Sudden Death

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

Like all books, Sudden Death comes mostly from other books. References to almost all of them appear in the novel itself, as the form allows. But there are two recent biographies of Michelangelo Merisi without which I couldn’t have written the book: Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane and Peter Robb’s M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio. Andrew Graham-Dixon established the relationship — now so obvious — between Caravaggio’s paintings of beheadings and his Rome death sentence. Peter Robb traced the link between the mind-sets of Galileo Galilei and Merisi as two poles of a single system. The research and investigation of both biographers into the role of Fillide Melandroni in the work of the artist are also at the heart of my book. Equally indispensable were Heiner Gillmeister’s Tennis: A Cultural History and Cees de Bondt’s Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy. Alessandra Russo’s work on material culture in the century of the conquistadors, especially as curator of the exhibition El vuelo de las imágenes: Arte plumario en México y Europa, at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, sparked a good part of the writing of this story. The little that is truly historical in the novel comes from her work and from Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome by Renata Ago.