just because he was a great and “tortured” artist? Shouldn’t the voice of a biographer sometimes assume a critical tone, no matter how passionate the author is about her subject? Instead, Prose seems to exculpate Caravaggio, describing him as a “preternaturally modern artist who was obliged to wait for the world to become as modern...
This dialogue of Caravaggio with the modern world was unfortunately cut short by a particularly negative turn in his life’s theme of fights and flights. He collapsed on a beach at Port Ercole, while trying to run after the ship that had left with all of his most recent work. While the 39 year-old’s body remained on that beach, his paintings sailed away: Caravaggio’s work outlived him. For centuries, his art was largely criticized as vulgar and lacking imagination. Only in the 1950s, after an exhibit of his work...
...took three-and-a-half centuries for the world to catch up with Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio...