Caravaggio and the Mythical Sexuality

Sex is central to the aesthetic of Caravaggio. But its presence is not simply carnal or erotic and must not be read purely as such. Sexuality goes far beyond the phenomenon of intercourse and fertility. It is a concern of morality, judgement and a search for absolute truth. By giving powerful realism to his figures, Caravaggio imbues his figures with a moral significance, gestural bodies with a key to some of the fundamental values of any society. His work twists and torments social norms as well as the ways we read, observe and evaluate them. When going about this, one must considering the patron, the epoch and of course the short and non-stop chaotic life of the artist. In focusing on Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593), Bacchus (1595) and Amor Vincit Omnia (1601), one discovers an enigma: whether they should be read as signifiers of transcendence beyond sexuality or simply erotic spectacles. Out of the views on sexuality in Papal Rome and the riotous life of the artist himself, this conversation between divine truth and erotic desire materializes.

Caravaggio loved painting beautiful young men. Though the artist did paint women, those depictions never parallelled the tenderness and drama that he gave to depictions of muscular, imperfect specimens commonly known as his “soft boys.” Throughout his life, the artist maintained a definitively reckless, uneasy and promiscuous existence, completing many of his paintings in way stations while on the run from some criminal justice. This chaotic reality began early for Caravaggio. In 1571, right after he was born, the Battle of Lepanto transpired in Rome led by Pope Pius V and his Holy League driving the Ottoman Empire out of Rome as a crusade against non-Catholic rule in the Mediterranean region. His world was perilous and bloody from its inception. At the age of 6, the boy lost basically every male family to the bubonic plague and his mother at the age of 13. Thankfully, his family was well-connected to the influential Colonna and Sforza families so the man was not entirely desolate. This same year, he began his training under a student of Titian in Milan but quickly fled to Rome after an altercation with a policeman. Once in Rome, Caravaggio quickly fell into a life of crime and debauchery, simultaneously brushing shoulders with the high society patrons within the papacy of Clement VIII and running a grisly gang of prostitutes, beggars and criminals. But within this dual life of the street and the Vatican, Caravaggio began to build his visceral realism that made him so radically new and quickly renowned. Using his derelict peers as models for his early figure, the artist fiercely dug into an innovative style that Papal Rome desperately needed after the Counter-Reformation forced them to dispose of Mannerism. In turn, he built a dynamic realist mode of representation, bringing an immediacy and intimacy with the subject that reflected his own relationship with them. He treated them with a tender dignity but did not shy from showing the awkwardness and perversion of life, seen almost immediately in Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593).

This question of Caravaggio’s sexuality starts to emerge in Boy with a Basket of Fruit. It is at once a testament to the artist’s masterful work in allegorical genre scenes appealing to the Church and his obsession with provocative, androgynous boys adding to a homoerotic narrative. From his very beginnings, Caravaggio tested the boundaries of societal norms. In Milan, he roamed the night streets with gangs of painters and thieves who lived by the phrase ‘without hope, without fear’ — young people with an anger within, looking to fill the hole that the loss of family left, lashing out for survival in a world that never ceased to torture them. This didn’t end when he reached Rome, only meeting new sword-wearing scoundrels like architect Onorio Longhi and painter Mario Minniti who introduced him to an underworld of brawling, drinking and of course, plenty of whoring. Within this context, Caravaggio painted Boy with a Basket of Fruit, Minniti as his young model. At its roots, this naturalist, chiaroscuro piece of a scantily clothed boy holding an overflowing basket of overripe, rotting fruit draws formal inspiration from Roman statues, existing in the Eupompus idea that ‘nature alone is worthy of imitation.’ In other words, through nature we derive virtue. What we see is a clearly effeminate youth dressed in a flowing, falling white shirt and he holds a classical symbol of fertility and innocence. The scene is incredibly sensual and indicative of young love or sex. Since the fruit is overripe, we can conclude that this boy is no longer innocent, impure and connected to the idea of lechery or perversion, moral corruption even. The boy is painted with soft lips, a sensuous musculature and an invitation to join him in this indulgent feast. He not only stimulates the viewer but invites us to approach and engage with him. His shoulder curved enticingly, eyes directly addressing the viewer but holding a basket of both pleasure and corruption; there is a bit of a retreat as he advances. It is in this movement away that attracts, that entices the viewer, suggesting some secret he has that serves to eroticize, a “deceptive availability.” Other pieces of this same year and the next, Young Sick Bacchus and Boy Bitten By Lizard, also show some type of corruption (disease, poison reptile) a virtuosity in genre painting and a pervasive sensuality in gesture. This piece gives us a bit of a view into the artist’s mind, at once a secular, Pope-safe piece but under the surface an erotic advance. But did the artist want us to read into it this deeply or is it just a complex game that Caravaggio is playing on us by tapping into psychological desires when we should just see the figure as an allegory for Desire itself, allusive and transcending sexuality? Are the mess of possibilities meant to just tease us? It is clear now that Caravaggio had an eye for men yet it cannot be proven. He murdered Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1601 for a woman. We know it isn’t that simple. Thus we delve ever deeper into the enigma in a look at Bacchus.

