Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

"Of all the great Italian painters, Caravaggio speaks most clearly and powerfully to our time. Caravaggio's early paintings of cardsharps, musicians, and street vendors convey his familiarity and fascination with the Roman underworld; his stark and brilliant religious paintings represent, for the first time in European art, the world of the poor, the suffering, and the outcast, and they depict the religious experience of the individual with a directness our age can recognize."--BOOK JACKET. "Caravaggio lived hard and died young, having fled Rome for Sicily, apparently after killing another man in a dispute; his life, involving powerful patrons, sybaritic cardinals, and saints, as well as street boys, prostitutes, and rivalrous painters, is one of the most colorful of any artist's. This biography - the first in English in two generations - shows us Caravaggio's genius with the striking clarity of his own paintings."--BOOK JACKET.

From October 2, 2009 to January 24, 2010, the Galleria Borghese will celebrate the quatercentenary of Caravaggio's death by displaying his masterpieces together with twenty paintings by one of the great artists of the second half of the twentieth century, Francis Bacon, whose birth centenary falls this year. These two extreme figures have entered the collective imagination as "accursed" artists, who expressed the torment of existence in their painting with equal intensity and creative brilliance. Their lives separated by three hundred years, these two disturbing figures will encounter each other for the first time at the Galleria Borghese, which will be enhanced by thirty masterpieces of the two masters from the world's leading museums.

Catalogue de l'exposition présentée au musée des beaux-arts de Nancy du 29 octobre 2010 au 3 janvier 2011. Commandé du vivant du Caravage par Henri II, duc de Lorraine, le chef-d'oeuvre n'a jamais quitté Nancy depuis sa réalisation, en 1608. Transposé au XIXe siècle sur une nouvelle toile, ce tableau fragile, de 2,05 m sur 1,85 m, a bénéficié de campagnes de restauration exceptionnelles, menées conjointement par les équipes pluridisciplinaires de l'Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro de Rome et du Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France. Croisant la fascinante chronique des investigations de la nouvelle imagerie scientifique et le regard des historiens et des historiens de l'art, l'exposition-dossier qui met à l'honneur une Annonciation restaurée est l'occasion d'approfondir la connaissance de l'extraordinaire maître lombard.