Chicago Adult Entertainment: Review: Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon

It’s hard to understate the drama of Caravaggio’s short life. When he was a boy, Milan was hit by an outbreak of the bubonic plague, in which victims would die horribly within four days of contracting the disease. As a young man, he went to Rome where he lived a vagabond life, moving house 10 times in his first three years in the city. In order to succeed as a painter, the young Caravaggio had to find powerful patrons. This he did, but his innovative flair often made life a struggle: five times in the course of his career patrons rejected the paintings he had done for them and he was forced to revise the works into a more acceptable form.
Caravaggio made his subjects human, even though the scenes he painted were biblical or from myth. His Death of the Virgin, showing the Virgin Mary surrounded by a crowd of mourners, was rejected by the Carmelite fathers “because he had painted, in the person of the Madonna, the portrait of a courtesan whom he loved — and had done so very exactly, without religious devotion”, according to an early biographer, Giulio Mancini.

See the full article from “Irish Independent”