Pace Sean Thomas, as Germaine Greer writes in The Boy, to suggest
that the Renaissance masters painted naked youths because they were pederasts
is like suggesting that they painted still life because they wanted to have sex
with it or because they were hungry.
The best, even the only, way to understand
Caravaggio is as a Catholic devotional artist, as the titles of numerous of
works make perfectly clear; those titles need to be taken at face value, and the
works evaluated accordingly.
The same may be said of most, if not all, the
Renaissance masters, beginning in each case with the paucity, if not the
absence, of evidence for the notion that their works are somehow supposed to be
pornographic, or at least erotic in the popular sense of the word.
The "religious dimension" needs to be taken
with absolute seriousness, and the relationship between Classicism and
Christianity (especially Catholicism) acknowledged.
Where, then, does that leave the concept of the
Renaissance?
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