From Booklist
Caravaggio has become an icon for the paradoxical connection between the sacred and the profane found in his work. A seventeenth-century painter of daring authenticity, he is also remembered for his reckless behavior and violent temper, which led to his killing a man under circumstances that remain mysterious. Norwegian writer Naess, intrigued by the dark rumors that cling to Caravaggio like shadows and by the true nature of holiness, draws on historical documents to create a set of hypnotic first-person narratives that add up to a Rashomon-like multiplicity of perspectives. Innocenzo Promontorio, the most loquacious and most fictionalized witness, is a young man who models for and parties with Caravaggio. Innocenzo also studies astronomy, which, like Caravaggio's unprecedented realism, was considered a dangerous quest for truth in a time of tyrannical church rule. Each subsequent witness--including the proud and mettlesome prostitute, Phyllida, Caravaggio's model for the Virgin Mary; the painter's hypocritical priest brother; and several fellow artists--relates self-serving theories about the murder in clever monologues that ponder truth, justice, and faith. Donna Seaman
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Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Norwegian

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"At the centre of this literary detective story are the events of a May evening in Rome in 1606 when the painter Caravaggio was challenged to a duel and killed a man." "What was the cause of the fight that resulted in him fleeing Rome into exile? Evidence found in the Vatican archives provides some clues in the form of first-person witness statements of nine people who came in contact with the artist before his flight and subsequent mysterious death in exile." "The book explores destiny, sensuality, love, brutality, unquestioning religious faith and the line between the sacred and the profane as well as the reliability of memory. It asks how far an artist may go and how an aggressive, self-destructive and heavy-drinking libertine could create an art of genius that united a passionate, sensual nature with a keen sense of observation, an intense aesthetic sensibility and an unorthodox kind of religious devotion."--BOOK JACKET.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

This 1997 novel by a prominent Norwegian author assembles the testimony of nine "witnesses" to explain a scandalous incident in the year 1606: it seems the celebrated (and impulsive) painter killed a man in a duel, then fled from Rome into a prolonged exile. The witnesses' several "accounts"—dominated by that of Caravaggio's intimate friend and sometime model, would-be astronomer Innocenzo Promontorio—subtly explore the conflict between the artist's rigorous self-discipline and willful sensuality, in a nicely textured tale that in its best pages becomes something very like a late-Renaissance Rashomon.