Visitors to London’s National Gallery will find themselves in the company of Europe’s finest artists. Across its many rooms, the Gallery hosts masterpieces from Degas, Rembrandt, Da Vinci, and, relevant for this book review, Caravaggio. The scale of these works is truly breathtaking.
Next to each painting is a small plaque detailing the artist’s name, the painting’s name, the relevant dates for both artist and painting, and a short paragraph describing the artwork. But many plaques are bemusing because of what’s missing.
On some plaques, the painting’s name bears a question mark. On others, no artist is credited, leaving the work as “unknown” or “After Rembrandt”. Still others have no definitive dates attached, only a range e.g “1578-1590”. The paragraph describing the paintings doesn’t help either. For example, take this paragraph for Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano’s Saint Mark(?): “Two monumental saints – Mark and Sebastian – stand in niches topped with shell-like arches. They must originally have formed the outer wings of a multi-panelled altarpiece. We don't know where they originally came from, but in the seventeenth century two panels were recorded in the church of the Crociferi, Venice, where they flanked an image of the Annunciation by Cima (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). They do not seem to have belonged together, however: the Annunciation is taller, quite different in composition and painted on cloth rather than wood.“
Notice the ambiguity. “We don’t know where they came from” and “They do not seem to have belonged together” show the Gallery is missing key bits of information. But this isn’t a matter of laziness.
Art History is a weird animal because artists now deemed legendary were unremarkable people in their lifetime. As such, few paintings come attached with all the relevant records. Fraudsters love this ambiguity as it allows them to slip forgeries into auction houses. Galleries presumably hate this ambiguity because visitors lack a solid understanding of what they’re looking at despite the institution’s best efforts.
Because Art History is filled with so many ambiguities and educated guesses, authors writing in that field have the same problem the National Gallery has. Unfortunately for them, they can’t hide their difficulties behind a pretty painting.
One notable example is today’s book, Caravaggio, by Andrew Graham-Dixon.
What’s It About?
For once, that’s not a rhetorical question. Normally, I would use this section of the book review to provide a blurb before going into what worked and what didn’t work for me. But this time, I can’t quite do that. Ostensibly, the book is a biography of the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio. In actuality, the book is…well, we’ll get to that.
What Works
Not much, but I’m cutting the author a lot of slack here and I feel you should too. Graham-Dixon had a titanic task in front of him. On paper, his job was to chronicle Caravaggio’s life to examine which events may or may not have influenced his paintings. As an artist, Caravaggio’s training, style, and commissions were the bread-and-butter of his life. So, theoretically, exploring Caravaggio’s personal life alongside his artistic works would have made an interesting case-study for sixteenth-century Italy.
But though this might have been Graham-Dixon’s plan when creating this book, the archival reality doomed that idea from the get-go.
What Doesn’t Work
The problem with this book is that there’s neither enough surviving documentation of Caravaggio’s life nor is there enough space in the book to adequately study Caravaggio’s work. As such, Graham-Dixon has serious narrative holes to fill. Long sections of the book are devoted neither to Caravaggio’s life nor his art, but rather to what life was like in Renaissance Rome. These sections are like a commercial break that seemingly never ends. So instead of a biography, this book is a sort of Renaissance history book with a weird obsession on one particular artist.
Then when we get to Caravaggio’s paintings, Graham-Dixon has the hideous job of trying to describe a painting in words…a painting not ready available to the reader. Sure the book comes with image plates containing pictures of Caravaggio’s paintings, but they don’t tell you which painting Graham-Dixon is talking about at any one time. So after the reader escapes an irrelevant section on Rome’s criminal underworld, they’ll so find themselves sinking under descriptions of a painting for which they lack context.
And because so few documents about Caravaggio’s life have survived, the book is frequently incoherent.
The Moral of The Story
Unlike my other book reviews condemning an author as an incompetent wastrel, I’m letting Andrew Graham-Dixon off the hook. None of the above problems with his book stem from gross authorial misconduct. Rather, they’re a consequence of him having little material to work with.
Books, especially non-fiction, are deceptive because they don’t show how many other books, articles, and transcripts the author needed to read and synthesise into the new book. The only clue the reader has is the bibliography and works cited section at the back of the book. Depending on the subject, these two sections alone can take up a third of the pages between the covers. Graham-Dixon’s bibliography isn’t anywhere close to this number, and that’s the problem.
Fiction books aren’t quite the same, but the most realistic and memorable fiction books are backed up by considerable author research. For example, Margaret Mitchell spent years listening to relatives’ Civil War stories and reading large amounts of (now widely considered dubious) material to make Gone With The Wind feel as grand and epic as possible.
Unfortunately for Graham-Dixon, he didn’t have Margaret Mitchell’s mountain of paper. There just wasn’t enough there.