A Life Sacred and Profane

Caravaggio

'Action-packed, magisterial ... Caravaggio's life was every bit as bloody, sexy and attention-grabbing as the paintings themselves and Graham-Dixon is a man who knows the paintings better than almost any' The Times 
 
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. The worlds of Milan, Rome and Naples through which Caravaggio moved and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and whores, prayer and violence. On the streets surrounding the churches and palaces, brawls and swordfights were regular occurrences. In the course of this desperate life Caravaggio created the most dramatic paintings of his age, using ordinary men and women - often prostitutes and the very poor - to model for his depictions of classic religious scenes. Andrew Graham-Dixon's exceptionally illuminating readings of Caravaggio'spictures, which are the heart of the book, show very clearly how he created their drama, immediacy and humanity, and how completely he departed from the conventions of his time.

Caravaggio has rarely been seen in such depth and such relief as in this marvellous biography. Andrew Graham-Dixon reads Caravaggio's paintings with the habits and assumptions, thoughts and fears of his contemporaries so that we see and feel the paintings more acutely and intensely than before. The man and his work emerge enriched and enlivened

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum

Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane gave me immense pleasure and provided constant delight. It is a thrilling lesson in the art of seeing, a sensual exploration of the shadows of Caravaggio's sometimes violent but always Christian world, a detective story with a highly satisfying ending. Andrew Graham-Dixon's ability to have a reader see a painting through written language is a rare and precious gift. The book's rigour and integrity are obvious. I trusted every word and was sorry to turn the final page

For more than twenty-five years, Andrew Graham Dixon has published a weekly column on art, first in the Independent and more recently, the Sunday Telegraph. He has written a number of acclaimed books, including A History of British Art and Renaissance, and is twice winner of the Hawthornden Prize, Britain's top prize for writing about art. He is one of the leading figures in broadcasting in the UK, having presented seven major television series on art for the BBC.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. The worlds of Milan, Rome and Naples through which Caravaggio moved and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and whores, prayer and violence. On the streets surrounding the churches and palaces, brawls and swordfights were regular occurrences. In the course of this desperate life Caravaggio created the most dramatic paintings of his age, using ordinary men and women - often prostitutes and the very poor - to model for his depictions of classic religious scenes. Andrew Graham-Dixon's exceptionally illuminating readings of Caravaggio'spictures, which are the heart of the book, show very clearly how he created their drama, immediacy and humanity, and how completely he departed from the conventions of his time.

Andrew Graham Dixon

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is a powerfully persuasive investigation into the intellectual and devotional world of Vermeer and his circle. Painting by painting, the riddle of the Sphinx is masterfully unravelled ... [Andrew Graham-Dixon] trawls the archives, lays out new evidence, links pictures never linked before, and teases new meaning from signs, symbols and sitters ... His reading of the paintings is revelatory

Densely researched and highly original .... this book is an extraordinary portrait, flooded with light and colour, and a splendid unfolding of the pressure of meaning in everyday life; in other words, it emulates the special charge of Vermeer’s paintings

Graham-Dixon puts forward a revolutionary theory... Right, or wrong, it is a theory that will change the way people look at that famous pearl earring, as well as at the painter’s other luminous portraits of lone women

With the skill of a good showman and the meticulousness of a scholar, [Graham-Dixon] .... sets out to illuminate the elusive life of Johannes Vermeer [and] to solve the riddle of the ''Girl'' herself .... In his quest to decode Vermeer's work, he draws together a piercingly analytical gaze and some well-informed speculation ... There are few better writers to take on the task

Andrew Graham-DIxon is that rare thing - a tireless scholar and critic who looks beyond the analysis and appreciation of art into its very soul ... [his] book seems to be driven by what other works on the artist lack: passion. Anyone who loves art with warm to the beguiling, personal nature of this beautifully written narrative ... this is art history as an imaginative leap into a world in which the enlightenment was the only bulwark against chaos, and toleration was - and still is - necessary for civilisation.

Eloquently argued, engagingly written and ultimately rather moving

Challenging existing scholarship, Graham-Dixon has a radical new sense of 
Vermeer [that] focuses afresh on the artist’s social networks and the history and religion of the Dutch Republic

Graham-Dixon is an experienced and diligent writer on art, and the book contains much absorbing factual information about Vermeer's mysterious life and his circle ...  [it] attempts to return Vermeer to his own period

This book is going to revolutionize the way we understand Vermeer. I read it slowly, feeling 'like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken'. How extraordinary to realise that things are not the way you have imagined all your life

Peter Carey, twice winner of the Booker Prize

This is a phenomenal book. The research and originality are staggering, suddenly creating a coherent character simply out of understanding the religious, social and political setting properly. I was utterly absorbed by it

Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of Lower than the Angels

Andrew Graham-Dixon places Vermeer's work in the context of its time. He convincingly makes clear that Vermeer's paintings are not simply atmospheric genre pieces, but coded works with a deeply religious meaning. In doing so, he presents a completely new vision of the artworks of Vermeer

Riddles, mysteries, an enigmatically smiling woman with a single earring ... Johannes Vermeer has foxed art historians for centuries. Precious little survives in the archives; the 30-odd paintings he left are as elusive as they are beautiful. Andrew Graham-Dixon lets the light in. Painting by painting, codes are cracked and symbols give up their secrets ... this is a powerfully persuasive and grippingly told new interpretation of Vermeer and his miraculous pictures

