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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1400 to 1600 > Renaissance art > General
For four hundred years Caravaggio's (1571-1610) staggering artistic
achievements have thrilled viewers, yet his volatile personal
trajectory-the murder of Ranuccio Tomasini, the doubt surrounding
Caravaggio's sexuality, the chain of events that began with his
imprisonment on Malta and ended with his premature death-has long
confounded historians. In a bravura performance, Andrew
Graham-Dixon delves into the original Italian sources, presenting
fresh details about Caravaggio's sex life, his many crimes and
public brawls, and the most convincing account yet published of the
painter's tragic death at the age of thirty-eight. With
illuminating readings of Caravaggio's infamous religious paintings,
which often depict prostitutes and poor people, Graham-Dixon
immerses readers in the world of Italy at the height of the
Counter-Reformation and creates a masterful profile of the
mercurial painter's life and work.
Ideal painting in the Renaissance was an art of illusionism that
eliminated for the viewer any overt sense of its making. Titian's
paintings, in contrast, with their roughly worked and "open"
surfaces, unexpected glazes, and thick impasto brushstrokes, made
the fact of the paint increasingly visible. Previous scholars have
read these paintings as unfinished or the product of lesser studio
hands, but in The Muddied Mirror, Jodi Cranston argues that this
approach to paint is integral to Titian's later work. Rather than
presenting in paint a precise reflection of the visible world, the
artist imparted an intrinsic corporeality to his subjects through
the varying mass and thickness of the paint. It is precisely the
materiality and "disfiguration" of these paintings that offer us
the key to understanding their meanings. More important, the
subjects of Titian's late paintings are directly related to the
materiality of the body--they represent physical changes wrought
through violence, metamorphosis, and desire.
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