09/09/2024
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🇬🇧👉 Almost all images of young men in Caravaggio's paintings possess homoertoic potential. Unlike what happens with contemporary q***r art, where we can interpret thanks to the identity of the artist or their intentions, these meanings are primarily attributed on the basis of the images themselves, which look camp, or thanks to their context. There exist hypotheses about Caravaggio being homo/bisexual but moving beyond these contemporary labels, we can affirm he had a special liaison with Mario Minniti, the (hypothesised) protagonist of his Boy with a Basket of Fruit. Minniti would eventually move back to Sicily and marry, but this in itself doesn't mean he had no connection with Caravaggio (even today, marrying and bearing children isn't a sign of a strictly binary or heterosexual attraction).
Because we know next to nothing about Caravaggio as a person, we can use "q***r possibility" , the possibility of reconstructing q***r lives where we have too little information about someone and infiltrate the gaps left by "official" history. But these images can also be traced back to the theatrical context sponsored in private form by Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, Caravaggio's patron, where these younglings would have performed wearing costumes and dressed as women. The attitudes of worldly figurations like that of Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the other youth in The Musicians are allusive and were already popular in Renaissance art but here they've been turned to male representation making it ho******ic, especially considering the identity of the onlooker.
***ringrome ***ritaly ***rart ***r **oy ***rmuseum ***ringmuseums
