Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (London, 1983). Deeply unreliable on the facts of the painter’s life, but still worth reading for some of the author’s interpretations of the pictures themselves. Also contains a useful translation of Francesco Susinno’s eighteenth-century life of Caravaggio.
Helen Langdon (ed.), The Lives of Caravaggio (London, 2005). A handy, pocket-sized edition of the three principal early biographies of the artist, by Giulio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione and Pietro Bellori.
Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (London, 1998). Much the best twentieth-century biography of Caravaggio, outstanding in particular on the painter’s years in Rome. The last few chapters should be read with care, however, because some of Langdon’s assumptions and conclusions concerning Caravaggio’s later life have been overtaken by subsequent archival discoveries.
Roberto Longhi (ed. Giovanni Previtali), Caravaggio (Rome, 1982). For those who can read Italian, these are collected writings on the artist by arguably the greatest and certainly the most influential Caravaggio scholar of the twentieth century. Full of pithy, down-to-earth descriptions of the paintings.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London, 2003). A brilliant, panoramic overview of the religious history of the period.
Maurizio Marini, Caravaggio. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, ‘pictor praestantissimus’ (Rome, 1989). Another for the reader of Italian. Marini’s book draws together a great number of the primary documents relating to Caravaggio’s paintings, and reprints many of them in facsimile.
John T. Spike, Caravaggio (New York, 2001). Somewhat marred by the author’s attributional optimism (so much so that both the front and back covers of the book show pictures that Caravaggio never painted!). But the accompanying CD-ROM catalogue is tremendously useful, bringing together just about all the primary sources for all of the major paintings. In his catalogue Spike also furnishes remarkably long and comprehensive lists of bibliographical references for every single one of Caravaggio’s paintings – a monumental endeavour, making his catalogue indispensable to anyone wanting to explore any particular work in great depth and detail.
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First published by Allen Lane 2010
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