Caravaggio: The Complete Works - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8836622356 ISBN 13: 9788836622351

Publisher: Silvana Editoriale, 2012

Synopsis

Dramatic shifts from foreboding dark to probing light, with minimal gradation in between; a realism that exposes all the flaws and folds of human flesh, eschewing Michelangelo's idealized bodies; a surgical explication of almost unbearably tense emotion; and the poised depiction of crucial moments at the lip of their unfolding: these were among the innovations of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. Without them, as the great Italian art writer Roberto Longhi once noted, "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed... and the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different." It was Longhi who rescued Caravaggio's painting for the twentieth century, prior to which it had lain dormant since the painter's mysterious death in 1610. During Caravaggio's lifetime, however, his work was enormously influential and controversial. Each of his innovations in some way upset the prevailing tendencies of the day-not least when his insistence on physical realism led him to paint Saint Matthew as a bald peasant with dirty legs (attended upon by an irreverently intimate boy angel). Nonetheless, Caravaggio was never short of commissions or patrons, and left to posterity around 80 late Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces. Now available in paperback, this monograph is published on the fourth centenary of Caravaggio's death, and documents his complete paintings in high-quality reproductions. Authored by renowned scholar Rossella Vodret, it is the must-have monograph on the artist.

About this title

About the Author:

John T. Spike is an internationally respected critic and historian of art. He has organized many exhibitions of Italian art and has published major books on the Florentine Renaissance, including Abbeville's Masaccio and Fra Angelico.

From Library Journal:

Spike's opus is suspended between two eras of the technology of literacy. A well-illustrated text is given over to a chronologically structured study of the artist's life and work, while an enclosed CD-ROM provides a densely detailed catalogue raisonn . While the mass of documentation found in the electronic component of this catalog will be of considerable value to serious students of art history, the book proper does little to advance our understanding of the art or enlarge our appreciation of the significance of the artist. Sporadic efforts to relate the artist to a broad range of contemporary scientific and religious thought, while at times insightful, can also sometimes seem excessive and improbable. Consistent formal scrutiny is also too often slighted in favor of iconographic readings that range from the erudite but plausible to the recondite but strained. Catherine Puglisi's Caravaggio (LJ 4/1/99) is a superior introduction to the artist and his works, while Helen Langdon's Caravaggio: A Life (LJ 6/1/99) is a superior biographical and contextual study. Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Silvana Editoriale
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 8836622356
• ISBN 13: 9788836622351
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Vodret Rossella