Can a book be judged by its cover? Monographs on Caravaggio, as David Carrier has observed in “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: Caravaggio and His Interpreters” (Word and Image 3 (1987): 50), are a case in point. The dust-jacket illustrations that embellish studies of this artist’s work are usually selected from a small group of well-known canvases that are considered synecdochic of his stylistic or thematic preferences as a whole. In the case of John T. Spike’s new book on the artist, the images on the front and back of the dust jacket—the Vienna David with the Head of Goliath and the privately owned Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge—are neither well known nor even works whose authorship is universally accepted. Yet Spike’s text does not dwell on such matters, being more concerned with the interpretation of securely attributed works than with the odd question of attribution. Inconspicuously tucked into the rear cover, however, is an accompanying CD-ROM that comprises a full oeuvre catalogue, prepared with the assistance of Michéle K. Spike.

Like John T. Spike’s previous monographs on Masaccio and Fra Angelico, this Abbeville Press publication is a large and sumptuous volume, profusely illustrated with excellent color plates that are carefully integrated into the text itself. The structure of the book is conventional, with each of the five chronologically designated chapters devoted to a distinctive period in Caravaggio’s career. Despite its physical resemblance to generic coffee-table art books, Spike’s volume is neither bland nor ingratiating, its 765 footnotes attesting to the meticulous scholarship that everywhere underlies its lively prose.

Within the traditional format of the “life and works” monograph, Spike ranges far and wide in an effort to contextualize Caravaggio’s artistic genius. Although he affirms that Caravaggio was “the first artist in history whose paintings seem directly concerned with his own life” (15), the author resists the temptation to allow the biography to subsume the work itself or, for that matter, to substitute fuzzy theoretical thinking for sharp-eyed looking, a shortcoming of more than one recent Caravaggio study. Each chapter is divided into a multitude of shorter essays (unfortunately not listed in the Table of Contents), which explore, particularly for the earlier periods, the social, political, religious, and epistemological matrices of his art. Thus the second chapter, “1592–1597,” integrates the analysis of individual pictures with illuminating excursions into topics like “The Comedy of Deceivers,” “Del Monte and Renaissance Humanism in Urbino,” “The French Controversy After 1592,” and “Del Monte and Alchemy.” Later, in the chapter entitled “1598–1600,” Spike’s discussion of the concept of Grace is as concise and clear an explanation as can be found anywhere of the abstruse theological controversy then dividing Protestants from Catholics and even Catholics among themselves.

Fresh insights into the methods and meaning of Caravaggio’s art run through nearly every page. One of the most provocative of these ideas is the recurring suggestion (70, 84, and 158) that Caravaggio may have resorted to the use of optical aids such as mirrors or lenses in fashioning his lifelike images. This is, of course, the argument that David Hockney has advanced in his recent book Secret Knowledge, Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking, 2001), a volume that created a major stir after its release but has since subsided, partly under the weight of its own hubris. Spike has cautiously endorsed this argument, finding residual evidence of the practice in pictures like the Uffizi Bacchus and the Kansas City Baptist. In light of subsequent investigations made in the scientific community that dispute Hockney’s assertion, most notably by David Stork and Christopher Tyler, this is not a proposition that seems to be gaining credibility among scholars in any discipline. Leaving aside the putative use of optical aids, however, Spike’s discussion of Caravaggio’s compositional methods, particularly his penchant for incising figural outlines into the wet gesso, is lucid and sound.

The CD-ROM, “Catalogue of Paintings,” would constitute an equally formidable second volume were it printed on paper. At 464 pages, the disc contains a full account of seventy-seven works (some with second versions) considered “Autograph Works,” twenty-two classified as “Other Works Attributed,” and 115 others included as “Lost Works.” Entries for the first two categories are exhaustive, updating and extending the scope of Mia Cinotti’s canonical catalogue, Michelangelo Merisi detto il Caravaggio: tutte le opere (Bergamo: Poligrafiche Bolis, 1983). Apart from the physical advantages of small size and portability, CD-ROM technology allows the reader to search for paintings either by date, location, or title. While the miniaturization of this database undoubtedly will lead to the theft of the disc from school libraries, its flexible format permits a variety of approaches to be taken in studying his art.