Rome did not like nudes at this time. Between the Council of Trent (1545) and the Thirty Years War (1648) the word was justice in the name of piety. Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) was as ruthless as Pope Sixtus (1585–1590), putting to death incredible numbers of scoundrels in the papal provinces, cracking down on prostitution, and not sparing the wealthy criminals either. Famously, Clement VIII put to death, Beatrice Cenci who killed her father after enduring a wide variety of abuses. Along with these edicts against criminals, like Caravaggio and his peers, Clement VIII proceeded to tighten measures against nudity in art, notably castrating every exposed, carved or painted penis in the Vatican, disregarding their importance to Renaissance imagery. The pope claimed, in the wake of the anti-extravagance, during this Catholic centrality movement of the late 16th Century, that these phallic images might arouse carnal desire in the church all the while not batting an eye at gruesome, biblical violence. La Rappresentazione di anima et di corpo by musician Emilio de Cavalieri was performed in 1600 which condemned the flesh and any visual gratification believing that purification was only found through ritual degradation. Nudes did not disappear however. They could only be viewed by private patrons and their spouses, not the public. Annibale Carracci could paint public nudes since they were considered in no way erotic. Meanwhile, Caravaggio was known to saunter down the streets of Rome from one high society party to the next, looking for a brawl with a sword illegally by his side. This rough justice seen every day in public executions and brawls was reflected in his realism. It was around this time that the artist met the wealthy art patron and Cardinal, Francesco Maria del Monte and received some of his most important commissions of his career, notably The Musicians (1595), The Lute Player (1596), The Fortune Teller (1594–95), The Card Sharps (1594) and Bacchus (1595). All were steeped in boyish sensuality and allegory making many speculate about the Cardinal’s sexuality and motives for buying so many of these pieces and eventually taking the artist in as a resident.

In Bacchus, Caravaggio utilized the youthful beauty of a boy as a model, possibly Mario Minniti again, dressing the pale boy up as the Roman God Bacchus, the God of wine, fertility, inebriation, ecstasy etcetera, connecting to the virtues of antiquity and asking questions of morality through sensual gestures. While ideally, we could delve fully into the significance of Bacchus, satyrs and sexuality, it will have to be streamlined slightly. Nonetheless, Bacchus is historically recognized as a symbol of the erotic, homosexuality, indulgence, and orgy, only amplifying this tool of desire the artist uses to entice the viewer with offers of divine love. On the surface, Bacchus fulfills all of the aforementioned qualities of antique naturalism, becoming, for those pious enough to end here, an allegory of the organic world. But the artist gives us a heavily coded arcadian scene. It should also be noted allegedly that the artist represented this image without any preparatory drawings but may have used some kind of optical aid to achieve this level of realism. Again, obsessed with this tenuous physicality but this time, compared to the previous boy, this boy’s sumptuous tunic is almost entirely off of his right side, exposing his awkwardly perched arm which is tenderly rendered, possibly looking at early Annibale Carracci, Orazio Gentileschi, or even Michelangelo but over-emphasizing its naturalism. The subject, demi-God of indulgence, is also quite androgynous which isn’t uncommon. He reclines, wearing a wreath and surrounded again by rotting and overripe fruit, the figs implying genitalia quoting the pastoral scenes of Titian but digging deep into something more visceral, psychological about all humans. Reclining on a filthy couch, Bacchus could very well have been modelled after a child prostitute or a hormonally stunted castrato singer, both of which Caravaggio could have spent time during his time with del Monte, if not after Mario. Pushed even further into the foreground, his eyes are glazed over, drunk maybe from his undiluted, “akratic” wine, tempting the viewer with a seductive, unspoken look described by Bauer as “maybe you should think twice before approaching” look. Oft theorized to have derived this bacchanalian subject from, Edmund Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” Bacchus uses this and classical reference as vehicles for moralizing content.

