Rendering 2 Arts

On Caravaggio's lust, talent and power.

The headline of the article is "On Caravaggio's lust, talent and power". The author of the article is Jonathan Jones. The article was published on the web site www.guardian.com on Monday 27 May 2013. The article provides the information about the difficulty to forget the first time I saw Caravaggio's painting Victorious Cupid. I turned a corner in a museum in Berlin and my heart froze. Plainly, it is painted from life. A youth has stood naked in Caravaggio's studio, wearing fake wings. The ragazzo grins cockily as he displays his flesh, in a light that somehow leads all eyes directly to, well, the penis of Cupid. It is overt sexuality, not romantic notion of love, that triumphs in this painting.

In the beginning of the article the author states that at his feet lie symbols of ambition and creativity: armour, musical instruments, mathematical tools, a crown. Cupid's insolent nakedness and provocative smile declare casually that everything, in the end, is less important than sex. It is a precociously modern point of view. Caravaggio means it to be disturbing. His picture proves what it preaches. However you react to it – with shock, revulsion, embarrassment, fascination or confusion – you are caught in its compelling grip.

Then he states that Caravaggio's masterpiece is more than 400 years old – he painted it in 1601 or 2. It amazed his contemporaries. They saw it as a personal confession: to them it proved Caravaggio guilty of the crime they called "sodomy", which in Caravaggio's case, outside of marriage, plainly meant homosexuality. The Christian society of his day was known to burn people alive for this.

Jonathan also reports that Caravaggio was born Michelangelo Merisi in 1571 near Milan. By the time he made a name for himself as a painter in Rome in the late 1590s, he was already known by the name of his home town, Caravaggio. He became the most celebrated – and controversial – artist in Rome, but in 1606 killed a man in a street fight and fled the eternal city. On the run in the south, he painted masterpieces in Malta, Sicily and Naples before dying of fever at Porto Ercole, Tuscany, in 1610.

Anyway the author believes that Caravaggio's sexuality is at the heart of his genius. His paintings are acts of defiance in an age when the wrong kind of love could get you executed. This fact has shaped perceptions of his art for centuries. He was virtually forgotten in the respectable Victorian age, when his florid young men were just too much for corseted psyches to take, then rediscovered in the 20th century.

The author tends to note that ultimately, sex was the sword that Caravaggio swung to get attention when, as a young penniless unknown arriving in Rome from the provinces in the 1590s, he painted pictures of young men who posed as – and probably were – prostitutes. Caravaggio revealed the secret life of the city of God in his paintings of young poor bodies for sale.

Then he states the painter's "boy, that laid with him" strikes a curious pose, with one of his bare legs raised to give the fullest view of his penis. This pose is based on a male nude painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel – which Michelangelo was accused of turning into a "brothel" with all his depictions of male members. The same boyfriend also appears nude in Caravaggio's painting St John the Baptist in the Capitoline Museum, Rome. Here he hugs a ram while sitting on luxurious red and white sheets. Golden light bathes the youth's legs while a fall of shadow leads the eye, once again, to his penis – another pose based on one of Michelangelo's nudes in the Sistine Chapel.

In the very end of the article the author writes that he needs to do that because his art is a sustained attempt to shock us into recognising, with a new freshness, the rough reality of life. By being so real, Caravaggio's art makes us see the world and one another with a new intensity. Grinning back at us, his boy posing as Cupid defies both law and death. Caravaggio grants his idol immortality, even as the youth tramples ambition, culture and knowledge. Sex is more real than all that stuff. It slithers like a snake through Caravaggio's art, sending a shiver under the skin that heightens our sense of being alive.

In my opinion that sex was the sword that Caravaggio swung to get attention. I believe It is very interesting way of producing of art.