Why did you decide to write a book about Caravaggio? Is there anything new to say about him, after all these years?
It might seem strange, but even though Caravaggio is one of the most obsessed-about and massively popular artists of all time, an extraordinary amount of devastatingly interesting and revealing new information has come out about him in recent years. I am talking about new, hard, archival discoveries, a truly astonishing treasure trove of documents from the distant past – new facts about the prostitutes with whom he consorted, the women (and perhaps men) with whom he had sex; the soldiers, mercenaries and thugs with whom he fought and argued; the other painters with whom he contested; the man he murdered in a castration-attempt on a tennis court in Rome in the summer of 1606; the man he shot and near-fatally wounded on the brutal military island of Malta a few years later; the gang of four who pinned him down and cut his face off in Naples, condemning him to a terrible, slow, lingering death …
What sets your biography apart from others that have been written about him?
All of this new stuff had been discovered by scholars working in different places in different, disconnected ways. Some of it had been published, but generally only in aracane or extremely academic corners. No one had put it together, however. So I did. Whether the reader thinks I have done a good job with the information, the information itself is transformative in terms of what we know and think about the painter. I think it’s like a bomb dropped into the still waters of existing Caravaggio literature. Basically, my book is the first to bring all of this information together for the general reader. As a result, I believe it is the first book about him truly to tell the full story of who he was, why he did what he did, and ultimately what happened to him.
