Dimensions
156 x 235 x 39mm
M is the name of an enigma.
In his short and violent life, Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio changed art forever. He threw out inherited dogma and technique and painted with devastating clarity, and in the process he laid bare his own sexual longing and the brutal realities of his life with shocking frankness. Like no painter before him and few since, M the man appears in his art - fierce, vulnerable, opportunistic, unyielding, sometimes filled with laughter.
Five years of brilliant fame in Rome provoked deep hostility to M - he was imprisoned for criminal libel, saw his work rejected by Roman churches and clashed with the law. A savage street fight left M nearly killed and his enemy bleeding to death. A price on his head, M fled south to Naples and beyond, four years of dazzling success as a painter and personal catastrophe. Jailed in Malta for an unnamed crime, M fled pursued by killers through Sicily and Naples and disappeared forever in the summer of 1610.
Peter Robb has written the first-ever book-length life of the first great modern painter. It looks at the crises in politics, art and science dividing Italy and Europe, at M's protectors and enemies. He identifies friends, boys, lovers and models and links M's life to his powerful and moving paintings. He shows M's great mind and great heart, and puts paid forever to the myth of the psychotic genius. Refuting accepted accounts, he shows M betrayed by his protectors, ambushed and murdered in a sexual vendetta, the murder concealed by the state - a startling conclusion to a groundbreaking book.
