That Terrible Shadowing

David Stedman

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Why I wrote this book

I have been an admirer of Caravaggio's work for many years but did not study his life and career in detail until I took part in 'Mastermind', for which I chose his life and work as a specialist subject. The more I researched the life of Caravaggio the more I became intrigued and fascinated by his life and character, and by the febrile rivalries in the 17th century Roman art world.

I decided that I would love to bring the story of this extraordinary character and extraordinary world to a wider audience in a Rabelaisian style that would entertain as well as inform, and bring him back to life in attempt to capture the essence of his personality and the mystery which still surrounds his life and death.

Synopsis

This highly original art historical faction novel probes the mystery of Caravaggio's death in the context of a rivetingly told time travel adventure.

We meet face to face with the great 16th-17th century Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, to be buffeted through the adventure by his towering genius and flawed personality. The story is a murder mystery woven around the true facts of Caravaggio's life and told by a cynically humorous and world-weary modern narrator.

A compact time travel device brings Caravaggio kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It also spirits the narrator back four hundred years to meet celebrity suspects among Caravaggio's fellow artists, friends, lovers and patrons. Clues are traced from period writings and paintings including Caravaggio's own masterworks, which are reproduced so that the reader can attempt to solve the mystery themselves or simply gorge on the astonishing images produced by Caravaggio's hand.

The story is taut and shamelessly scabrous in establishing the Rabelaisian relationship between the narrator and Caravaggio. Known facts about Caravaggio's life are kept intact but the plot is ingeniously peppered with plausible inferences that intensify and enrich the dramatic and entertaining content. It is a fact that Caravaggio murdered his love rival and incurred the death sentence from the state and vengeance from his victim's family.

It is a fact that Caravaggio's body disappeared after his death despite the fact that he was the most famous artist in Europe. But if mute on Caravaggio's actual cause of death in 1610 history seethes with motives and teems with suspects.

Reviews

From 'The Artist' magazine:

" 'That Terrible Shadowing' is an entertaining and intriguing attempt to get under the skin of Caravaggio, painting's favourite bad boy. The novel brings him back to life in the 21st century to butt heads with an exasperated narrator trying to find out why Caravaggio was such a trouble-maker and who might have murdered him. It's a long list! An unusual device for such a murder mystery is the inclusion of illustrations of all Caravaggio's works, in which clues to the murder are supposedly contained. The novel includes a lot of humour but the end result is a serious sideways look at a compelling genius. Recommended.' "

About the Author

David Stedman spent many years in the printing trade, both at home and abroad, and then in retail management before discovering a talent as a quiz player which led to him founding Quizmail, a national general knowledge tournament which has been running for nearly twenty years, and, in 2003, to winning the title of series champion on the Channel Four television quiz 15-to-1 and to becoming BBC Radio Four's golden jubilee Brain of Britain.

In 2006 he was joint runner-up in the final of the BBC television quiz series Mastermind and it was the in-depth study of the life and work of the artist Caravaggio needed as one of his specialist subjects on that series, together with a lifelong interest in great works of art, which inspired David to write his debut novel That Terrible Shadowing.

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