Briefly, these references to Book II of “Faerie Queen” and theories of excess are complex but important to the narrative and the sexualized symbol of wine in Caravaggio’s Uffizi Bacchus. This English epic poem popular in Europe when Caravaggio was working teaches specifically of Temperance, telling a tale of the knight Guyon who resists the seduction of the temptress Acrasia, who is shown squeezing grapes into a gold cup in revealing garments similar to those of Bacchus. Instead of falling into her sexual trap, he captures her and rescues those she imprisoned. A classic moral tale of resisting temptation. This tale uses this sense of Taste embodied in grapes as an allegory for lust much like the Apple is used in Genesis as a pursuit of gluttonous pleasure. While necessary for pleasure and sustenance, Taste is a sense we share with animals thus it becomes prone to carnality and excess more so than the other four. Ultimately, we are dealing with the moral question of debauchery versus temperance. Bacchus is the embodiment of debauchery and Guyon is that of temperance, a struggle between reason and appetite. In Bacchus we see a personification of excess, a victory of the immoderate over reason, the God of sexual luxury drinking pure, unblended, uncivilized “Akratic” wine. We may not want to submit to these temptations that promise sensual pleasure, but moral demise disguised behind the veil of a mythological scene, warns us of the beastly, rotting consequences of indulgence. In essence, this sexually ambiguous purveyor of corruption can be interpreted in a variety of ways; for example, is he a warning from God not to give into sin or is he simply a child prostitute beckoning the viewer to join him? Moral corruption has two sides: that of pure delight and that of a disgraced reality. Such moralizing is what allowed Caravaggio’s Bacchus to pass under the nose of Papal Rome while a prurient undertone of the artist’s controversial personal life remains. Furthermore we ask, did the artist intend to give this subtle shame to the viewer, this moral lesson when he himself was committing a variety of these infractions? What we can possibly infer is that the artist was sick of this incessant idealizing of male nudes by so many male painters before him, Michelangelo, Titian and Cesari in particular, and expose a deeper truth about people in general. While he may have possessed a tender appreciation for men, Caravaggio represented this young street Bacchus this way in order to reveal something true about human nature, invigorated by this fear that chased him all his life, twisting the spear into the gut of accepted sexual norms. There is guilt present in Bacchus and a knowledge of the temptations we submit to daily under the eye of God, a personification of moral conflict.

Caravaggio was still in his early 20s during his time with Cardinal Del Monte making mostly secular images but gradually, he began to introduce more overtly religious paintings into his oeuvre notably with Judith Beheading Holofernes and St. Francis in Ecstasy both of which engage with this tool of sexuality uniquely but at once building the artist’s fame among clients in the church. Much like someone centuries later, Lucien Freud or Alice Neel, Caravaggio did not shy away from the imperfections and crudeness of his subjects, rather he painted exactly what his eye saw, moving rapidly away from the accepted norms of idealism of the Renaissance, showing both the dignity and the indignity. Naturally, as with any iteration of modernism, this took a long time to be socially accepted . In due time, through the help of Del Monte, Caravaggio received much more and much larger commissions, most famously in the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, familiarizing the public with his dramatic tenebrous representation of important biblical scenes and ever progressing the raw sense of life in his realism. As was mentioned before, while his shocking theatricality and immediacy was appreciated, his realism of using vagrant models was widely controversial and often rejected. This dark spirit of the man who fraternized with both the derelict and the pious came through in these works. This was uncomfortable for many in the church and for good reason, it was like nothing they had seen before, he showed an absolute truth instead of fantasy; this was vulgar in 16th Century terms. He humanized biblical stories, bringing these monumentalized characters down to earth, close enough to touch.

But his production of more religious subjects did not mean he stopped making secular ones. In fact, our final piece to discuss happens to be one of them, Amor Vincit Omnia (1602), an allegory for love’s allpower and a playground for sexual speculation. The image shows a fully nude young boy dressed as Cupid, stumbling off of a bed onto a pile of musical instruments, painting equipment, mathematical and astronomical tools and armour. The painting was made for Italian banker and art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, the title meaning that “love triumphs over all” but also possibly Vincenzo conquers all. Quite literally, artist is changing existing norms in this piece by showing Cupid as just a rascal kid who you could run into on the street. Again, he looks to earlier Renaissance painters for formal inspiration but radically modernizes the subject by not idealizing Cupid, showing him as a human with crooked teeth and disheveled hair. It is also clear that this was painted later than his other secular images as the lighting is significantly more chiaroscuro, the contrast of the white body and dark background is dramatic. Aside from the technical, this image is full of eroticism; he shows the full nude frontal of a young boy, no longer alluding to it with suggestive drapery but fully embracing his nudity in the heat of the Counter-Reformation. But here is where the enigma of this era comes in. While depicting any sort of nudity, let alone child nudity in art was quite nearly criminalized, the mentality applied to it was significantly less sexualized than a viewer today would expect. Child nudity and eroticism were not policed in Rome like they were in the late 20th Century into today. In fact, in the age of Giustiniani commission, while it was still not made for the public eye (hidden behind silk in the private quarters of Giustiniani but even then the silk was for theatricality, not for hiding it), this fear of sexualizing children was generally not thought of. Nonetheless, it would still be shocking. But homosexuality and pederasty were seen differently in Baroque Rome.

