DOUBTING THOMAS

This 1997 novel by a prominent Norwegian author assembles the testimony of nine “witnesses” to explain a scandalous incident in the year 1606: it seems the celebrated (and impulsive) painter killed a man in a duel, then fled from Rome into a prolonged exile. The witnesses’ several “accounts”—dominated by that of Caravaggio’s intimate friend and sometime model, would-be astronomer Innocenzo Promontorio—subtly explore the conflict between the artist’s rigorous self-discipline and willful sensuality, in a nicely textured tale that in its best pages becomes something very like a late-Renaissance Rashomon.