M is the name of an enigma. In his short and violent life, Michaelangelo Merisi, from Caravaggio, changed art for ever. 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. As a book about art and life and how they connect, there has never been anything quite like it.

Peter Robb fa rivivere la figura di Michelangelo Merisi, passato alla storia come Caravaggio, e rifiuta le versioni classiche sulla sua morte, inserendola in un inquietante contesto di vendetta per motivi sessuali rivelando il nome di chi, con ogni probabilità, fu il mandante del suo assassinio.

M is the name of an enigma. In his short and violent life, Michelangelo Merisi, from Caravaggio, changed art for ever. In the process he laid bare the brutal realities of his life with shocking frankness. This is a study of the man and his art, and of how life and art interconnect.

As this collection of essays makes clear, the paths to grasping the complexity of Caravaggio?s art are multiple and variable. Art historians from the UK and North America offer new or recently updated interpretations of the works of seventeenth-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and of his many followers known as the Caravaggisti. The volume deals with all the major aspects of Caravaggio?s paintings: technique, creative process, religious context, innovations in pictorial genre and narrative, market strategies, biography, patronage, reception, and new hermeneutical trends. The concluding section tackles the essential question of Caravaggio?s legacy and the production of his followers-not only in terms of style but from some highly innovative strategies: concettismo; art marketing and the price of pictures; self-fashioning and biography; and the concept of emulation.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) has long been recognized as one of the great innovators in the history of art. Through detailed analysis of paintings from his early Roman period, 1594-1602, this study now situates his art firmly within both its humanistic and its scientific context. Here, both his revolutionary painterly techniques--pronounced naturalism and dramatic chiaroscuro--and his novel subject matter--still-life compositions and genre scenes--are finally put into their proper cultural and contemporary environment. This environment included the contemporary rise of empirical scientific observation, a procedure--like Caravaggio's naturalism--committed to a close study of the phenomenal world. It also included the interests of his erudite, aristocratic patrons, influential Romans whose tastes reflected the Renaissance commitment to humanistic studies, emblematic literature and classical lore. The historical evidence entered into the record here includes both contemporary writings addressing the instructive purposes of art and the ancient literary sources commonly manipulated in Caravaggio's time that sanctioned a socially realistic art. The overall result of this investigation is characterize the work of the painter as an expression of "learned naturalism."

Art critic, historian, writer, TV presenter, politician and professional provocateur, Vittorio Sgarbi is a prominent figure in Italy's cultural landscape. Controversial, often caustic, and always charismatic, his thought-provoking opinions and writings leave no room for indifference. In this highly readable and well-informed book, Sgarbi covers the life and works of Caravaggio, analyzing the genius's disordered and adventurous existence and the revolutionary greatness of his masterpieces. As Vittorio Sgarbi writes in the book: "The life and work of an artist always end up looking alike; but in Caravaggio's life there was a sense of fun, an enjoyment of burlesque and a lack of propriety that is not reflected even in his in most daring works. In Caravaggio, we had the cohabitation of a sophisticated, intellectual capable of imprinting an ideal turning point in the course of history and the principal character of an adventure story-quarrelsome, overbearing, cursed-as he was portrayed in romantic interpretations. On the other hand, his intemperance cannot be ascribed to the spirit of the times; behavior that we would call extravagant today was instead common in such violent and difficult times. The true greatness of Caravaggio lay in his having shown the other, and indeed authentic side of reality. But these are external elements, psychological reflections that pass from life into art."