Caravaggio: A Life [Hardcover]

Helen Langdon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1999

A powerful and illuminating biography-the first in English in two generations-of one of the most popular painters of all time.

Of all the great Italian painters, the seventeenth-century master Caravaggio speaks most clearly and powerfully to our time. His early paintings of cardsharps, musicians, and street vendors convey his fascination with the Roman demimonde; his stark and brilliant religious paintings convey the world of the poor and the outcast and the religious experience of the individual with a directness our age can recognize.

Caravaggio lived hard and died young, having fled Rome for Sicily, apparently after murdering another man in a dispute; his life is one of the most colorful of any artist's. In this vivid and beautifully written biography, Helen Langdon tells the story of the great painter's life and times in a way that leaves the reader with a renewed appreciation of his art.

Caravaggio painted a fairly small number of works, many of them for settings in Rome, Naples, and Sicily, where they remain today; and he painted directly from human models. So the story of his life and times reveals Italian society of the period-involving powerful patrons, sybaritic cardinals, and saints, as well as street boys, prostitutes, and rivalrous painters.

Langdon has spent a lifetime studying Caravaggio; this biography, the first in English in two generations, shows us Caravaggio's genius with the striking clarity of his own paintings.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin once said that Caravaggio came into the world to destroy painting. Helen Langdon's marvelous biography suggests that rather than destroying painting, the Milanese artist gave it a new lease on life. Upon his arrival in Rome, Caravaggio ended a tradition of Italian Renaissance painting with his radically new naturalistic style, which continues to dazzle and influence viewers today. Beautifully poised between biographical scholarship and artistic appreciation, Langdon's book provides the reader with a complex, fascinating portrait of Caravaggio, still the rebel and outsider of the popular imagination, but also immersed in the Roman world of art, politics, and patronage. Some of the finest sections of the book vividly evoke the streets and brothels of early 17th-century Rome, which provided Caravaggio with the inspiration for many of his early works. By contrast, the later sections--which deal with Caravaggio's exile and commissions in Naples, Malta, and Sicily--seem rather brief and truncated, giving the final third of the book a rather unbalanced feel. This is, however, partly due to the elusiveness of Caravaggio himself--with little direct contemporary documentation on the painter, he often slips into the shadows, evading the scrutiny of even the most persistent biographer.

Langdon's achievement here is to produce a compelling portrait of the artist that throws new light on his paintings. Here is a painter who was proud, difficult, and arrogant, yet highly intellectual in his appreciation of the changing face of both Catholicism and scientific enquiry. Written with great historical clarity, and supplemented by 42 magnificent color illustrations, Helen Langdon's Caravaggio is a worthy contribution to scholarly study of this artist. --Jerry Brotton

From Publishers Weekly

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 436 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st Farrar, Straus and Giroux ed edition (May 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374118949
• ISBN-13: 978-0374118945
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,097,321 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars As clear a portrait as we can hope for, currently..., January 25, 2002

By 

Stopheles (Ridgewood, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Caravaggio: A Life (Hardcover)

Langdon's research payed off in this beautiful look at one of the Late Renaissance's most powerful (and mysterious, and notorious) painters. Sadly, most of what we know of Michelangelo Caravaggio's life is through second-hand sources -- police records and such -- but Langdon seems to have pored through every bit of esoterica related to the painter's relation to his time, his culture, and his peers. What we get for her troubles is a portrait of a man whose devotion to religion was so strong that he would do anything -- including lying about his lineage -- to maintain a secure place as a "defender of the faith."

Sadly, the one-star review on this page has a point: many of Langdon's statements are qualified with "perhaps", "almost certainly," etc. This, however, is one of the prices we pay for any attempt to pin down an elusive person who lived on the fringes of a society which passed four hundred years ago. I much preferred this reading to, for example, Desmond Seward's CARAVAGGIO of the same year, in which the author ranted against any recent interpretations of homoeroticism in Caravaggio's sensual paintings, and even against the concept of Caravaggio -- a notoriously violent and tumultuous figure in the history of painting -- having actually earned his lifetime reputation as a criminal!

Beautifully illustrated, well documented, and written with both a sensitivity towards the subject and a refusal to let that sensitivity obscure "the dirt". ..this is a significant addition to the study of one of painting's more fascinating figures. I highly recommend it.

34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Light inside the Shadows, January 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Caravaggio: A Life (Hardcover)

I found this book to be very entertaining as well as educational. The author did a great job of recreating the setting of Carravaggio's life; the important characters and atmosphere of all the places the artist lived in his nomadic life. Also, I look at Carravaggio's paintings in a new light and am even more impressed and moved by them than previously. Carravaggio's was a tragic life. The author captures the sense of impending doom that hanged over the artist's head like an executioner's sword. The author did a great job of bringing the artist to life with what little is actually known about him, through records, accounts, and most of all his paintings. Through it all there is the sense of an awesome talent and fragile ego, that both humbles and angers all who knew him. I came away realzing that Carravaggio was a man of his times as well as an artist of all time.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best, February 23, 2007

By 

Pius XI (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Caravaggio: A Life (Hardcover)

This is one of the best Caravaggio books ever written. It is a shame it is no longer in print. The combination of Roman history, church history and art history along with the extensive use of art plates, provide the backdrop for a thorough look into the life of one of the greatest artists of all times.

Helen Langdon gave me the opportunity to understand not only who Caravaggio was, but how he progressed in his development as an artist. This is a thoughtful and thorough presentation. There are many excellent books available on various aspects of Caravaggio's life and paintings; this is the most complete. It is worth the effort to try to locate a used copy of the book.