"Michelangelo da Caravaggio, one of the most popular of all the great painters, had an amazingly colorful and adventurous career, full of dramatic contrasts.

He was a religious artist who used prostitutes and castrati as his models, a mystic with a police record, the favorite of cardinals, and the Pope's portrait painter, who committed murder; an outlaw from the Roman hills, lionized in Naples; a Knight of Malta imprisoned in a Maltese dungeon, hunted by hired assassins in a vendetta with an unknown enemy and horribly disfigured by sword cuts in a Neapolitan brothel.

Ironically, he died at an early age on a lonely Tuscan beach, after receiving a pardon that would have allowed him to become an even greater painter."--BOOK JACKET. "Based on the latest research, and written like an adventure story, the book concentrates on the man without neglecting the artist, vividly re-creating his life in early Baroque Italy and as a "monk of war" in Malta."--BOOK JACKET.