Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane

"It’s amazing because, as I said, we really know very, very little about Caravaggio except that he had a quarrel about artichokes and killed somebody, possibly over a bet on a tennis match, or possibly over a woman. Out of this, Graham Dixon, who is a superb art historian, has made an absolute blood-and-guts, pacy book. Caravaggio was an arrogant, rebellious murderer. Graham Dixon manages to pull the tempestuous life out of the tempestuous times. This is the Rome of the popes and Machiavellian power games and the struggles of the Counter-Reformation. Rome is being rebuilt as a show-off Baroque city. You’re getting out of the rather straitlaced, scholarly Renaissance into the hurly-burly of the Baroque and it’s very sensual. That life, the development of Rome and the political developments of the time, match what we know of Caravaggio’s technique, which was very fast and spontaneous, like his temper. He painted tremendously fast, and then, when he’d finished it, he would go dragging around town for a few weeks. This book, I think, is brilliant. It reads like a thriller. It’s incredibly colorful. It’s a very masculine book about a very masculine subject. It’s always the same with my biographies : I want to find out more about people whose work I admire. With Edvard Munch, August Strindberg, Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Gauguin nobody had written a book that I wanted to read. It was really at the start of lockdown. There was a marvelous exhibition at the National Gallery of Gauguin’s portraits. They always do wonderful lecture series at the National Gallery and I realized how long ago it was that he had been written about."