Caravagio's real name was Michelangelo Menisi, but he took the name of the town he was born into.I suppose there was no point being another Michaelangelo in much the same way few new artists call themselves Bowie. The fame of the other person bearing those names is unrepeatable. It would be like trying to catch a lightning bolt in a butterfly net.
At nineteen years old it is said Caravagio opined that a painter at that age knows all he needs to know. By the time he had reached the end of his apprenticeship he had escaped from the murderous attack of robbers, survived the plague and any number of daily hardships which are a person's lot in life, then and now.. then much more so than now. Life was hard and short for rich and poor alike, apprentice, painter or Pope, everyone got it hard. Caravagio understood this and learned to live with it, enjoying the fleeting moments of pleasure, again and again. Talk about mad, bad and dangerous to know. He possessed a quick fire temper and also the swordsmanship to do something other than threaten. yet he was also possessed of an incredible talent, a masterful grasp of painting. froman early age he displayed prodigious talent. over time his genius brought him admiration ,and for intervals,the lavish patronage of nobles and churchmen. but his recklessness and volatile personality would also bring him great suffering and eventually exile, before an untimely death far from his birth place and those who perhaps understood his passion's best. Yet he led a life of extraordinary adventure, creating legendary works of art that would outlive Empires. He was a stand out personality in a great city blossoming through a renaissance of art and culture.
Robert Payne's novel captures the spirit of that age with alacrity. some chapters of the painter's life feel breathlessly delivered, with almost any possibly being his last, such were some of the adversaties he was forced to overcome, not all off which he was able to. Commiting terrible offences, including murder, he was forced on different occasions to uproot and flee. Even escaping from a prison in a fashion that would not have seemed out of place in Dumas. the Devil of course, is in the details and Caravagio is the very devil. robert Payne evokes the setting masterfully, with an almost audible clatter of wagon wheels on cobblestones and the lively tumult of the Italian Renaisance crowds, capturing the beauty, pain and complexity of the era.
I saw one of his paintings once, long ago in a gallery in Dublin. I was struck by its size and the black, black, blackness that people seemed to bob in, like a sentient ink. Caravagio understood perfectly how to use that darkness to draw the gaze, to focus the eye in whichever way he wished.
Born to darkness, he had no fear off it.
