Product Overview
Sublime blasphemy?
The complete uvre of the dark genius who revolutionized European painting
Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (15711610), was a legend even in his own lifetime. Celebrated by some for his naturalism and his revolutionary pictorial inventions, he was considered by others to have destroyed painting. Few other artists have provoked such controversy and so many contradictory interpretations right up to modern times.
On the heels of Caravaggio year 2010, this work offers a comprehensive reassessment of Caravaggios entire oeuvre, with a catalogue raisonn of his works. Five introductory chapters analyze his artistic career from his training in Lombard Milan and his triumphal rise in papal Rome, up to his dramatic final years in Naples, Malta, and Sicily. The spotlight thereby falls upon the radical nature and innovative force of Caravaggios art and its influence in all of Europe.
Our understanding of Caravaggios work has been substantially broadened in recent decades by major exhibitions, restoration campaigns, new attributions and archival discoveries. The new catalogue raisonn offers a detailed overview of the artists entire oeuvre based on the latest research. Every painting is reproduced in large-scale format, with spectacular details that offer dramatic close-ups and set new standards in print quality. A new photographic campaign has been undertaken, enabling the smallest details to be reproduced on a large scale for the first time. They reveal all the more clearly Caravaggios virtuosity and his enormous ability to capture the viewers attention and to build a communicative bridge between the worlds of picture and viewer. Sequences of spectacular details grouped by subject allow us to experience Caravaggios ingenious rhetoric of looks and gestures and their theatrical staging in paint.
