Caravaggio

Andrew Graham-Dixon, a British writer on art and an historian, traces the career of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, a painter whose work changed European art in the early seventeenth century. The book follows him through the turbulent years of the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church was commissioning art to reclaim its authority, and shows how his restless temperament and his brushes with the law shaped his life as much as his paintings did.

Graham-Dixon recounts the violent and reckless episodes that marked Caravaggio's days in Rome and beyond, including street fights, a killing, affairs of many kinds, and a long imprisonment on Malta. Alongside this personal story, the author examines the painter's technique, his dramatic use of light and shadow, and the religious and social pressures that governed what Italian painters could show.

The result is a study for readers interested in both art history and the lives of artists, especially those drawn to Baroque painting and the cultural politics of its age.