‘Caravaggio: The Palette and the Sword’
Books 1 and 2
By Milo Manara
Fantagraphics, 64 Pages

This beautifully produced graphic biographical novel depicts the violent world of a great artist, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), whose fiery temperament erupted both on canvas and on the streets of Rome and other Italian cities. Milo Manara’s great achievement is to fuse the color and sensationalism of Caravaggio’s paintings with the gaudy and vibrant tones of comic books, showing that the highs and lows of the artist’s life are the palette of his intense sensibility. 

In Book 1, Caravaggio escapes Rome after killing a man who has murdered a prostitute, one of those women the artist put into his paintings in portrayals of religious figures. The panels of Mr. Manara’s art show that the profane and the sacred were products of the same brush, the emanation of a painter who could portray agony and ecstasy as deeply as his namesake Michelangelo.

The cover of Book 1 depicts the artist holding in his arms the half-nude body of a woman in a scarlet dress, the bottom half of which hangs down in line with her dangling left arm and lolling head as Caravaggio looks down at her as if to fix her in his grief and in his imagination. Her figure dominates a golden frame, with one foot, arm, and head extending beyond the frame, as if in witness to the purport of Caravaggio’s life and art, which in Mr. Manara’s panels are constantly bursting out of the boundaries of his savage society.

Several scenes are lit as in a film noir, emulating Caravaggio’s own use of chiaroscuro. So, too, the plot of the artist’s life plays out as a crime drama.

In Book 1, he is a man on the run, aided by women and men who recognize his greatness and fervently hope he will be pardoned for his crime. What matters to him is that he can continue to work as an artist. He constantly has to shift his ground as those in pursuit of him close in.

Book 2 illustrates Caravaggio’s desperate moves to Malta and Sicily from Naples. Everywhere he goes, Caravaggio wins new friends and those ardently desiring that he complete his great works. The cover of Book 2 captures his plight: He sits, arms and hands outstretched in a plea for salvation, seeking a pardon from the pope and the peace that is denied him because of what he admits is the “devil” inside him. 

Mr. Manara’s work is suffused with omens of Caravaggio’s fraught existence. In the last panels of his doom, he is shown crying out on a beach, fearing that his work has been lost at sea. Help in the form of a beautiful woman arrives too late. She gazes in dismay at him as a figure pitched into the sea.

Both the power and the poignancy of Caravaggio’s work are exquisitely conveyed in Mr. Manara’s wonderful palette of color, with the same haunting beauty that pervades his subject’s paintings. 

Usually the complaint against biography, and even biographical novels, is that they cannot emulate the style of their subjects but can only comment on artistic achievement rather than being artistic achievements in themselves. Mr. Manara has surmounted that failing with a superb visual style of his own, inspired by Caravaggio and yet perfectly conformable to the paneled presentation of comic books.

In addition to Mr. Manara’s work, “A Bonus Gallery of Caravaggio Paintings” is included with the spectacular “Beheading of Saint John the Baptist” (1608), a 12- by 17-foot painting, the only one Caravaggio signed.  “A Milo Manara Gallery” is notable especially for the dramatization of the artist and his models, and a section titled “Story Notes” supplies the historical and biographical background of several panels, buttressed by a bibliography of English, French, and Italian books about Caravaggio.

When you get to the end of the book, you will find Caravaggio in a supplicating posture, washed up on a beach, with the hand of a celestial being just a few inches from his uplifted head, suggesting how close this flawed man came to divinity.

Mr. Rollyson’s writing on art is included in “Essays in Biography.”