Caravaggio's Secrets (review)

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have given their book a coyly suggestive name, and several of their chapter titles more obviously propose an erotic concern—"Sexy Secrets," "Losing It," among others. Although their book clearly has been marketed to attract those interested in the homoerotic, the authors immediately and emphatically dismiss the possibility of any (homo)sexual interpretation of Caravaggio's works. They acknowledge that his models might seem to seek the attention of viewers, but they insist that erotic solicitation is not the goal of the artist (or his models). According to Bersani and Dutoit, eroticism is irrelevant to Caravaggio's interrogation of methods of seeing and of being. Utilizing psychoanalytic theory, eroticism is characterized as an exercise of the "hyperbolic ego" that seeks to consume objects of desire. Caravaggio is supposed to have sought to articulate nonerotic forms of connectedness, which avoid the violence inherent in other types of human relations.

To a modern viewer, Caravaggio's provocatively posed youths might seem "ripe" for a queer analysis, but most scholars of his work have insisted that his paintings have no deliberate homoerotic content. In accord with most previous commentators, Bersani and Dutoit maintain that it is impossible to be certain about the sexuality of anyone in the artist's circle, and they (rightly) insist that contemporary concepts about sexual behavior do not apply to Caravaggio's era. Moreover, as they also note, scholarly attempts to analyze the homoerotic character of his work most often have been disappointing. Unfortunately, Donald Posner and many others who have discussed the sexual content of his work have resorted to offensive and meaningless clichés. ¹

Surprisingly, no scholar has articulated a positive queer interpretation of the artist, equivalent in scope and complexity to that which Derek Jarman realized in his powerful film, Caravaggio. The "interests" of some of Caravaggio's most important patrons (who are reported to have held parties with cross-dressed "street youths"), police records documenting the artist's personal involvement in the Roman "sexual underground," and other historical evidence could provide the basis for a systematic "reconstruction" of a vibrant queer personality. However, this project could be realized only by someone more interested in social and contextual research than Bersani and Dutoit appear to be. They provide almost no biographical information about the artist and seem to have assumed either that readers are already familiar with the artist's biography or that they are uninterested in the historical limits of his existence.

Caravaggio's work differs in certain fundamental respects from that of other painters of his era, but Bersani and Dutoit obscure the character of his achievement by "overstating" and exaggerating his uniqueness. They repeatedly invoke Alberti's On Painting as an indication of the "norms" of art in his era. Yet this treatise, published in 1436, has little relevance to the period of Caravaggio's activity (c. 1592-1610). The authors do not even mention the numerous art treatises published in the late sixteenth century; these books articulated Mannerist and post-Mannerist theories more relevant to Caravaggio and his contemporaries. The few comparative examples of works by other artists (cited only in endnotes) are too obviously distinct in style and meaning from Caravaggio's. Some of the features of Caravaggio's work that most intrigue Bersani and Dutoit (including the intense but "oddly" unfocused gazes; the flat backdrops, which limit action to the foreground; and the lack of clear spatial connections among various pictorial elements) are comparable to effects achieved by (now often overlooked) artists active in northern Italy, where Caravaggio was trained, such as the Campi brothers and Girolamo Muziano. The careers of these artists are only now being unraveled, but Caravaggio's interactions with them need to be explored if we are to understand exactly how and why his work actually differed from that of his contemporaries. Particularly...