Caravaggio by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page A

assessment of the Flemish writer Dirck van Amayden, who wrote that, in his youth, Del Monte had had a weakness for women of ill repute, but that, as he grew older, his sexual attentions were directed entirely toward young boys. He was discreet, Amayden continued, until the election of Pope Urban, after which Del Monte became more unrestrained and open in the pursuit of his erotic proclivities. Even when he was elderly, impotent, and nearly blind, his dalliances continued, and near the end of his life he named a boy as a beneficiary in his will.
    But why should that surprise us? Rome was, as we have seen, a city in which men greatly outnumbered women and in which men tended to marry at a relatively late age. And the disturbing revelations of our own time have made it painfully clear that even the most pious priests and church officials are not always immune to the stirrings of erotic longing.
    Recent scholarship has revealed that homosexual activity was so common in Renaissance Florence that a special department of the police force, the Office of the Night, was created expressly to deal with “sodomites” who indulged in these forbidden, sacrilegious, and illegal pursuits. During the seventy years, from 1432 to 1502 , that the Office of the Night was in operation, 17 , 000 people (in a city of 40 , 000 ) were brought to the office’s attention, and 3 , 000 were convicted of having had homosexual relations. Penalties could be severe, ranging from public whipping and humiliation to prison terms. Rarely, these crimes were punished by mutilation and castration; even more rarely, the convicted man was burned to death or beheaded. In the sixteenth century, the city fathers of Lucca legalized prostitution in the hope that increasing the number of available women might decrease the incidence of sodomy.
    Closer to Caravaggio’s era, in a town near Assisi, a well-known sodomite was released after merely paying a fine. And according to popular wisdom, the case gave sodomites a free pass to conduct their private lives as they wished.
    Perhaps because the dramatic upsurge in Caravaggio’s reputation coincided with a period during which our own modern society became radically more open about matters of sexual preference, there has been a remarkable amount of discussion concerning the nature of the artist’s sexuality. Though earlier critics hinted strongly at his erotic ambivalence, the artist was first officially “outed” in the early 1970 s. In the meantime, anyone who had ever glanced at his work would doubtless have noticed the highly charged, enraptured manner in which he depicted young boys, and his lifelong lack of interest (compared, for example, with such artists as Titian) in naked female flesh. The subjects that permitted respectable painters to explore their personal and professional interest in naked women—for example, depictions of Susanna in her bath spied on by the leering elders—failed to seize Caravaggio’s imagination, and it’s revealing to compare his fully dressed, melancholy, and unusually chaste Magdalene with Titian’s luscious, repentant sinner, clothed only in her own flowing hair. Whenever a male and female appear together in Caravaggio’s secular paintings, in The Gypsy Fortune-teller or in Judith and Holofernes , for example, the implications of their connection are unfortunate, even dire: The man is being cheated or killed.
    Even so, the debate has raged on. Writing in 1995 , one critic argued that Caravaggio’s friend and model Mario Minniti could not possibly have been homosexual; the conclusive proof being that, after returning to his native Sicily, he married and had children.
    The common thread—and common fallacy—of many of these academic and literary conversations has been a tendency to make assumptions and draw conclusions as if those who lived in previous centuries thought about sexual behavior and sexual identity in the same terms