The absolute most definitive work to-date. Beautifully written. ( )

I know it's a cliche, but facts about this artist's life are so few and far between he is very much like his own paintings: emerging briefly, every now and then, from the dark out into daylight.
   Details of his early life are particularly sparse - which made (to me at least) the first hundred or so pages of this biography hard going. There's plenty about Milan and Rome, folk art, archbishops and cardinals, but nothing substantial about the man himself. The result is peculiar: like a portrait painting without the portrait, all setting but no face. Once you get beyond that though, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio does begin to emerge - and what a man he is! For a start, I'd forgotten just how far ahead of its time some of his work really was: painted in the seventeenth century, St John The Baptist say, or David With The Head Of Goliath, could have been done in the twentieth.
   I was amazed, too, by his extraordinary life. He strode about the seedier parts of town dressed in a cloak and armed with a sword; he killed an opponent in a duel (although Graham-Dixon argues convincingly that this was accidental) and may have earned money as a pimp. The most astonishing image of all though (as unforgettable as any of his pictures) is that of the great-painter-as-fugitive on the run in fear of his life: fleeing from city to city - and, everywhere he stopped, painting a masterpiece.
   I'm glad I didn't lose patience during those first hundred pages because this is as enthralling a biography (of Caravaggio or anyone else for that matter) as I've ever read. ( )

I picked this up on the strength of the reviews, I knew nothing about Caravaggio or his art. A famous name well worth the time to learn more about. The artwork is available on Wikipedia where most of the paintings have individual articles and zoomable HD images. It is asking too much of a publisher to provide quality color art plates inside a biography. The B&W images are sufficient to remind the reader which painting is being discussed but not when seeing a painting for the first time - one can't be too lazy about looking them up in color high resolution to get the full effect. Indeed, prior to the Internet, the Caravaggio experience was limited to expensive art books and trips to museums. Books like this in conjunction with visuals on the Internet make for a greater than sum. ( )

A very enjoyable read. I knew nothing about Caravaggio and nearly nothing about art in the early seventeenth century and I think I learned a ton about both from this book. There are many color plates of the art, unfortunately sometimes they are so dark I couldn't make out the details discussed in the text. There was enough for me to get the idea, though. ( )

A highly enjoyable biography about Michelangelo Merisi called Caravaggio who lived in an age where painters. writers and composers were of the same social class as prostitutes and servants. It also looks like that he owed the start of his career more to a cardinal's interest in him as a boy toy than his art. Andrew Graham-Dixon makes a good case that Caravaggio's violent life was partly due to his involvement in prostitution and acting as a pimp, dueling with competitors in the streets of Rome.

His cinematic, dramatic art is mirrored in his equally dramatic and violent short life whose scenes merited their own Caravaggio paintings. How would he depict his imprisonment in a cell of the Knights of Malta? Or mortally wounding his opponent in the groin in Rome? Graham-Dixon brings both the stories and discussions of his paintings to the table. Recommended. ( )