High Art and Low Life

There simply can't be many biographies as good to read as Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio. Admittedly, he has more to work with, as far as a tense action thriller requires, than Andrew Motion or James Booth had with the life of their university librarian poet, but it's a brilliantly organized story over and above its sensational content.

Caravaggio's art, it seems, benefitted from his lack of formal training. It would be difficult to think of anyone whose sublime talent was at quite such odds with their turbulent, troubled life. Before he died aged 38, he had spent several years on the run from the crimes he left behind him, most of which were generated by a volatile personality in conflict with a finely-graded social system in which slights and disrespect were readily the cause of grievances that needed to be settled.

Brilliant though his paintings clearly are, his subject matter alone couldn't make him a major favourite because I'll have the Dutch from a few years later any day but Graham-Dixon's explanations show how much was in them. By the age of 38, though, whether due to injuries sustained or not, he was well into decline, usin his chiaroscuro technique to hide his shortcomings in darkness.

It is remarkable how much of the desperado life can be pieced together from such disparate sources but there remain inevitable gaps and the exact circumstances of the last few days, trying to get back to Rome, separated from the paintings on the boat he had been going on before he was detained, would either be better to know, or not.

For me, an artist's story should be that of tremendous early work, a middle period of masterpieces and maybe a sad decline. I'm not sure I'm going to try to claim that Shakespeare suffered that but the last plays aren't quite Hamlet; I had the feeling that Seamus Heaney was going over old ground in his last two books but Patrick Hamilton, who had written such fine novels, turned in no more than his outline of a work in progress in Unknown Assailant.

 

Caravaggio on film was done by Derek Jarman and the DVD can be had for less than a fiver and so I'll have one. I'm in no hurry to return to the overly scholarly Schwartz Rembrandt and Tales from the Colony Room looks no better than it should be so next up is likely to be A.N. Wilson's Paul, who was possibly the inventor of Christianity, not Jesus Christ who, it might say, never said he was anything but Jewish. Maybe Paul's got a lot to answer for but we can rely on Wilson to put a contrary slant on it.

Books about such faraway times and places have the advantage of all their contemporary detail, as far as it can be understood, or misunderstood, and so Shakespeare's London, Caravaggio's Rome and Paul's Mediterranean travels can be made more vividly of interest than a walk up the Copnor Road to Tesco Express although I'm sure they'd be very taken by the opportunity to see suburban Portsmouth in 2023.

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Racetrack Wiseguy writes - Diego Velazquez was worth waiting for yesterday, 2.4m gns worth of Frankel progeny, especially at 4/6 when returned at 2/5 and coming home alone.

Hold your bets, though, on next year's classics. Aidan O'Brien has a jigsaw puzzle to do, over the winter rather than just yet, in deciding which horses to send where in order to win everything and there will be more 2yo's to be seen yet, probably from him but hopefully from somebody else, too.

Diego did the necessary business to get me past the latest milestone in accumulated profit for the year. It's been a steadily, gradually winning summer and that's all I expect of it. Extrapolating the year so far across the remaining four and a half months would break last year's record but that's not the game. Winning at all is good enough.

It's necessary to understand that. Unlike the Daily Express a few weeks ago who appeared to think that the rate of inflation being reduced made us better off. No, it means we're still getting worse off but not quite as quickly.

Perhaps they were Liz Truss's economic advisors in disguise or, like just happened on Sounds of the 70's, they thought that Creedence Clearwater Revival's I Heard It Through the Grapevine was 'Better than the Original' ( !!! ).

One presses on regardless. Letsbefrankaboutit was a well-backed favourite from an in-form stable in the first at the Curragh this afternoon. It was a big field and so I even looked at the alleged draw advantage, found it to be 'high' and so thought 15 out of 16 was a good thing.

It easily won the race on his side but finished nearly 4 lengths behind the horse drawn 4 on the other.

It not being something I usually look at, being mostly a jumping man and not liking big fields on the flat, I don't even know what 'high' means. Maybe two horses drawn on the other side of the Curragh's wide open spaces were better horses. Chepstow in October can't come soon enough for me.