In the year 1571, Michaelangelo Merisi was born in Lombaardy in the small hill town of Caravaggio. In about 1583, at approximately twelve years of age, Caravaggio apprenticed for four years with the Bergamese painter Simone Peterzano. Peterzano was a Late Mannerist with some repute in Milan. Peterzano’s subject matter ran from classic to religious with a preponderance of religious subjects, mainly in fresco. After his apprenticeship the young artist is said to have returned to his home and may have traveled to Venice. Then, in 1592, the twenty-one year old Caravaggio leaves Milan and travels to Rome with a small inheritance which didn’t last him long. Rome at the beginning of the Counter Reformation was bustling with the building of many churches and numerous, lucrative commissions were available.

Caravaggio seemed to possess a predilection for the employment of young men as models in many of his early paintings in Rome (1592- a. 1596). This is evident in such works as the Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593), the Bacchus (1595) (See below), the The Musicians (1595), the Lute Player (1596), and the famed Amor Vincit Omnia (1601). The artist presents these young men as possessing a sense of veiled lussuriosi--they were luxurious, in the true sense of the word. His models were naturalistically treated and many of them bore the grime and character of a street urchin. They were certainly not Apollonian! The naturalism that Caravaggio employed in depicting the human model was not mere physical realism but psychological realism as well--realism with a vengeance. There is an overt sexuality, certainly sensuality in Caravaggio’s treatment of these young men. These youths may be viewed as homoerotic in a XXI^st Century sense. But what may be true in the XXI^st Century is not necessarily applicable in the XVI^th and XVII^th Centuries. It would not have been untoward to see young nude boys frolicking in the Tiber or Arno or Po Rivers, or even in the narrow lanes of the cities of Italy. In 1594 one of his paintings caught the eye of the powerful, sophisticated, aristocratic and dissolute Cardinal Del Monte.