Caravaggio. The Complete Works

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Caravaggio ( 1571-1610 ) was an Italian painter of the Baroque movement renowned for his bold and masterful use of light and darkness ( Chiaroscuro ) to create dramatic compositions.

This art book by Taschen is a splendid reproduction of the now out of print deluxe edition [[ASIN:383650183X Caravaggio: The Complete Works]], first published in 2009. Although slightly smaller in print size than the original edition, the book is still a hefty volume and comes at a much lower price tag, making it a great value purchase for a very comprehensive collection of Caravaggio's works.

The huge prints of Caravaggio's paintings are beautifully and faithfully reproduced in the book, and the page count and content is identical to the original edition.

There are many Caravaggio art books out there, but this is one the best. Taschen has created a book of exceptional value and quality, and this gets my highest recommendations.

This is wonderful. The book appears to be very well made, and comes with a hard cardboard protective frame printed with the same imagery that is on the dust sleeve. I find the quality of the print and paintings to be quite fine. I can see what some folks were referring to, in reviews of a prior edition, when they mentioned some of the images are dark. Some are darker than others, but they do not appear to be inconsistently exposed. I do not see this as a problem. If you are looking at fine details, you'd want to do do that in sufficient light. The images as printed are fine for general browsing in most lighting conditions. The book is very large, and heavy. I have to say that the current heavily discounted Amazon.com price (around $35 at my time of purchase) is an unbelievable deal for a book of this quality and size. Even the regular price for this printing is completely fair and lower than I would have expected for this product.

This is a gorgeously printed and produced book, with Caravaggio's difficult-to-reproduce chiaroscuro images presented in deep rich clarity. The figures and stories seem to emanate from the day as they do from the actual canvases. The copious text is well written, scholarly, and evocative, and fitting a painter of Caravaggio's importance. The book design, with a sleeve that collapses into a book stand, is clever and stately. I have already spent hours exploring its pages, even weeping at imagery I have loved for decades as if I were standing before my beloveds once again.

Customer beware: the item you'll receive isNOT the advertised 2019 edition, but a 2015 print (ISBN 978-3-8354-5581-4).

The print quality is pretty shoddy in parts. Some of the close-ups are so badly reproduced that you can see individual pixels (!) with the naked eye. E.g., look at the thumb on page 161.

Finally, what makes this a terrible purchase is that there's a bait and switch. Though the item description says the book is a "slip case" edition - as evidenced by earlier stock item photos (attached to this review), testify to that - you won't get anything. Instead, Amazon Prime throw the book, without protective cover or any other interior packaging else, into an oversized empty box. As a result, the book you receive is damaged on arrival. Simply not worth your hassle.

This used to be on sale for $35, and is definitely not worth more - especially not now, that the item is being shipped without protective slip case and handled so poorly.

I purchased this book after seeing very good reviews on it. However, reading reviews and seeing the specifications of the book held no clue as to what an outstanding book this would be when I opened the parcel this afternoon. The book is a rather heavy coffee table book. The pages are heavy and nothing from the back of any page shows through. The images are all clear and this includes all of his works with details of most of them, and several fold out pages showing the paintings in even greater detail. I always expect the best from Taschen's art books and this one surely doesn't disappoint. It is well worth the price.

This book is massive--definitely a coffee table stunner, but not great for carrying around. It is, however, the absolute 100% best resource for Caravaggio reproductions. You will never find another book that reproduces Caravaggio's works as faithfully as Schutze's. Other books do not even come close, and some are downright shameful. As a PhD student working with a professor to digitize some of Caravaggio's works for a seminar course, Schütze's book was the only resource I would use to provide images of works without acceptable digital reproductions. I ended up purchasing my own copy because it was so beautiful.

Excellent Taschen publication. Generous number of large scale closeup details. Informative text, with a number of insightful descriptions of Caravaggio's evolving style. One fairly minor caveat: Mr Schutze's descriptions of the painter's intentions to elicit particular emotional responses from viewers of his work derive not from any writings left to us by the painter, but rather from Mr Schutze's own emotions. As he seems to be solidly of a religious bent, he gives Caravaggio purely religious intentions, which may or may not reflect the painter's mind and heart.

Most of the reproductions in this tome (and a true tome it is!) are splendid, detailed enough to show the weave of the canvas and an occasional brushstroke - though Caravaggio's style was not such that many brushstrokes would be obvious anyway. I am not thrilled with the decision to show several of the reproductions in full two-page spreads, i.e., across the gutter. I find that this distracts from my enjoyment of the image in most of those cases, but that is a quibble. I have to admit to not reading much of the text at all, so far. This is largely due to the huge disparity between the font size and the book's dimensions (it's difficult to comfortably read) and the decision to sometimes print gold-colored text on black paper was a poor choice, if a stylish one. All that said, this is a gorgeous book. If you love Caravaggio, I think you'll love this addition to your library. Note the size well, though. It's huge, and you will have to consider where and how to display it.

Superb picture print quality, the book is so beautiful and well composed that my eyes cannot get enough of it. It is hard to believe the small price paid for so much quality within this large size book. Five stars for sure.

After an initial confusion about the size of the book, I went ahead to order. Received the book and very satisfied. It is the same as the previous version (978-3836501835) except a little smaller, but at a very discounted price. Practically all reviews on the previous version apply this new version too.