ART 235: Pre-Modern Art History

New York Times bestselling author Francine Prose offers an enthralling account of the life and work of one of the greatest painters of all time. Caravaggio defied the aesthetic conventions of his time; his use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed--street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged--was a profound and revolutionary innovation that left its mark on generations of artists. His insistence on painting from nature, on rendering the emotional truth of experience, whether religious or secular, made him an artist who speaks across the centuries to modern day.

Varriano concentrates on uncovering the principles and practices--the intellect and the imagination--that guided Caravaggio's eye and brush as he made some of the most controversial paintings in the history of art. Caravaggio's irascible personality, libertine sexual preferences, and lawless, even murderous, behavior have attracted as much heated commentary as his realism. Varriano sheds important new light on these disputes by tracing the autobiographical threads in Caravaggio's paintings and framing these within the context of contemporary Italian culture. Ultimately, Varriano links Caravaggio's aggressive persona and innovative methods to changes taking place throughout seventeenth-century Europe.

Caravaggio was the most revolutionary artist of the Italian Baroque. The intensity and drama of his chiaroscuro style is matched only by his life. Outlaw, heretic, murderer and sensualist are some of the charges brought against him by his contemporaries.

Caravaggio is the most arresting European painter of the years around 1600. Although he died in 1610, in his thirty-ninth year, he is often considered the most important Italian painter of the entire seventeenth century. He is also notorious as a painter-assassin: he killed a man in 1606, and a similar crime was rumored in his youth. Caravaggio's painting speak to us more personally and more poignantly than any others of the time. We meet him over the gulf of centuries, not as a commanding and admirable historical figure like Annibale Carracci, but as an artist who somehow cut through the artistic conventions of his time right down to the universal blood and bone of life.