Staying with one of our sons over the week-end, I found that I was having difficulty sleeping, so got up and decided to read for an hour. This is nothing to worry about, as I know from personal experience that I can fall into a bimodal sleeping pattern quite often, with an afternoon sleep balancing a period of activity in the middle of the night. I had with me on this occasion the biography of Caravaggio, by Andrew Graham-Dixon, that I have mentioned in a couple of previous postings.
It really is a remarkably good read, with several surprises. We all know, for example, that Caravaggio led a pretty disreputable existence for a good part of his life. Dixon goes a good way beyond that, and presents convincing evidence that his subject actually operated as a pimp. Several of his regular models were actually women who worked for him in other respects. Also, a good deal of the violence he was involved in probably had to do with his efforts to defend his “patch” and his “assets”.
Incidentally, I find Dixon’s scholarship to be astonishing. His rummaging in the records of the magistrates’ courts of Rome seems to have left him with an unrivalled vocabulary of sixteenth entry obscenities and expletives.
Despite all of this, my admiration for Caravaggio grows all time. Don’t worry: I an not likely to entertain the idea that in order to be a great artist you must be a bohemian. An outsider, perhaps, but that is another thing.