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CARAVAGGIO
By Naira R. M.
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Description
Of books about the oeuvre of Caravaggio, there are apparently no end. A mercurial artist, who lived less than 40 years, his legacy is one of volatile extremes. For better or worse, his uneven biography is in itself a work of art. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted notoriously provocative religious and classical tableaux, yet left few traces (no letters, no table talk, no notebook or treatise) of his life beyond his art. Painting with an intensity of realism never before equalled, Caravaggio`s impact was immediate, profound and everlasting. He transmuted a realism in a variety of ways, making it both the climax and golden age of European art. But his realism was too close to life, too real to comfort. Bound to appreciate the supernatural mastery of Caravaggio`s chiaroscuro translating the moral turpitude and death as the musts, this book also evaluates the artist`s personal motives, and psychological state of freezing the ecstatic foreshortening on a two-dimensional plate, through geometrical reasoning of the golden ratio, gnomonic growth and descend. In other words, this is not a "coffee-table art-book." It lands us at the port named 'geometry of emotions' to admire Caravaggio`s 'metaphyisical theaters' and experience a third-degree intimidation from his style of dynamic symmetry between life and death, astute and simpleton, dignity and humiliation. Illustrating 20 masterpieces out of the several hundreds, this book runs a 'geometrical diagnostics' on three paintings: "Cardsharps," "The fortune teller," and "The Incredulity of Saint Thomas." A few canvases of Flemish and Venice artists presenting absolutely different styles, yet incorporating root 3 and 5 golden ratios (1.618), with square root (1.272...) ( "Jiovanni Arnolfini and His Bride" by Van Eyck, or "Cupid and Psyche" by Canova), are pilot-tested to form the control group in building the theory. Next, on Caravaggio`s exemplary canvases "The lute player," "Narcissus," and "The Beheading of Saint John," it explains the artist`s ambitions in contrasting extremely realistic figures with extremely artifical background of the brown and black, pushing his subjects closer to the spectator. Finally, this book presents some events in Caravaggio`s turbulent life, including his apprenticeship, womanizing, his vision of Christianity, and the departure.
