Mauro Bigonzetti (choreographer) | Caravaggio / 2025

revealing caravaggio’s gay sexuality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mauro Bigonzetti (choreographer), Roberto Bolle and Timofej Andrijashenko (dancers), Caravaggio / 2025 [5.30 minutes]

 

Art critics and biographers has long tip-toed through the years concerning the Italian artist Caravaggio’s sexuality. Some such as Andrew Graham-Dixon even argued that any such claim that Caravaggio was homosexual was based on “circumstantial evidence and much rumour,” and that he certainly did also have sexual relations with females and prostitutes.

     Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott has taken issue with what he regarded as Graham-Dixon's minimizing of Caravaggio's homosexuality:

 

      “There was a fussiness to the tone whenever a scholar or curator was forced to grapple with transgressive sexuality, and you can still find it even in relatively recent histories, including Andrew Graham-Dixon's 2010 biography of Caravaggio, which acknowledges only that ‘he likely slept with men.’” The journalist notes the artist's fluid sexual desires but gives some of Caravaggio's most explicitly homoerotic paintings tortured readings to keep them safely in the category of mere ‘ambiguity.’

     Today it is generally recognized that the mercurial artist who created through his dramatic use of chiaroscuro what came to be described as tenebrism, influencing such major artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Rembrandt, was gay. He is now generally acknowledged to have been a gay or bi-sexual man who had open relationships with other males, and often was involved with what today would be called street gangs and murder. Some proclaim he was mad by the time of his death, perhaps of syphilis, but more likely sepsis he acquired through a wound.

      Certainly, this ballet number centers upon his male sexuality, occasionally referring to some of the paintings in a room made up to look like the Caravaggio room in the Palazzo Barberini.

        The dance features lifts, thrusts, hand-locks, and positions in which one dancer wraps his body around the other, in one case in this ballet the other removing his supporting hands as if the two had become one body.

       This is a ballet full of homoerotic moves symbolizing both the love of the two men and their sexual commitment. There is no question here about the artist’s sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2025  

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).