Title : The Race to the Abyss - Dominique Fernandez - book
Summary :
Rome, 1600. A young, unknown painter arrives in the capital and, in a few paintings of unprecedented power and eroticism, revolutionizes painting. Realism, cruelty, chiaroscuro: he overturns three hundred years of artistic tradition. Cardinals protect him, princes court him. He becomes, under the pseudonym Caravaggio, the official painter of the church. But here's the thing: he is a born outsider, violent, antisocial; the very idea of "making a career" is repugnant to him. In defiance of the law, he is passionately fond of boys, especially bad boys, thugs. He likes to fight, as skilled with a sword as he is a virtuoso with a brush.
Sentenced to death for killing a man, he fled, wandered between Naples, Malta, and Sicily, caused further scandals, and died at the age of thirty-eight on a beach north of Rome. Murdered? Probably. By whom? We don't know. Why? Everything is mysterious in this life and in this death.
It took a novelist to resurrect, beyond this fabulous era of Baroque Rome, an extraordinary temperament about whom we know nothing for sure, except that he was an absolute genius, one of the greatest painters of all time.
- EAN: 9782253112754
- Used book
- Book in good condition
- The book matches the photo
