Caravaggio

by Jonathan Gash

Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610), known as Caravaggio, after his home town in Lombardy, was arguably not only the finest painter of the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods, but one of the great artists of all time. He must also rank among the most revolutionary of those who, from time to time, have sought to overthrow established artistic orthodoxy through a return to, or strengthening of, naturalism. His two principal innovations - his use of chiaroscuro and his practice of painting directly from posed models- imbued his picturesque genre scenes of cardsharps and fortunetellers and his groundbreaking religious paintings, so redolent of the spirit of the Counter Reformation, with an intense, crisply etched presence. While his capricious character, aggressive behavior, and bohemian way of life have intrigued the modern imagination, fueling the notion of him as an embattled outsider who channeled the complexities of his own make-up into an assertively iconoclastic art.

In this new edition of his authoritative text, which places Caravaggio’s achievement squarely within the cultural and religious contexts of his time, John Gash has incorporated several recent documentary and pictorial discoveries. The book illustrates most of Caravaggio’s surviving paintings, executed in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the majority of them in color.

Genres: Art

128 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2004

About the author

John Grant is an English crime writer, who writes under the pen name Jonathan Gash. He is the author of the Lovejoy series of novels. He wrote the novel The Incomer under the pen name Graham Gaunt.

Grant is a doctor by training and worked as a general practitioner and pathologist. He served in the British Army and attained the rank of Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was head of bacteriology at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for the University of London between 1971 and 1988.

Grant won the John Creasey Award in 1977 for his first Lovejoy novel, The Judas Pair. He is also the author of a series of medical thrillers featuring the character Dr. Clare Burtonall.

Grant lives outside Colchester in Essex, the setting for many of his novels. He has also been published in Postscripts.

Reviews

[John Abrahamson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great details about my favorite artist, but wish the book had better/more pictures within the book.