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ben_miller's review against another edition
5.0
As a crash course on the life of a painter, it's hard to imagine one more entertaining and informative than this. Of course, it helps that Caravaggio had one of the most sensational lives of any major artist. When he wasn't defying the aesthetic conventions of his time in furious creative outbursts, he was swaggering around Rome with a sword on his hip, threatening, cursing, and assaulting the populace. The majority of the book discusses his art, punctuated by key biographical episodes, which, this being Caravaggio, tend to be fights, court proceedings, prison breaks, and gambling imbroglios.
Francine Prose is a storyteller, and does a wonderful job of interpreting the events of his life, particularly given that the sources she's working with tend to be either contradictory or non-existent. She has a good eye for an insult, too, and jabs Caravaggio's contemporaries, especially Baglione. I'm not an art scholar, but her readings of his paintings were convincing enough for me. Even if I don't universally agree with her conclusions, I can appreciate the refined eye she brings to the task.
At some point I'll dig into some of the more substantive biographies on Caravaggio, but as a primer I really couldn't ask for anything more.
Francine Prose is a storyteller, and does a wonderful job of interpreting the events of his life, particularly given that the sources she's working with tend to be either contradictory or non-existent. She has a good eye for an insult, too, and jabs Caravaggio's contemporaries, especially Baglione. I'm not an art scholar, but her readings of his paintings were convincing enough for me. Even if I don't universally agree with her conclusions, I can appreciate the refined eye she brings to the task.
At some point I'll dig into some of the more substantive biographies on Caravaggio, but as a primer I really couldn't ask for anything more.
janellerad's review against another edition
2.0
Read most of the book but stopped short of the ending because I found the writing style to be repetitive & kind of a drag to read
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