The conventional reading goes like so: love triumphs over all; Amor stands on music, a copy of Plato’s Republic and architecture tools; the erotic reads as an advance from a young boy. But both fail to consider the presence of a third reading. In Republic, Socrates discusses justice with a variety of Greeks and other 9th Century people and how they define it. Caravaggio places love above this and other artistic, academic media. In Socrates’ Symposium, which many would have read in the artist’s time, outlines the steps necessary to ascend from earthly beauty to absolute beauty, stating: “boys have the power to bring a man from one to the other. When he loves a boy, he catches sight of absolute beauty and is near his goal.” This statement, in modern or Baroque terms, seems to quite literally justify and even idealize pederasty. Additionally, many poets Caravaggio followed read poems about pederasty, most notably Petrarch who speaks of a “naked, shameless Amor who he longed for” seeing the boy as a spiritual guide who he lusted after. Caravaggio’s Amor is so unabashedly real that one must question whether or not he was also engaged in these egregious acts, representing contradicting moral standards of the 16th Century. When observing this seemingly predatory painting, one cannot help but notice its innate concern for depicting physical pleasure. If one looks at it through this erotic perspective, the right hand of Amor is gripping his arrows with a looseness one can only relate to male foreplay; the left hand reaches behind to do what one can only imagine to be some kind of sexual invitation. In this way Amor Vincit Omni does contain erotic imagery when seen in a certain way, it also helps that Cecco del Caravaggio (Francesco Boneri), the model for this work and many others, was Caravaggio’s assistant and supposed lover. In turn, “the carnal and spiritual exist on a flowing continuum, we have a vision of pederasty that is idealized when it’s spiritual and abominated when physical.” Thus, Amor, the symbol of love, is being defined as an embrace of the spiritual and physical. This view of sexuality is morally accurate to the era, a time when pederasty and homosexuality were seen as sodomy, though very few cases of either law were enforced. Several accounts note how widespread pederasty was in Italy, even referred to in a song as “a pleasant pastime.” Due of this, the sexuality of Caravaggio or his work was never fixated on until relatively recently. Homosexuality, even, was not defined as a concept until 1870 according to Michel Foucault and what in Caravaggio’s time was a sin, today is a life form and morphology, a singular nature. So was Caravaggio gay? Was he producing erotic works to titillate a repressed public? Are his works even supposed to be sexualized? This is precisely the enigma we are tackling.

Truthfully, it seems like sexualizing the work of Caravaggio, while exciting and controversial, is an oversimplification of the artist’s early work. There are such a wide variety of readings one can apply to these paintings, it seems a bit silly to conclude that these images are this reckless, bisexual character’s expression of the world he lived in and the debauchery he took part in. While his lifestyle can be used to judge the body of work, it seems in particular, Amor is an even grander epiphany than the union between an evolved Michelangelesque rendering and Platonic beauty. In Bacchus and Boy with a Basket of Fruit, Bersani and Dutoit conclude that the artist wanted to hold back erotic availability and resist the reduction of the sensual into the sexual even though we are tempted to sexualize it. In turn, we realize that maybe these images were made to be enigmatic, maybe we are reading too much into these images as anxious modern connoisseurs, maybe we should just experience their power. Hammill in Sexuality and Form agrees in a way by saying sex is central to the aesthetic just as long as it does not signify. Meaning, we can find pleasure in these images just as long as we see them as an open mesh of possibilities, dissonances and resonances, rather than only fixating on gender to signify. Additionally, Christopher Bollas in his The Shadow of the Object defines these works as “trisexual” meaning they don’t signify sex but merely the memory of gratification, a genderless concept beyond sexuality. But what all of these theories share is that sex and gender are mere points of departure to a grander meditation on mankind. It tells a narrative of humans elevating themselves to Godliness for centuries. Thus, the sense of humanity in Caravaggio’s work presents a profound and indicative truth far beyond eroticism. However, without the eroticism, this intimate communication between the subject, the artist and the viewer, we would not have this sense of aesthetic and sexual difference to combat traditional notions. It also would not grab our attention so successfully. We must look at his use of sexuality as his contemporary but also as someone today. While this interest in boys and androgyny may be indicative of the artist’s own sexuality, we have very little evidence to justify this. By sexing these bodies or Caravaggio, we also lose this enigmatic quality, which is clearly their greatest characteristic — this secrecy and unreadability is essential to their erotic appeal, much like temptation is vital to sexuality. This aesthetic of mystery in Caravaggio’s realism may lead us wondering his sexual orientation and relation to these sultry boys but it is in our act of searching that he catches us staring. In these chiaroscuro pockets, he hides our darkest desires and the stark truth of our mortality. But at the same time, in secrecy these elements only gain power and pique our curiosity. As documents of the Baroque, these images represent the profound sense of humanity Caravaggio gained through his turbulent life, showing an unidealized reality and the power of hiding the truth.

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