Sex, Violence and Faith: The Art of Caravaggio AMELIA ARENAS Walking through the galleries of European art in a museum can be like watching a parade of patricians at a tournament. If it were not for their conspicuous haloes, you’d never know you were looking at saints: they are the shepherds, fishermen, hermits and martyrs of Christian lore who, for centuries, artists insisted on posing with the phlegmatic elegance of courtiers decked in shot-silk and goldtrimmed garments. To compensate for their inept performance, these miscast actors often carry along symbolic objects that once helped the public identify the characters they played. A poised Saint Lucy, for instance, might hold her mutilated eyes on a silver platter; St. Lawrence, the rack on which the Romans grilled him alive. The sanctity of these characters has always been “a matter of faith”—in the past, it was faith in the teachings of the Church; now, in the reliability of museum labels. But when you get to the age of Caravaggio in your museum walk, you’ll notice a visible change. You see a bewildered old man about to be hung upside down like a butcher’s carcass (fig. 1); a man sticking his finger inside another’s open wound (fig. 2); a venerable elder ready to slice the throat of a screaming child (fig. 3). It matters little whether you’re Christian or not, or whether you’re familiar with Christian art. You’re involved. You’re a witness to these horrors. You’re almost an accomplice. As you keep walking through the galleries, you’ll see one Caravaggio-look-alike after another, because during his short and controversial life, the taste for his art spread to every corner of the Christian world. But you needn’t even be in a arion 23.3 winter 2016 museum to feel his influence. He’s in the anonymous devotional postcards that beggars sell at the doorsteps of every village church from Italy to the Philippines. He’s behind the camera during the climax of all horror movies. He’s even in the magazine section of most pornography shops. Observe the source: Caravaggio’s Bacchus (fig. 4)—or rather, the Roman boy with dirty finger nails and plucked eyebrows that the artist dressed up as the pagan god of drunkenness— lies on a couch offering you a glass filled to the brim with wine. You are at risk. He fingers the black sash that holds his tunic and looks at you with sly, disdainful eyes and an incipient snicker, as if he could see in you some of his own lewdness , but none of his calm. On the table, a bowl overflowing with fruit and garnished with leaves echoes the plump face framed in a garland of grape leaves. Like the fruit, the boy is prematurely ripe—or, rather, bruised. It’s impossible to over-interpret the sexual content of this image, for the erotic appeal of Caravaggio’s boys is as vivid as the suffering of his martyrs. How appropriate that Bacchus, the ultimate deity of self-indulgence, should find an avatar in this contemporary “boy-toy.” His hands and face, reddened by the sun, remind you of the clothes he wears when he’s not playing a god in the studio, and makes his pale flesh look all the more naked. In fact, the only thing to suggest this corrupt, cynical kid is a god is the overwhelming power he has over you—and, perhaps, the fact that he projects no shadow on the wall. Hard as it may seem to believe, it is quite possible that Caravaggio’s Bacchus passed as a Christian allegory. Bacchus, originally, the deity of the wine harvest, was, since Roman times, associated with Jesus, who offered as his symbolic blood a toast of wine to his apostles during his Last Supper— a gesture ritually re-enacted each time in the Christian mass. Besides, like Jesus, Bacchus too was a resurrected god since, according to one of the most popular traditions, he was reborn after being torn to pieces by jealous gods. This ancient connection between Jesus and Bacchus might sex, violence and faith: the art of...