Tobias Grey

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe By any measure, Zac Brettler was a precocious kid. He was “scarcely out of diapers” by the time he had memorized the lyrics of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Going Back to Cali” and could regale his family with a word-perfect rendition. At five, he had the wit of a pint-size Groucho Marx. When asked by an older girl to read something, Zac didn’t miss a beat: “I didn’t bring my glasses,” he replied.

Writing from the French Riviera in the spring of 1950, Mark Rothko confided to his friend the sculptor Richard Lippold, “I am still looking for the fabulous, which they say I will find in Italy.” Rothko was 46 and in the middle of a five-month European tour. Organized by his wife, Mell, the trip was meant to help him recover from a nervous breakdown brought on by his mother’s death, in 1948. His work, too, had recently—and momentously—changed.

Looking at Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid for the first time, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the instant one’s back is turned, the naked young boy in the picture will jump down out of the frame and run riot. Downright shocking in its life force, Caravaggio’s allegorical painting is unlike anything that came before or after. Indeed, it seems to bespeak some kind of Faustian pact.