CARAVAGGIO

A frolicking and rampaging debut about a larger-than-life painter, courtesy of Britisher Peachment, a longtime writer on art, opera, and ballet.

“A brief ecstasy, a brief satisfaction of my itch,” Caravaggio says in a prologue, speaking of murder: “and then nothing more than the sadness that washes over you after coupling. And then the growing desire for more. There was drinking and brawling and whoring and sodomy.” And indeed, we are given the crude and bumptious story of a true life treated with great liberty. Michelangelo Merisi (later Caravaggio) never did get on with his parents (“For how can it be that two stupid people can give birth to a child more intelligent than they?”), so it’s a good thing he’s in Milan, where the most important things are fencing and sex with anything. At 18, he’s off for Venice, where the whores are the best in all of Europe and where he has a relationship with the philosopher Bruno, all the while receiving the best possible education in aesthetics. The picaresque moves next to Rome, the only place in the world for a painter, where there are many more young boys and girls to choose from. By now, Caravaggio is famous and working on ceilings (“It’s still there on the ceiling if you want to go see it”). Poor Bruno is burned at the stake, but no bother: Caravaggio simply blows his money on whores and gambling. The Vatican will be after his shorts before long, and Caravaggio is conceited enough to wind up in a duel, but we’ve already been told that murder is no big deal. Still—how does he find epitaphs to his chapters that come from two centuries after his death? Perhaps through immortality, which may be his most important legacy: “Cast a cold eye on it all, and on my work. I am still alive.”

“You cannot trust a murderer to have a fancy prose style.” Well, you can here—in this wild tour of mid-millennium debauchery.