Somehow it seems unlikely that the first Gypsy woman he happened to meet would have been quite so beautifully and luxuriously dressed—in a pristine white blouse and turban, cross-stitched in black—as the sly, pink-cheeked, and lovely fortune-teller in his painting. And it seems oddly convenient for the purposes of the narrative that she and her customer are both around the same age and similarly attractive; they even look vaguely alike. Even so, you can observe Caravaggio seeking out the convincing detail, such as the way the handsomely costumed young man has removed only one of his leather gloves in order to have his palm read. You can imagine the artist watching or asking his model exactly how she would proceed, taking her client’s hand in both of hers, tracing the lines with one finger while she gently and provocatively prods the mound beneath his thumb, distracting and transfixing him—a tactile sleight of hand.
The con game is rougher, more raucous, and less sweetly eroticized in The Cardsharps, another scene from the low-life demimonde Caravaggio painted at around the same time as The Gypsy Fortune-teller. Again the innocent dupe is a well-dressed, prosperous, naive young man, who intently contemplates the cards in his hand as if he were playing a regular, straightforward game of cards. But the viewer knows what the boy does not. Within seconds of looking at the painting, we have grasped the sketchy situation—namely, that the boy’s two companions are cheats, in league against him. Peering over his shoulder is an older, bearded, seedy fellow who uses his right hand—in a fingerless glove, which in itself seems to augur no good—to his youthful partner, who faces their victim across a table. The younger swindler is shown in three-quarter view, turned away from us, just enough so that we can see the cards he has concealed behind him, tucked into his striped doublet.
Like The Gypsy Fortune-teller, the painting conveys the sense of a con that’s been witnessed in action, observed, as it were, from nature—and then choreographed and rearranged to enhance its dramatic appeal. Surely, Caravaggio had plenty of chance to watch people gambling, a popular pastime in his era, indulged in by groups at every level of society. Also both works, especially The Gypsy Fortune-teller, contain visual references that Caravaggio’s contemporaries would have recognized as direct allusions to familiar scenes from the theater and from the commedia dell’arte.
Meanwhile, the artist’s moral sympathies are far from predictable or clear. Except for the older cardsharp, an undeniably shady character, both the victims and their victimizers arouse in us equal measures of sympathy and disapproval. The few images of this sort that preexist Caravaggio, in German and Netherlandish art, are satirical and instructional, and offer improving moral lessons. But most viewers would find it hard to say what, precisely, Caravaggio means us to learn from what we are seeing.
Much later, after his genius was recognized, and after he began to attract disciples and imitators, Caravaggio was known to fly into a rage whenever he felt that someone—for example, Guido Reni—was trying to copy his style. And history has proved how justified he was, because the more imitative and less talented “Caravaggesque” genre painters of petty criminals hoodwinking their unsuspecting prey have partly succeeded in clouding our view of his dazzling originality.
In both The Cardsharps and The Gypsy Fortune-teller, you can see the pleasure of an artist discovering something new—the sheer fun of fabrics, textures, of meticulously rendering, in two dimensions, the plumes in the feathered caps. You can imagine how satisfied he must have been with these early efforts to dramatize an event, to organize a group of actors in a mise-en-scène that today we would call cinematic. And you can watch an artist realizing that what he is doing is succeeding, that the paint is doing what he wants it to do, that his intention and purpose are finding their way onto the canvas.
And that was what occurred. The paintings furthered their creator’s goals, both artistic and professional. Caravaggio found a dealer, whom Baglione identifies as Maestro Valentino. The Gypsy Fortune-teller and The Cardsharps caught the eye of Cardinal Del Monte, a generous collector and an important figure in the Roman art world, who—coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally—was a great fan of commedia dell’arte and had a well-known weakness for gambling.
Born in Venice, raised in the sophisticated court of Urbino, Francesco Maria Del Monte came to Rome around the year of Caravaggio’s birth. There he became a confidante of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici. When Ferdinando was recalled to Florence to become the grand duke of Tuscany, he helped Del Monte (who became Ferdinando’s cultural and political representative in Rome) to advance in the ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Appointed cardinal, Del Monte moved into the Palazzo Madama, where he lived unostentatiously and focused his energies on a broad range of intellectual and artistic pursuits. He was famous for his love of music and musical instruments; his fascination with science, alchemy, literature, and philosophy; his fondness for the theater and for parties; and for the avidity and single-mindedness with which he collected art. By the time of his death in 1626, he possessed more than six hundred works, including eight canvases by Caravaggio. He was also renowned for his personal charm, his diplomatic skills, his integrity, his sense of humor, and above all for the enthusiasm with which he enjoyed the worldy entertainments available to a Roman church official with some money and considerable influence.
