Caravaggio. La luce e il buio della mente

Who was Caravaggio really? A violent man in a time of ordinary violence? Or a crazy victim of a society of prejudice?

Giovanni De Plato’s book stems from this question, proposing to illuminate the chiaroscuro that dominates in the life, work and clinical case of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. The most basic facts of his biography, traversed by an uninterrupted battle between the brilliant light of his art (the light) and the nocturnal impetuosity of a complex personality (the dark), are still in question: the great, acclaimed and disputed artist is a man accused of being a “cursed,” a “delinquent,” a “murderer,” while even today some psychiatrists and psychologists consider him to be suffering from “mental illness.”

Making use of period documents and testimonies, Giovanni De Plato, through a narrative in the form of a novel, reconstructs the true story of Caravaggio, giving voice to the characters who surrounded his life, in an attempt to discover whether there are good reasons to acquit the artist of the accusation of infamous crimes and redeem his figure from the stigma of psychopathy. The research begins with an analysis of the first two decades of Caravaggio’s life, little explored but crucial to understanding his human and artistic evolution.

AUTHOR
GIOVANNI DE PLATO – Psychiatrist, former professor of psychiatry at the University of Bologna and director of Master’s program at the Buenos Aires site, director of the Department of Mental Health at the Ausl of Bologna Nord, WHO consultant for Latin American countries. He is author of scientific manuals and volumes, essayist, writer and columnist. His main educational texts include Handbook of Psychology and Psychopathology of the Emotions (2015); Elements of Psychiatry (2016). He is on his fourth novel after The Son of the Best (2018), The Mystery of Evita (2020) and for Scheiwiller, Vincent van Gogh. The yellow of madness (2022).