Seward, a renowned British historian (The Wars of the Roses, 1995, etc.), sets out to reassemble the shadowy life of the 17th-century Italian chiaroscuro master Michelangelo de Caravaggio. Born in 1571, Caravaggio lost his father to the plague when he was only six. From then on, death followed close on the painter’s heels, leaving its reflection in Caravaggio’s portrayal of corpses and severed heads in his art. A man of violent temper, prone to fits of jealousy and uncontrollable rage, Caravaggio committed a crime in nearly every city he lived in and had to flee the law on numerous occasions. Arriving in Rome in 1592, he lived for many years on the fringe of respectability, making a meager living in the workshops of other artists. Eventually, one of his paintings caught the eye of Cardinal del Monte, who invited Caravaggio to become a resident painter at his palazzo. The cardinal’s patronage ensured a quick rise to fame and numerous commissions—especially from clergy, who were perpetually smitten by Caravaggio’s Madonnas (even if many of them were modeled by prostitutes). Caravaggio’s success culminated in a commission to paint the pope’s portrait, but soon after, he was implicated in a duel that ended in the death of his tennis partner. Caravaggio became an outlaw in Rome, but he continued to exploit his talent and even sought admission to the Knights of Malta. The master of the order relaxed the rules to admit the famous artist but was just as soon obliged to expel him for attacking another knight. Caravaggio would remain on the run until death finally caught up with him. Penniless and exhausted from wounds and illness, Caravaggio died on the shore at Porto Ercole in 1610. Given the glaring lack of historical data, Seward does a fine job of piecing together circumstantial evidence of the painter’s turbulent life, while skillful juxtaposition of Caravaggio’s personal narrative and art illuminates the origins of his dramatic style.(16 color illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15032-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
