Harr's new book tracks lost Caravaggio masterpiece mystery

A century ago, Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio (the name of the town in which he was born), was one of the most obscure Italian baroque painters. His artistic genius for capturing stark, engrossing images bathed in a swath of light on otherwise murky canvases was unheralded and his hard-lived, violent life all but forgotten.

In the last 100 years, Caravaggio's legend and art have been resuscitated by scholars and by art lovers who have rediscovered the fascinating story of a volatile 17th century painter and his incomparable artistic achievements.

The latest in a string of Caravaggio books comes from a seemingly unlikely source. Author Jonathan Harr is a journalist best known for his National Book Award-nominated "A Civil Action," about the American legal system gone awry.

Harr, a journalist by trade, says his "The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece" grew out of a magazine article.

"In 1993, I happened to read a short newspaper article ... about the discovery of a painting by Caravaggio that had been lost for 200 years. (It) raised more questions than it answered, but I thought that the bare bones of the story -- a lost masterpiece of great value that suddenly emerges out of the distant past -- had the elements of good narrative. Back then I was still struggling to finish 'A Civil Action,' and everything seemed more interesting to me than what I was supposed to be doing. So I clipped the article and put it aside."

While "A Civil Action" remained on the burner, Harr returned to the Caravaggio story.

"I wrote a piece for The New York Times magazine about the painting. ... I only got to tell a small part of the story," Harr says. "I thought I might be able to turn it into a book. As soon as I finished 'A Civil Action,' having no expectation that it would do very well, I immediately proposed the lost painting book to my then literary agent. He told me he doubted any publisher would give me enough of an advance to travel to Italy and do the book. So I kept looking for another book subject but one thing after another either fell apart or didn't satisfy me.

"And then serendipity intervened. My friend, the writer Tracy Kidder, had taken some time between books to study Italian at Smith College and he wanted to go to Italy to try out what he'd little learned. He suggested we go together. As it happened, we both knew Lester Little, a professor of medieval studies at Smith, who had just been appointed director of the American Academy in Rome. Tracy and I wrangled an invitation. The only requirement was that we have a project to work on. And so, six years after the fact, I resurrected the idea of Caravaggio's lost painting. It seemed, in some way as if I were destined to write this book after all."

There are fewer than a hundred Caravaggio works still to be seen in Italian churches and the art museums of the world, so art historians are always eager to find a work that can be attributed to him. The mysterious "The Taking of Christ" had long fascinated them. So, when some art history students in Rome uncovered some traces of the painting, people noticed. Not long after, a painting turned up far from Rome that got even more of a buzz going.

These events form the meat of "The Lost Painting," which is rendered in the kind of fast-moving, straightforward prose that is the goal of all journalists. It reads, in fact, like a lengthy magazine article.

"The Lost Painting" is a story of dedicated scholarship and a passion for painting. Harr says those are the aspects that drew him to the story.

"It was part mystery, part quest, part amazing coincidence of the sort that only happens in real life," he says. "And it involved a work of art -- paint on piece of fabric -- that had incalculable aesthetic, historical, and of course commercial, value. This fragile piece of work had survived 400 years, through wars, revolutions, plagues, floods, famines, fires."

Harr was, of course, also drawn by the magnetic pull of Caravaggio and his art.

"And then there was Caravaggio and his life, a painter of genius, utterly revolutionary, who conceived a new manner of painting -- naturalistic and at times starkly realistic -- that was as different from the Renaissance and Mannerists painters who had proceeded him as Cubists were from Impressionists.

"His life -- what we know of it -- is fascinating, too. He was a rogue, constantly in trouble, and in and out of jail, usually for assault and battery. He behaved like a thug, he dressed in ragged clothes stained with paint, clothes that he rarely washed or changed. And of course, he killed and man and spent his last years in flight, traveling constantly, becoming increasingly paranoid and deranged, and yet still painting magnificent works of art."

Although Harr is clearly fascinated by the painter, his subjects here are the painting and those searching for it and they are what keep readers riveted throughout the story. No less engaging is the idea that ordinary people can sometimes find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

While aspects of Caravaggio's life are interspersed throughout the text, it is not a book about Caravaggio, strictly-speaking.

"The research of (art students) Francesca and Laura and (art conservator) Sergio were all part and parcel of the book I chose to write. I didn't want to write yet another biography of Caravaggio," Harr says. "But I also wouldn't have written the book if the artist had not been Caravaggio; if they had been following a painting by Guercino or Cavaliere d'Arpino. The stakes would have been much lower, and consequently not as significant in the art world. Nor as dramatic, I might add."

Jonathan Harr reads from and signs copies of "The Lost Painting" at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 9 at Schwartz Bookshop on Downer Avenue.