Author Description

The short, violent life of Michelangelo Merisi -- sometimes called simply M, and known to us as Caravaggio -- changed art forever. In the words of Robert Hughes, 'There was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same.' M threw out accepted technique and dogma to paint from life with dazzling clarity. In the process he laid bare his own sexual longings and the brutal realities of life with shocking frankness. M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio is strikingly different from the usual artist's life: The Times Literary Supplement writes, 'Its hero is wholly, richly alive.' With 'tremendous vigor, dash and swagger' Peter Robb evokes the seething and dangerous world of Italy at the end of the sixteenth century. Caravaggio is seen as a provocateur to a culture riven by the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation, a background of ideological cold war against which, despite all odds and at great cost to their creators, brilliant feats of art and science were achieved. M was imprisoned for criminal libel and saw his work rejected by Roman churches. A savage street fight nearly killed him and left his enemy bleeding to death. Later, with a price on his head, Caravaggio fled south to Naples and beyond, where he experienced four years of creative triumph and personal catastrophe. After being jailed in Malta for an unnamed crime, and pursued by killers through Sicily and Naples, he disappeared in the summer of 1610. Refuting standard accounts, Robb presents Caravaggio's death in a gripping scenario of sexual vendetta, betrayal, ambush and state collusion -- a startling conclusion to a groundbreaking book.