In 1595, Cardinal Del Monte, who by then had purchased The Gypsy Fortune-teller and The Cardsharps, invited Caravaggio to live in the Palazzo Madama and to become part of a household that included numerous artists and sculptors, singers and musicians. Bellori remarks on the boost this gave Michelangelo Merisi’s confidence and reputation, and surely it must have been a great relief to him to find a stable, congenial living situation and a dependable means of support after the uncertainties of his first years in Rome. Soon the artist was turning out canvases as consciously charming and seductive as Boy with a Basket of Fruit, but now geared to the sensibility, tastes, and interests of his munificent new patron.
The first painting that Caravaggio appears to have done expressly for Del Monte was The Musicians, also called A Concert of Youths, which, according to Baglione, he painted “from nature, very well.” The work depicts four boys, each prettier and more adorable than the next, who have come together, presumably in preparation for a concert. In the center of the canvas, a handsome young man in a loose and nearly transparent white blouse, with a length of heavy red brocade draped diagonally across his chest, tunes a lute. He has not begun performing, but already his eyes are brimming with tears. Over his left shoulder, a dark-haired youth who closely resembles the boy with the basket of fruit (both of whom are thought to have been modeled on Mario Minniti, Caravaggio’s Sicilian friend, with whom he may have lived at the Palazzo Madama) holds a shawm—an early wind instrument—as he gazes out at us, attentive and expectant. The two other boys seem unaware of our presence. On the left, a winged Cupid, even younger than his companions, concentrates on separating some green grapes from a bunch, while, on the right, another boy, draped in a white toga tied with a bow, turns his half-naked, beautiful back and the tender nape of his neck to us while he studies a musical score. A violin and bow rest on the bench beside him.
The boys are clothed, it’s true, but their flowing white garments are depicted in a way that suggests casual disarray and undress, and manage to reveal enough bare flesh so that they seem effectively naked. Or perhaps that impression is the result of the perfect intimacy, the ease, the relaxation, and above all the air of erotic indolence with which they cluster together to fill the space of the picture. Like the boy with the fruit basket, their pink lips are gently parted, their eyes veiled. We may have watched groups of musicians tuning up and preparing to play, but rarely have we seen any as dreamy, as delectable, or as enticing as these.
Not long afterward, Caravaggio painted the The Lute Player, another offering for Del Monte on a musical theme. Here a pretty, curly-haired, dark-eyed, and even more androgynous youth in yet another flowing white shirt stares seductively at us as he pl
ays his lute, an instrument known for its aphrodisiac qualities; many love songs were composed for its particular tonal range. Indeed, the musician’s gender is so ambiguous that Bellori describes the work as a portrait of a woman in a blouse playing a lute. It has also been suggested that the model for the painting was the singer Pedro de Montoya, a Spanish castrato who was part of Del Monte’s household.
In this painting, unlike The Musicians, we can read the score from which the boy is singing. It’s a madrigal by the sixteenth-century Franco-Flemish composer Jacob Arcadelt, a song whose lyrics say, “You know that I love you.” At the left of the canvas is a vase of flowers and an arrangement of ripe and overripe fruits and vegetables, including some figs and a cucumber that viewers of the period would have recognized as a sly sexual joke.
Looking at the musical paintings Caravaggio made for his cardinal and that he intended to gratify the tastes of his new employer, it’s all too easy to recall the unfriendly 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 1970s. 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 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.
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 time, he was painting what his patrons asked him to paint and what he imagined they wanted him to paint. Still, he was insisting on his right to exercise his uncompromised and uncompromising genius and his theories about art. The canvases of this period seem wholly sincere and at the same time ironic, like private jokes on the subject of the artistic conventions that he was being encouraged to follow. Such contradictions may be part of the reason why even these—the most apparently “old-fashioned” of his works—still strike us as so modern. Whatever unease we may feel with these traditional themes and conventions, Caravaggio feels it also, along with us and for us—preemptively, so to speak—and his work at once celebrates, gently mocks, and transcends the subject matter (the portrait of the mythological figure, the sentimental religious scene) that, handled by a less original painter, can sometimes fail to translate across the intervening centuries.
The rendering of beauty together with the simultaneous joke about beauty is at the heart of Caravaggio’s only surviving still life, The Basket of Fruit, which Del Monte’s friend Cardinal Federico Borromeo is thought to have commissioned from Caravaggio, or possibly to have received as a gift from Del Monte. An ardent fan of still lifes in general and of Northern art in particular, Borromeo collected the work of Jan Breughel, who painted exuberant, splashy studies of glorious floral arrangements in which each showpiece tulip, iris, or peony is an honor to its species.
Anyone could have predicted that Caravaggio would have been unlikely to do anything of the sort, and in fact his painting can be seen as a kind of challenge to the vibrant bouquets of his Northern contemporaries. His still life is another avowal of his belief in painting from nature and at the same time making his audience aware that they are looking at a painting. It is also rebellious rejection and refutation of the months during which he toiled as the (no doubt underpaid) flower-and-fruit man in Cesari’s studio.
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