La bellezza maschile -- Amore

Speranza

The Petrarchan poetics of the image, as in the portrait of the beloved, expands now to include Amore-likeimages of young men inscribed within implicit scenarios of intimate, word-less communication with the beholder.

A Leonardesque half-length by Giorgione of a boy in classical dress is placed in an unmistakable erotic registerthrough the attribute of an arrow.

Raphael, the supreme inventorof Petrarchan portraits of beautiful women, produced a single male counter-part to the genre in his Bindo Altoviti
from around 1515.

The sitter was a Florentine banker, but the portrait seems to have little to do with thedefinition of a professional persona: rather it pursues a dimension of privacy and intimate disclosure in its deep shadows, its affective touching of thebreast, its registering of something between a smile and a question in the setof the eyes and the mouth.

As painter of the story of Psyche, Raphael knew Apuleius’s text and probably Niccolò da Correggio’s
favola, which probably stands behind the painstaking descriptive attention to what in those textsappears as a definitive physical attribute of Cupid: the long locks of goldenhair, which the Latin poet describes as brushed to a sheen by Venus herself (Metamorphoses
V.30).