Caravaggio

Speranza

Caravaggio's unprecedentness frankness results from a landmark in patronage.

His paintings circulated among wealthy nobles with homerotic tastes -- the first sub-cultural network where we can identify not only the major clients and artists but their social contacts and viewing habits.

Many were commissioned by the cultivated and pleasure-loving FRANCESCO DEL MONTE -- the earliest known patron with homoerotic interests who hired an artists to represent scenes with a common emotional appeal for both parties.

The numerous mythological paintings depict scantily draped ephebes offering the viewer wine or fruit, and implicitly, themselves.

Some are portraits of his clients's entertainers and banquetmates -- all identifiable to one another as members of a semi-clandestine fraternity.

At times, these pictures approach unadorned genre.

"The Lute Players" (or Musicians) shows four half-clad males (the right read one perhaps a self-portrait) dreamily lost in tuning up before the very kind of performance often sponsored at del Monte's palazzo.

This variation on the pastoral theme of MUSIC as the handmaiden of PASSION de-idealises its classical roots.

Obviously far from from fauns or shepherds, these males are denizens of the contemporary demimonde that sold services to the elite, from music to sex.

Numerous contemporary copies of all these pictures (and variations by Giovanni Lanfranco) suggest there was a sizable demand for such subjects among like-minded Romans, creating a 'homosocial' market, the economic crucible of an emerging subculture.

For the nobleman Vincenzo Giustiniani, Caravaggio made more than a dozen paintings, including "Amore".

Caravaggio imagines a younster triumphing over all. In his blatant realism, this chubby preadolescent, as insolently warning as Parmigianino's Cupid but more gleefully tempting, is no ideal god byt an exhibitionist ragamuffin.

The model was Giovanni Battista.

Giovanni Battista is named in a libel suit brought by a rival painter to Caravaggio in 1602 as his 'catamite'.

VINCENZO GIUSTINIANI hung "Amore" proudly.

Caravaggio was the first to borrow homoerotic motifs from an earlier arist, who shared similar tastes.

Among many quotations from Michelangelo, Caravaggio's "Amore"'s triumphant pose echoes Michelangelo's "Vittoria" of 1530, picking the slender thread of a rudimentary "homoerotic tradition" passed down from Poliziano more than a century earlier.

Caravaggio's illustratious predecessor loomed over his shoulder.

In his "David" Caravaggio reveals the dread of 'losing his head' in masochistic submission.

Caravaggio's art represents a flowering of the classical synthesis, at least for overly erotic images created by or for indefiable homoerotic malesk as we see in Caravaggio's contemporary Guido Reni, a possible homoerotic who delighted in painting the usual suspect of Apollo.

Caravaggio's life reveals the foundations of a new social, sexual, and artistic order.

As cities grew, the urban homoerotic subculture that coalesced in the entourage of a few wealthy Roman aristocrats expanded beyond a learned elite to become more increasingly visible.

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Considering that our knowledge of these networks comes from records of attacks on them, they were remarkably widespread and energetically creative.