Caravaggio by Francine Prose

Author:Francine Prose [Francine Prose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061739965
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

By this time the double life that Caravaggio had been leading—as a member of Del Monte’s exquisitely refined milieu and as a street gangster drinking in the taverns and dueling in the back alleys of the Campo Marzio—must have begun to seem simple compared with the multiple sets of manners and mores he was now obliged to adopt as he moved among a wide range of social circles and conducted what amounted to a series of parallel, interrelated careers. Even as he was finishing his deeply felt religious masterpieces for the Contarelli and Cerasi Chapels, he was also working for hire, painting portraits of anyone who had enough celebrity to intrigue him or enough money to pay his fees.

As if to make it perfectly clear that his depictions of Saint Paul’s and Saint Matthew’s conversions did not signify that he himself had suddenly felt called to walk the straight and narrow path of the righteous, Caravaggio painted two of his most provocative and disquietingly homoerotic works, full-length nudes of the same dark-haired, smooth-skinned prepubescent boy. Sprawled with his buttocks pressed against a fur pelt, Saint John the Baptist grins saucily at us as he flings his arms around the neck of a shaggy old ram. Except for the single jarring note—that only one of them is human—the pair precisely models the discrepancies (young vs. mature, smooth vs. hirsute) that, in Caravaggio’s era, were culturally required attributes of the acceptable homosexual couple. The fact that the boy’s pose is modeled so closely on one of Michelangelo’s nudes in the Sistine Chapel adds the extra frisson of an art joke, a tribute or an insult to a masterwork of the past that amplifies the painting’s already considerable outrageousness.

Victorious Cupid, a sly, impudent—and winged—boy stands with one leg folded back on a bench covered by a tangled bedsheet. His thighs are spread, his penis exposed. One of his hands is either behind, or on, his buttocks, calling attention to his perfect little rear. His look of delighted triumph seems partly inspired by the fact that the artifacts and symbols of knowledge, culture, and civilization—musical instruments, a pen and a book, military armor, scientific and mathematical implements, a crown and a globe—have effectively cast themselves at his pretty feet. It’s hard to talk about these paintings without sounding as if one is squinting at the past with the myopic eyes of the present, as if we wish to defile the innocence of an earlier era with the puritanical assumptions of a society that can no longer see a child’s beauty admired without diagnosing a case of pedophilia. But to paraphrase Dickens on the death of Little Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to feel that these works were intended to convey a sexual charge, that these boys’ expressions and poses were consciously meant to be teasing, enticing, and seductive.

The Cupid was commissioned by Del Monte’s friend Vincenzo Giustiniani, who hung it in the same room as his most prized old masters.

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