A fascinating examination of Caravaggio and others who adopted his dramatic style of painting The Italian painter known as Caravaggio (1571-1610) claims a place among the most revolutionary figures in the history of art. His intense naturalism, almost brutal realism, and dramatic use of light had a wide impact on European painters, including Orazio Gentileschi, Valentin de Boulogne, and Gerrit van Honthorst. Each of Caravaggio's followers absorbed something different from his work, propagating his stylistic legacy across Europe. In this extensively illustrated catalogue, Letizia Treves introduces the international Caravaggesque movement and traces the distinct artistic personalities of its leading players. Even now, Caravaggio's name overshadows the other talented artists who adopted his approach to narrative painting: the use of theatrical lighting to illuminate a story encapsulated in a single, dramatic moment. Treves explains the innovative and unifying features of these painters' work and how, despite resistance to their style and subject matter, many outstanding Caravaggesque pictures found their way into important collections. Published by the National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: National Gallery, London (10/12/16-01/15/17) National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (02/11/17-05/14/17) Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (06/17/17-09/24/17)

Following Caravaggio's death in 1610, the French artist Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632) emerged as one of the great champions of naturalistic painting. The eminent art historian Roberto Longhi honored him as "the most energetic and passionate of Caravaggio's naturalist followers." In Rome, Valentin—who loved the tavern as much as the painter's pallette—fell in with a rowdy confederation of artists but eventually received commissions from some of the city's most prominent patrons. It was in this artistically rich but violent metropolis that Valentin created such masterworks as a major altarpiece in Saint Peter's Basilica and superb renderings of biblical and secular subjects—until his tragic death at the age of forty-one cut short his ascendant career. With discussions of nearly fifty works, representing practically all of his painted oeuvre, Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio explores both the the artist's superlative depictions of daily life and the tumultuous context in which they were produced. Essays by a team of international scholars consider his key attributions to European painting, his devotion to everyday objects and models from life, his technique of staging pictures with the immediacy of unfolding drama, and his place in the pantheon of French artists. An extensive chronology surveys the rare extant documents that chronicle his biography, while individual entries help situate his works in the contexts of his times. Rich with incident and insight, and beautifully illustrated in Valentin's complex, suggestive paintings, Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio reveals a seminal artist, a practitioner of realism in the seventeenth century who prefigured the naturalistic modernism of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet two centuries later.

Caravaggio was one of the most mysterious and revolutionary painters in the history of art. As this volume shows, he created a new language of theatrical realism that lives on through his paintings.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year "This book resees its subject with rare clarity and power as a painter for the 21st century." —Hilary Spurling, New York Times Book Review Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) lived the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. This commanding biography explores Caravaggio’s staggering artistic achievements, his volatile personal trajectory, and his tragic and mysterious death at age thirty-eight. Featuring more than eighty full-color reproductions of the artist’s best paintings, Caravaggio is a masterful profile of the mercurial painter.

A new title in the successful Lives of the Artists series, which offers illuminating, and often intimate, accounts of iconic artists as viewed by their contemporaries. The most notorious Italian painter of his day, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) forever altered the course of Western painting with his artistic ingenuity and audacity. This volume presents the most important early biographies of his life: an account by his doctor, Giulio Mancini; another by one of his artistic rivals, Giovanni Baglione; and a later profile by Giovanni Pietro Bellori that demonstrates how Caravaggio’s impact was felt in seventeenth-century Italy. Together, these accounts have provided almost everything that is known of this enigmatic figure.

Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning A Civil Action, The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries. The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn’t alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances. Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others–no one knows the precise number–have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy. Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ–its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle. Praise for The Lost Painting “Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a bestseller . . . rich and wonderful. . . . In truth, the book reads better than a thriller. . . . If you're a sucker for Rome, and for dusk . . . [you'll] enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city.”—The New York Times Book Review “Jonathan Harr has taken the story of the lost painting, and woven from it a deeply moving narrative about history, art and taste—and about the greed, envy, covetousness and professional jealousy of people who fall prey to obsession. It is as perfect a work of narrative nonfiction as you could ever hope to read.”—The Economist

Now in paperback, an accessible and beautifully illustrated account of Caravaggio as a catalyst for modernity. Undeniably one of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio would develop a radically new kind of psychologically expressive, realistic art and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would lay the foundations for modern painting. His paintings defied tradition to such a degree that the meaning of his works has divided critics and viewers for centuries. In this original study, Troy Thomas examines Caravaggio’s life and art in relationship to the profound beginnings of modernity, exploring the many conventions that Caravaggio utterly dismantled with his extraordinary genius. Thomas begins with an in-depth look at Caravaggio’s early life and works and examines how he refined his realism, developed his obsession with darkness and light, and began to find the subtle and clever ambiguity of genre and meaning that would become his trademark. Focusing acutely on the inherent tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities within Caravaggio’s paintings, Thomas goes on to examine his mature religious works and the ways he created a powerful but stark and enigmatic expressiveness in his protagonists. Lastly, he delves into the artist’s final hectic years as a fugitive killer evading papal police and wandering the cities of southern Italy. Richly illustrated in color throughout, Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity will appeal to all of those fascinated by the history of art and the remarkable lives of Renaissance masters.

A revelatory study of a school of remarkable painters from one of the great art historians of the 20th century During the twenty years following Caravaggio's death, his revolutionary precedent inspired the creation of a remarkable body of paintings. Drawing together works by Bartolomeo Manfredi, Valentin de Boulogne, Nicolas Tournier, Nicolas R gnier, Cecco del Caravaggio, and the young Jusepe de Ribera, Michael Fried examines the nature of this later generation's engagement with Caravaggio. The magnitude and interest of their achievements have long been recognized, but existing scholarship has touched only the surface. Fried approaches his topic with seriousness and sophistication, revealing the density of meaning and sheer pictorial ambition in the works of the painters known as the Caravaggisti. Accessibly written, this beautifully illustrated book combines an account of works by Manfredi, Valentin, Tournier, Regnier, and Ribera with a detailed case study of Cecco del Caravaggio's Resurrection (1619-20), and concludes by surveying a group of paintings by Guercino, a painter not counted among the Caravaggisti, but whose strategies in relation to the viewer aligned him with their interests. Fried moves with agility between broad and focused fields of vision. In his final remarks, he makes a compelling case for understanding these paintings in relation to the thought of Ren Descartes.

This is a groundbreaking examination of one of the most important artists in the Western tradition by one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century. In his first extended consideration of the Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610), Michael Fried offers a transformative account of the artist's revolutionary achievement. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, The Moment of Caravaggio displays Fried's unique combination of interpretive brilliance, historical seriousness, and theoretical sophistication, providing sustained and unexpected readings of a wide range of major works, from the early Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the late Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. And with close to 200 color images, The Moment of Caravaggio is as richly illustrated as it is closely argued. The result is an electrifying new perspective on a crucial episode in the history of European painting. Focusing on the emergence of the full-blown "gallery picture" in Rome during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, Fried draws forth an expansive argument, one that leads to a radically revisionist account of Caravaggio's relation to the self-portrait; of the role of extreme violence in his art, as epitomized by scenes of decapitation; and of the deep structure of his epoch-defining realism. Fried also gives considerable attention to the art of Caravaggio's great rival, Annibale Carracci, as well as to the work of Caravaggio's followers, including Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Valentin de Boulogne.