Caravaggio's Light: Andrew Graham-Dixon's Portrait in Words

THE GUARDIAN
By Jonathon Jones

"The Crowning of Thorns" Courtesy of owner Kunsthistorisches Museum

I've waited a long time for a decent book on Caravaggio to come along. Unable to translate the shock of his images into prose, authors either sensationalise his life story in ways so crass as to be irrelevant, or retreat into reconstructions of his networks of patronage that are so dull they make you wonder why you ever felt seduced by his art in the first place – until, once again, you see a Caravaggio in a gallery or a church that knocks you sideways and scars your soul.  In his biography Caravaggio, the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has a very clever explanation for the unique effect of Caravaggio's paintings. The reason they obliterate other paintings in a gallery, even great paintings, is, he argues, to do with Caravaggio's special intensity of looking, which he believes was formed during the artist's youth in the religious visual culture of Counter-Reformation Milan. Under the influence of sensationally realistic popular Catholic art and spiritual advice to hold images of the holy scriptures in your mind, Caravaggio developed his ecstatic painterly stare. [link]