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Rating: Can an artist, both reactionary and revolutionary, undeservedly thrust into the filth of the seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation, transform into a private detective, kill and risk a death sentence to avenge the victims of fake-Christian horror? This is the central theme of The Secret Painting of Caravaggio by Francesco Fioretti, an author who has already come to light with the success of The Secret Book of Dante. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the avant-gardist who arrived in papal Rome of the anti-Baroque academics, delves into the seediest alleys of the Vatican's heart, teeming with courtesans and prostitutes enslaved by powerful families and oppressive courtiers, and - albeit unsuccessfully - attempts to overturn that fake ethical and moral order imposed by the Church after the schism of the sixteenth century, aligning himself and his art with the outcasts, the wretched, the "fallen women," and the common folk, excluded from the power of the Urbe and trampled by men of honor and lords of the faith.
The novel is the perfect portrait of Roman squalor in early Modernity. Caravaggio, a controversial figure, harshly criticized and opposed by the Academy yet highly sought after by noble patrons, finds himself dealing with the mysterious murders of two former prostitutes, both fugitives from the Convent of the Converted (a place of redemption for street rejects in the process of becoming nuns). With the precious help of his lover Lena, Michelangelo investigates the dynamics of these deaths with zeal and discretion, eventually identifying the filthy activities among the friars of the Convent and the would-be nuns, anything but purified, as the causes of these crimes. Detective Caravaggio, who can boast an unhappy dense résumé of brawls, clandestine duels, denouncements by the Bargello (the papal police force), and quarrels with numerous rivals, fully transforms into a serial killer with the murder of young Ranuccio Tomassoni, scion of a pro-Spanish noble family, once the lover of Annuccia Bianchini, one of his ex-prostitutes found lifeless. Thus begins his peregrination across the Mediterranean, between Naples, Malta, and Sicily, a few years before his enigmatic disappearance in today's Maremma, which prevents him from completing and successfully concluding his investigations.
The Secret Painting of Caravaggio is a work that lends itself to multiple interests and interpretations, from the artistic to the historical realm, passing through the traditional genre of the thriller and including the verve of the adventure context; Fioretti thus delivers an extremely varied and dynamic volume in its aims, offering a semi-biographical novel of a character of immense cultural stature like Michelangelo Merisi, to whom tradition has attributed the paternity of the artistic Baroque. The profile of Caravaggio reshaped by the author is astonishing: a man of exceptional ingenuity and marvelous thought, untied from the cliché of the cursed and violent artist, a lover of science and philosophy, an "inventor" of a new way of conceiving art and the depiction of human subjects (no more idealism and aesthetic perfection, Madonnas and Saints who wear the unsacred garb of beggars and prostitutes, solemn figures reduced to bodies scientifically represented in the decay and consumption of death and agony), knowledgeable of modern society, the Copernican and Galilean revolution. All this impressive baggage of knowledge, faith, science, and philosophy is embodied in the Lombard's "secret painting," the famous Death of the Virgin, in which the ex-prostitute Annuccia, poisoned by belladonna, is the Divine Mother of human suffering and the horror of Christianity torn and lacerated by conflict.
The volume unravels between fiction and reality, between the author's fervent imagination and strict adherence to historical sources. And so it is that the irascibility and intemperance of the hot-headed Caravaggio are extremely useful in leading the thread of the investigations and defending himself from the attacks, by sword and by brush, of academic rivals, while his anti-traditionalist scientific avant-gardism allows him to identify and appreciate in hindsight the contemporary - or nearly so - figures of Copernicus and Galileo and to apply their theories to the artistic realm. Michelangelo da Merisi is thus the human light that shines on the darkness and filth of a Europe fragmented into many Christianities that claim the purity of origins with massacres, violence, terror, and the coercive domination over the helpless populace.
Tasty, flavorful, and colorful, The Secret Painting of Caravaggio is a work of complete re-evaluation of the anti-myth of Caravaggio, the perfect balance of creativity and historicity turned into a novel, a way to immerse oneself - in a less overexposed Da Vinci Code manner - in the seedy hidden tunnels of the Vatican and to understand how Art can excellently walk hand in hand with the scientific rigor, social ethics of legality and equality, and the breathtaking allure of adventure.
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