MattRees.net

About the time Caravaggio was painting his masterpieces in Italy, Miguel de Cervantes observed that “Good painters imitate nature. Bad ones spew it up.” Forging seems to me more accurate than imitation. As I researched my Caravaggio novel A NAME IN BLOOD, I realized I had to learn how to paint with oils if I [...]

I went all over Europe and North America, tracking Caravaggio’s works and the places that touched his life for my novel A Name in Blood. But in particular I spent a great deal of time in Rome, Naples and Malta.

Describes the challenges of researching and writing about the great Italian artist Caravaggio for my novel A NAME IN BLOOD. I deliberately took my research too far, not only learning to fence with a rapier and to paint with oils, but dying my beard and cutting my hair in Caravaggio’s style and using New Age [...]

As Willy Wonka says in “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator,” the wisest men know that they need to indulge in some nonsense from time to time. Which is why I like to take my research for my novels just a bit too far. For A Name in Blood I did more than just read [...]

About the time Caravaggio was painting his masterpieces in Italy, Miguel de Cervantes observed that “Good painters imitate nature. Bad ones spew it up.” Forging seems to me more accurate than imitation. As I researched my Caravaggio novel A NAME IN BLOOD, which is out in the UK on 5 July, I realized I had [...]

To research A Name in Blood, my novel about the mystery of Caravaggio’s death, I traveled to all the places where the great artist lived and worked. I visited galleries around the world to stand before his masterpieces, and I read scores of books about him and the period in which he lived. (I don’t [...]

In a Jerusalem café, I was drinking an espresso with Stephen Victor, an Oregon-based practitioner of a process called “family constellations.” I mentioned to him that I thought the process might be useful in my research for A Name in Blood, my historical novel about Caravaggio. Stephen agreed. Though the most common use of constellations [...]

I was on a book tour in Spain when, on a visit to a Madrid gallery, I fell for Caravaggio’s St. Catherine of Alexandria. Here I tell the story of how that encounter with Catherine drew me into the work of the great Italian artist — and to the mystery of his disappearance. The result [...]

He was a raging psycho, an uncontrollably lustful homosexual, and a bit of a bitch. Somehow he also managed to produce some of the most sensitive and innovative art ever painted, much of it clearly based on a sophisticated understanding of theology and optical science. For many art historians and almost all creative artists writing [...]

In the chapel of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, I stood before the great painting now known as Seven Works of Mercy (Caravaggio called it Our Lady of Mercy.) The noise and chaos of Naples’s narrow streets spilled through the door of the chapel, just as they had in Caravaggio’s day. I wondered at the [...]