Caravaggio: A Life - Hardcover

Langdon, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374118949 ISBN 13: 9780374118945

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

Featuring forty-three color reproductions and black-and-white illustrations throughout, a well-crafted biography of Caravaggio--the first in English in two generations--sheds new light on the seventeenth-century Italian painter's dramatic life and astonishing work.

About this title

About the Author

Helen Langdon has worked at the National Gallery, the British Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery. She lives in London.

Reviews

At once more scholarly and less polemical than Desmond Seward's 1998 Caravaggio: A Passionate Life, Langdon's study of the Renaissance painter conveys a picture of Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1573-1610) as an artist amid rivals and intrigues without losing sight of his work and its significance. Not that Langdon downplays the juicy bits: she offers documented details on the scandals and rivalries, but does so without sensationalism or dependence on conjecture. While Seward railed against homoerotic interpretations of Caravaggio's works, and seemed particularly hostile to Derek Jarman's highly speculative 1987 film, Caravaggio, Langdon is unfailingly even-handed. In keeping with her focus on Caravaggio the artist (as opposed to Seward's man of faith), Langdon presents the relationship with Cardinal Francesco del Monte, for whom he served as artist-in-residence, in terms of career significance rather than personal relationships. Through del Monte, Caravaggio made contacts with church officials and patrons, and also with other painters, many of whom became rivals or detractors. The last section of the book is a balanced account of Caravaggio's induction into the Catholic order of the Knights of Malta (an honor seemingly requiring him to have lied about his family's lineage), his imprisonment in a Maltese dungeon for dueling with a Knight of higher rank and his legendary escape. Without downplaying Caravaggio's personal oddity and violent tendencies, Langdon approaches her subject with a sympathetic yet almost clinical eye. She scours the archives, examining police documents and bringing court records to light. In the end, she produces a finished view of an artist who helped redefine realism in art, even as his increasingly humbling depictions of people alienated him from painters and patrons, and fed his public image as a scoundrel and madman. 56 b&w illustrations, 42 color plates. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A complex, elegant biography of one of the most famousand famously combativepainters of the 17th century. Caravaggio's paintings, with their dramatic naturalism and haunting religiosity, give evidence of a compelling personality, but details about the artist are scant. Few of his words were ever recorded by his peers, and he wrote nothing that has survived. In spite of a dearth of original material, British biographer Langdon, in her first book, has created an account that interweaves a lively, informed discussion of his work with known details about his life. What is beyond dispute is that his talent catapulted him to the forefront of the art world by the age of 30. His was ``a brooding and profoundly Catholic art,'' in Langdons words, that rejected idealism in favor of realism. Using models and painting from life, Caravggio created an enfranchising religious vision: when he needed a Virgin, a local whore posed for him; his saints and apostles were humble men illumined by their faith. The passionate, painterly force for which he was lauded in Rome was not divisble from his life, however, and Caravaggio repeatedly brawled with other artists over slights both real and imagined. ``Having won sudden stardom, with a place in the world, [Caravaggio] responded badly,'' Langdon writes. ``He became vain and proud, increasingly involved in street violence, and so famed for his belligerence that news of it circulated through Europe.'' He was nothing if not a man of his times, and in Rome, in the 17th century, toughs walked the streets with daggers and swords; Caravaggio was no different. Fleeing Rome after killing a man in a fight, he suffered a tragic, untimely, but unsurprising death as he was attempting to return. To her credit, Langdon skillfully interweaves the coarse tragedy of Caravggio's existence with the transcendent humanism of his art and uses each to illuminate the other. (43 color plates, b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Langdon's affinity for Caravaggio's paintings is obvious in the meticulousness of her prose and her flare for creating mise^-en^-scenes within which she sets the dramatic and tragic action of this notoriously hotheaded artist's life. A cultivated and spiritual man, he was also an aggressive and volatile streetfighter. A genuine visionary, he painted with astonishing speed and daring, shocking the elite with both his precise depiction of the grittier aspects of contemporary life and his profoundly moving interpretations of scripture. He rapidly became the most famous painter in Italy, then risked all in one bloody escapade after another. He served time in jail, had to flee Rome after being accused of murder, and couldn't even stay out of trouble in the stronghold of the Knights of Malta, finally dying too soon under brutal and lonely circumstances. Langdon's grasp of Caravaggio's times and divided nature translate into the most comprehensive and balanced portrait yet of this revolutionary painter who discerned the sacred in the profane, the ideal in the natural. Donna Seaman

British scholar Langdon's masterly achievement is to integrate Caravaggio's art and life in a convincing and vividly delineated re-creation of his world. The themes of artistic patronage and practice, politics, religion, and criminality are effectively woven together to illumine the artist's work and behavior. Not only has Langdon synthesized an unprecedented amount of material to evoke the world within which Caravaggio labored but she has simultaneously created a freshened and deepened appreciation of his paintings. While occasionally venturing a bit far afield in the pursuit of a more fully rounded picture of his social milieu, she never fails the works themselves. Even readers already immersed in Caravaggio scholarship cannot fail to savor this brilliant conjunction of the formal and iconographic with the contextual, intellectual, spiritual, and social preoccupations of the moment. No previous English language work has so compellingly situated this artist in the ethos of his epoch. Art collections beyond the elementary level will need to acquire this informed, insightful, and eloquent opus.ARobert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374118949
• ISBN 13: 9780374118945
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 436