While most of the entries in the “Catalogue of Paintings” contain few surprises, a handful of attributions and redatings reflect Spike’s ingenuity and courage as a connoisseur. To take up the matter of the dust jacket again, the Vienna version of David with the Head of Goliath (on the front cover) is a picture whose authenticity—as Spike freely acknowledges in both text and catalogue—"has been doubted by most authorities" (197). But affirming that “the most ticklish disputes over attribution are very often disagreements over dating—and vice versa” (200), he contends that the work is comparable not to the Seven Acts of Mercy, to which it is sometimes unfavorably related, but with the Vienna Madonna of the Rosary, itself a problematic picture to be sure. By the same logic, Spike fully accepts the equally problematic Rome Narcissus, putting his own reservations to rest by assigning it not to Caravaggio’s Roman period—as most have assumed could only be the case—but to his later years, ca. 1608–10. Considering the technical evidence, such as the coarseness of the canvas, along with the painting’s stylistic and thematic affinities, the later date indeed seems to make the most sense to longstanding skeptics of the work, this reviewer among them.

Two pictures “rediscovered” by Spike himself are also catalogued in the “Autograph Works.” The first of these is the Portrait of Cardinal Cesare Baronio in the Uffizi, which he dates 1602–3. One of the mysteries of Caravaggio studies is the disappearance of the nearly two dozen portraits attributed to him in early inventories. These works cannot all have vanished: Given the relatively unadventurous nature of his few securely attributed portraits—the Courtesan Phyllis (Berlin, now destroyed) and Alof de Wignacourt (Louvre), for example—it is reasonable to assume that a number of the “lost” works have only been miscatalogued or simply overlooked. The Baronio, undocumented and long forgotten in the Uffizi storerooms, may well be such a work, although Spike is oddly not forthcoming in support of his attribution. More curious, perhaps, is his failure to include the portrait of Bernardino Cesari, in the Accademia di San Luca, Rome, in his checklist of paintings attributed to Caravaggio, despite Maurizio Marini’s seemingly persuasive proposal that this is, in fact, the early Caravaggio cited in the Patrizi inventory of 1624. For Spike, the Patrizi portrait remains “lost,” a sign to be sure of how fraught with uncertainty attributions to even an artist as singular as Caravaggio can be.

Without question, Spike’s most significant claim comes not with his upgrading of a minor work like the Baronio portrait or the downgrading of a major if already widely questioned one such as The Toothpuller (Florence, Palazzo Pitti), but with his other cover story, as it were: Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge. This is a privately owned picture on loan to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota that surfaced a decade ago and was first published by Spike himself in 1995 (FMR 75 (1995): 14–22). Unlike the sublime Ambrosiana Still Life, this painting is wildly provocative in both form and content. If Spike tends in his text to overemphasize the picture’s religious allusions (“Thus you will know them by their fruits” (146)), the overtly erotic nature of the painting’s juicy cleft melons and figs, phallic gourds, and peaches like “dimpled derriéres” (146) leaves little doubt that it is indeed a groundbreaking work. The very combination of sly wit and sexual innuendo was a conceptual favorite of Caravaggio while, more importantly, the style of the picture seems—to this reviewer at least—to be consistent with Spike’s dating of ca. 1603. That Caravaggio painted more than one still life during the course of his career is universally understood; that he painted this very subject (“Diversi frutti porti sop’a un tavolino di pietra in una canestra”) is documented in two seventeenth-century Barberini inventories. The rediscovery of this canvas is of major importance to the understanding of both Caravaggio’s life and work. Indeed, it is a cover story, controversial though the attribution may be, and one rightly concerned, as the book for the most part is, with broader and ultimately more meaningful issues.