Caravaggio's faces are hard to forget-consider the beautiful fortune teller, her almond-shaped eyes casting a spell over her young customer as she is easing a ring off his finger; the preadolescent Cupid, wide-eyed and round-cheeked, whose grinning lips part to reveal stained teeth.
He painted his sitters dal naturale, attentive to the most minor details-the circles under a man's eye, the delicate curl drifting down a woman's temple, the pallor of a model's skin in his dimly lit studio.
In a climactic scene towards the end of the novel, Michael finds himself in the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia, where Caravaggio's large canvas still hangs: 'the painting appeared before him like an ancient mastodon, high and mighty and seemingly displeased for having been made to wait for so long.'
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