He was Oscar Wilde’s neighbor and he lived under the shadow of Wilde’s trials, which established the emergence of homosexual identity, directly associated with artists, and the appearance of laws that criminalized gay activities. He gave no interviews and adidn’t write diaries or memoirs. John Singer Sargent was an extremely private man. Del Monte shared these paintings privately with his circle of friends, art patrons who also commissioned similar homoerotic work form Caravaggio. Caravaggio uses the myth of Bacchus as a façade to cover for the painting’s lasciviousness, but he brings to life Minniti’s naturalistic features in a hugely provocative manner. In Bacchus, commissioned by Del Monte, the model invites the viewer into the scene as his robe slips off.
He took him home to live with him and used him as a model for several paintings, including Boy with a basket of fruit (see above) and Bacchus.
Soon after, Caravaggio met the handsome Mario Minniti. An example of his homoerotic work is The Musicians, which Caravaggio painted during one of Del Monte’s parties. At the same time, Del Monte commissioned Caravaggio to paint private images of the street male youths that he knew personally.Ĭaravaggio’s creative life lasted less than two decades. This cardinal offered Caravaggio room and board in his palace and got him his first public commission at a church in Rome, which made Caravaggio a star in the art world.
Instead, he painted naturalistic male adolescents, emerging from the darkness with open sexual energy, at a time when the Church condemned nudity and pagan themes in art.Ĭaravaggio was able to produce his groundbreaking religious and homoerotic art thanks, in great part, to a patron who opened the doors to this double artistic life for him, Cardinal Del Monte. He revolutionized religious art by refusing to adhere to traditional, idealized, figures. His depictions of (homo) erotic subject matters set him apart from his contemporaries and predecessors. From the onset of his career, he was a rebel. CaravaggioĬaravaggio’s sexuality and turbulent life, fraught with brawls, and murder, are shrouded in mystery. When homosexuality was publicly acknowledged in the late 19 th century, male nudes became taboo and suspect and artists had to come up with coded ways and double lives to express their homo-eroticism. The assumption was that all men were heterosexual and wouldn’t care about seeing each other naked. Men of this era didn’t think that loving or having sex with other men was abnormal or put them into a sexual category, homosexuals. Most of the artists in question lived at a time before sexologists came up with the term homosexuality. They created mainstream work, which they showed openly, as well as homoerotic work, which they hid, circulated just among a circle of friends, or destroyed. This is why many gay artists, who couldn’t express themselves openly, were forced to live double lives. Gay artists have faced a daunting dilemma since the beginning of time: keeping their sexuality hidden or being out with their art and lives and, in doing so, risking rejection and even prosecution.