Caravaggio by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page B

as we do. Perhaps because sexuality seems so instinctive, so deep and inborn, we tend to suppose that its manifestations have remained constant and unchanged. But though we have mostly learned better than to generalize about other cultures from the mores of our own society, we still make the mistake of assuming that our ancestors experienced love and lust as we do, centuries later.
    In fact the modern categories that divide the heterosexual from the homosexual and place the bisexual on the margins of both groups are relatively recent. Sex between men in Caravaggio’s time was viewed very differently than it is today. For one thing, homosexual activity seems not only to have been common but, despite its illegality, less stigmatized and shameful than we might suppose.
    It was widely understood and accepted that a man could have sex with both males and females at different stages in his life. Moreover, sex with another male was not associated with effeminacy, nor was it believed to compromise one’s toughness or masculinity, especially if one took the active role, and only with the appropriate partner, which is to say with a boy, preferably smooth-skinned and beardless, and no older than eighteen. The social pressures concerning the requisite age discrepancy, and the attendant taboos involved, were so unwavering and so strict that they seem to have permeated and governed the most basic rules of attraction and desire. Sex between two adult males was considered so shameful and rare that only a few instances of it were uncovered by the effective and nosy police who compiled the informative annals of the Office of the Night.
    All this influences our ideas about Caravaggio’s erotic life. The fact that he might have been sexually involved with Mario Minniti and later with the prostitutes whose names we know as Fillide and Lena, would have presented, in his own era, not the slightest contradiction. Nor would it have seemed perplexing that a confirmed sodomite was also an aggressive brawler, a street tough, and a murderer. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, by the time Caravaggio came to Rome, he was already near or past the upper limit at which he might have been considered a desirable or even permissible object for the sexual attentions of an older, more powerful man. And so, though it is sometimes implied that Cardinal Del Monte’s interest in Caravaggio and his welcoming the painter into his home had a sexual component, it is far less likely they would have shared the same bed than that they would have shared an attraction to younger boys—the very sort of boys whom Caravaggio painted.
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    For the next few years, Caravaggio continued to live in the Palazzo Madama, supported by Cardinal Del Monte, who had become the director of the artists’ guild, the Accademia di San Luca, and who introduced Caravaggio to prominent cultural figures and art collectors—among them, Cardinal Federico Borromeo, Cardinal Alessandro Montalto, the banker Ottavio Costa, and the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, who became one of Caravaggio’s most important patrons and supporters. Quite a few of these men, who made up Del Monte’s social circle, would later order and purchase work from Caravaggio, and they helped him obtain the major commissions that would transform him from a gifted artist into a great one.
    Most of what we know about Caravaggio’s relatively tranquil and untroubled early years with Del Monte can be inferred from what he painted—works in which he experimented with novel ideas, set off in new directions, and showed off the virtuosic skill he had already developed. What comes through in the paintings of this period is a lightheartedness and ease, the relaxation—that is, if we could imagine Caravaggio “relaxing”—of an artist who at long last knows where his next meal is coming from and that he will, at least in the near future, have a roof over his head.
    Throughout this