Graham-Dixon's amazing discoveries will surprise and delight.... the best biography of Vermeer and the most complete analysis of his artwork that has ever been published

Andrew Graham-Dixon brings fresh archival detective work to the Dutch master - tracing his elusive patrons, unravelling the quiet power of their faith and rediscovering the exact Delft doorway captured in a beloved masterpiece

Striking ... bold ... a staggering feat of art-historical detection that reinterprets the painter's entire career

On 16 May 1696, 21 paintings by “the late J. Vermeer of Delft” appeared at auction in Amsterdam. Described as “being the best he ever made”, the collection, writes Andrew Graham-Dixon in this revelatory and revisionary new book, amounted to approximately two-thirds of Vermeer’s total output, virtually all of which will be known to anyone with an interest in western art

Such is the fame of Johannes Vermeer that it is quite difficult to appreciate the fact that, until Picasso drew attention back to his extraordinary gifts soon after the turn of the twentieth century, he was an almost complete unknown. Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, the new biography by the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon, concerns itself with many of the fascinating details of that lost life

This is impressive detective work ... Graham-Dixon give[s] us the deepest and most rounded portrait of Vermeer we are ever likely to have ... [he] is the best parser of painterly effects since the late Robert Hughes

Graham-Dixon’s task is to resacralize an art that the current age consigns to the realms of the secular. The arguments that are sustained throughout this book could not be more persuasively put, and they rescue Vermeer from the shelf, as it were, on which we have placed him for our convenience

A Life Lost and Found

The paintings of Johannes Vermeer of Delft are some of the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art. Yet like the life of Vermeer himself, they are mysterious and have for centuries defied explanation. Following new leads, and drawing on a mass of historical evidence, some of it freshly uncovered in the archives of Delft and Rotterdam, Andrew Graham-Dixon paints a dramatically new picture of Vermeer, revealing many of the painter’s hitherto unknown friendships as well as his previously undetected allegiance to a radical movement driven underground by persecution. 
 
He also vividly evokes the world of the Dutch Republic as it was in its so-called Golden Age. This was a watery world of fortresses and flood plains, taverns rocked by argument and cities stunned by devastating attacks and explosions: all linked by a network of canals where a uniquely efficient public transport system, operated by horse-drawn passenger barge, enabled people, goods and ideas to glide effortlessly from one place to another. The author sets Vermeer firmly in the context of his time, revealing the patterns of patronage that make sense of his work, and also exposing the difficulties posed by his home life, which was dominated by his Jesuit mother-in law and disturbed by the psychotic behaviour of her only son. 
 
In the past Vermeer has been imagined as a remote and enigmatic figure, but he emerges from this new account as a man deeply engaged with his own society: well-travelled, a reader of books, a man personally connected to many of the most interesting people of his time, including merchants, philosophers, preachers, bankers and regents, as well as his childhood friend, a philanthropic baker named Hendrick van Buyten. Vermeer was also deeply affected by the struggles that shook his world, the Eighty Years War for Dutch independence and the yet more terrible Thirty Years War, which ravaged the neighbouring German lands and resulted in the deaths of millions. The author shows how he was moved to become a pacifist by such atrocities, and thereafter made many of his closest friends in the ranks of Europe’s first peace movement. A further revelation is that Vermeer’s closest collaborator and chief patron was a woman, as were many others in his immediate circle. These are all previously untold stories. 
 
The many piercingly direct descriptions of Vermeer’s pictures, which are the heart of the book, shed new light on the intentions of the artist. Nearly all of his best loved works, Graham-Dixon shows, were originally painted for a single significant location in Delft. In light of such discoveries every one of Vermeer’s major paintings, including The Girl with a Pearl Earring, A View of Delft and The Milkmaid, are reassessed and their meanings rethought. As a result the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer – why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean? – are persuasively answered here for the first time.

Andrew Graham Dixon

Praise for Vermeer

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is a powerfully persuasive investigation into the intellectual and devotional world of Vermeer and his circle. Painting by painting, the riddle of the Sphinx is masterfully u ...

Densely researched and highly original .... this book is an extraordinary portrait, flooded with light and colour, and a splendid unfolding of the pressure of meaning in everyday life; in other words, ...

Graham-Dixon puts forward a revolutionary theory... Right, or wrong, it is a theory that will change the way people look at that famous pearl earring, as well as at the painter’s other luminous portraits o ...

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is a powerfully persuasive investigation into the intellectual and devotional world of Vermeer and his circle. Painting by painting, the riddle of the Sphinx is masterfully u ...

Densely researched and highly original .... this book is an extraordinary portrait, flooded with light and colour, and a splendid unfolding of the pressure of meaning in everyday life; in other words, ...

Graham-Dixon puts forward a revolutionary theory... Right, or wrong, it is a theory that will change the way people look at that famous pearl earring, as well as at the painter’s other luminous portraits o ...

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is a powerfully persuasive investigation into the intellectual and devotional world of Vermeer and his circle. Painting by painting, the riddle of the Sphinx is masterfully u ...

Densely researched and highly original .... this book is an extraordinary portrait, flooded with light and colour, and a splendid unfolding of the pressure of meaning in everyday life; in other words, ...

Graham-Dixon puts forward a revolutionary theory... Right, or wrong, it is a theory that will change the way people look at that famous pearl earring, as well as at the painter’s other luminous portraits o ...

Books by Andrew Graham Dixon

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