Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane PDF Download

Author: Andrew Graham-Dixon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393082938
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 585

View

Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year "This book resees its subject with rare clarity and power as a painter for the 21st century." —Hilary Spurling, New York Times Book Review Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) lived the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. This commanding biography explores Caravaggio’s staggering artistic achievements, his volatile personal trajectory, and his tragic and mysterious death at age thirty-eight. Featuring more than eighty full-color reproductions of the artist’s best paintings, Caravaggio is a masterful profile of the mercurial painter.

Author: Sybille Ebert-Schifferer
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606060953
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

View

Book Description
The young Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) created a major stir in late-sixteenth-century Rome with the groundbreaking naturalism and highly charged emotionalism of his paintings. One might think, given the vast number of books that have been written about him, that everything that could possibly be said about the artist has been said. However, the author of this book argues, it is important to take a fresh look at the often repeated and widely accepted narratives about the artist’s life and work. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer subjects the available sources to a critical reevaluation, uncovering evidence that the efforts of Caravaggio’s contemporaries to disparage his character and his artwork often sprang from their own cultural biases or a desire to promote the artistic achievements of his rivals. Contrary to repeated claims in the literature, the painter lacked neither education nor piety, but was an extremely accomplished technician who developed a successful marketing strategy. He enjoyed great respect and earned high fees from his prestigious clients while he also inspired a large circle of imitators. Even his brushes with the law conformed to the behavioral norms of the aristocratic Romans he sought to emulate. The beautiful reproductions of Caravaggio’s paintings in this volume make clear why he captivated the imagination of his contemporaries, a reaction that echoes today in the ongoing popularity of his work and the fierce debate that it continues to provoke among art historians.

Author: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Publisher: ATS Italia Editrice
ISBN: 8875710481
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 82

View

Book Description

Author: Giulio Mancini
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606066226
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 116

View

Book Description
A new title in the successful Lives of the Artists series, which offers illuminating, and often intimate, accounts of iconic artists as viewed by their contemporaries. The most notorious Italian painter of his day, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) forever altered the course of Western painting with his artistic ingenuity and audacity. This volume presents the most important early biographies of his life: an account by his doctor, Giulio Mancini; another by one of his artistic rivals, Giovanni Baglione; and a later profile by Giovanni Pietro Bellori that demonstrates how Caravaggio’s impact was felt in seventeenth-century Italy. Together, these accounts have provided almost everything that is known of this enigmatic figure.

Author: Clovis Whitfield
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781907372100
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
This book concentrates on a few crucial years of Caravaggio's development, in order to cast light on what made the artist such a revolutionary figure. It argues that this revolution was one of technique rather than style, and involved the sophisticated use of a camera obscura and so-called 'burning' or parabolic mirrors, exploiting new advances in glassmaking and optics. Because the results Caravaggio obtained by his new methods were so different he created a sensation, although these innovations were rapidly assimilated and the artistic establishment worked successfully to restore their way of doing things, so that the true novelty of his art in the 1590s has been obscured. Clovis Whitfield uses a lifetime of study of the period to discuss not only Caravaggio's technology but also his patronage and cultural context, the Rome of Clement VIII, concentrating particularly on Caravaggio's homosexual patron Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte and analysing the taste and role of his other early supporters as well. Whitfield's Caravaggio was the son of a bricklayer, untrained in traditional artistic disciplines, who instead took the dramatic step of painting exactly what he saw with his reproductive aids. Galileo's hypothesis drawn from observation and Caravaggio's novel description of what he saw were, according to Whitfield, parallel attempts to explain features of the many-layered reality that surrounds us. The book features remarkable new photographs and especially details of Caravaggio's paintings and those of his followers and rivals that will dramatically refresh hackneyed perceptions of this crucial figure and his world. "This revolutionary book will transform studies of the renegade 'people's artist'." Art Quarterly, Spring 2012

Author: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Publisher: Art Media Resources
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248

View

Book Description
This exhibition of works by Caravaggio and his most important followers, the Caravaggisti, demonstrates the artist's extraordinary abilities and influence upon the course of European art.

Author: Jonathan Harr
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588364895
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning A Civil Action, The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries. The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn’t alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances. Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others–no one knows the precise number–have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy. Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ–its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle. Praise for The Lost Painting “Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a bestseller . . . rich and wonderful. . . . In truth, the book reads better than a thriller. . . . If you're a sucker for Rome, and for dusk . . . [you'll] enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city.”—The New York Times Book Review “Jonathan Harr has taken the story of the lost painting, and woven from it a deeply moving narrative about history, art and taste—and about the greed, envy, covetousness and professional jealousy of people who fall prey to obsession. It is as perfect a work of narrative nonfiction as you could ever hope to read.”—The Economist

Author: Helen Langdon
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448105714
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 474

View

Book Description
Of all Italian painters, Caravaggio (c. 1565-1609) speaks most intensely to the modern world. His early works suggest a fascination with his own youth and sexuality and the trancience of love and beauty his later religious art speaks of violence, passion, solitude and death. Ugly, almost brutal-looking, Caravaggio was constantly embroiled in fights and entangled with the law; the prototype anti-social artist, he moved between the worlds of powerful patrons and the street life of boys and prostitutes. Helen Langdon uncovers his progress from childhood in plague-ridden Milan to wild success in Rome, and eventual exile and persecution in the South, and sets his work against the political, intellectual and spiritual movements of the day. Fully illustrated, her dramatic portrait shows Carravigio's life to be as sensational and enigmatic as his powerful and enduring art.

Author: Todd Olson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300190137
Category : ART
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
The renowned Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) established his career in Catholic Rome, making paintings that placed particular importance on sacred relics and the glorification of martyred saints. Beginning with his early works, Caravaggio was intensely engaged with the physical world. He not only interrogated appearances but also experimented with the paint's material nature. Caravaggio's Pitiful Relics explores how the artist's commitment to materiality served and ultimately challenged the Counter Reformation church's interests. In his first ecclesiastical commission, Caravaggio offered an unconventional representation of martyrdom that collapsed the borders between art, contemporary religious persecution, iconoclasm, and relics in early Christian catacombs. Yet his art controversially and eventually led to a criminal trial. After he had fled from Rome in disgrace, his major altarpiece depicting the death of the Virgin Mary, portraying her mortality rather than her sanctity, was removed. Caravaggio's materiality came into conflict with changing notions of the sacred; thereafter, the sacred object became a secular work of art, marking the displacement of the relic.

Author: Michael Fried
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691147019
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316

View

Book Description
This is a groundbreaking examination of one of the most important artists in the Western tradition by one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century. In his first extended consideration of the Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610), Michael Fried offers a transformative account of the artist's revolutionary achievement. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, The Moment of Caravaggio displays Fried's unique combination of interpretive brilliance, historical seriousness, and theoretical sophistication, providing sustained and unexpected readings of a wide range of major works, from the early Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the late Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. And with close to 200 color images, The Moment of Caravaggio is as richly illustrated as it is closely argued. The result is an electrifying new perspective on a crucial episode in the history of European painting. Focusing on the emergence of the full-blown "gallery picture" in Rome during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, Fried draws forth an expansive argument, one that leads to a radically revisionist account of Caravaggio's relation to the self-portrait; of the role of extreme violence in his art, as epitomized by scenes of decapitation; and of the deep structure of his epoch-defining realism. Fried also gives considerable attention to the art of Caravaggio's great rival, Annibale Carracci, as well as to the work of Caravaggio's followers, including Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Valentin de Boulogne.