Arts and Design

Private passions: the sexual secrets hidden in the world’s greatest art


Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Isabella Brant – the wife of his mentor, Rubens – is usually seen as a homage to the painter who helped him on his way. But a new interpretation by the Cambridge academic John Harvey suggests that Van Dyck was actually Brant’s lover – and her wry smile in the portrait is a coded brag. If so, it is part of a long tradition of sexual secrets hidden in art. Spotting the love story is a game that still teases us centuries later.

In the 1600s, an English traveller in Rome was shown Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia – in which a naked Cupid looks with a sneering smile from the wreckage of culture – and was told it portrays “Caravaggio’s boy, that laid with him”. This youth was called Cecco, and appears in other paintings by Caravaggio. He is Isaac about to be killed by his father, and a nude Saint John the Baptist. Caravaggio taught him, as well as laying with him, and he became an artist in his own right.

Detail from Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.



Detail from Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Photograph: Peter Horree/Alamy

Caravaggio was far being from the first artist who hid his passion in a picture. When he portrayed Cecco as John the Baptist, he was following Leonardo da Vinci, whose pupil Salaì was the most likely model for his semi-nude Baptist. This painting’s private meaning is teased out in a drawing by Leonardo that gives Saint John an erection.

In the 1460s, Filippo Lippi portrayed his lover Lucrezia as the Madonna, looking tenderly at a Christ who is probably their baby son. This may seem only mildly profane – except that Lippi was a friar and when he met Lucrezia she was a nun. He invited her to pose for a painting in her convent, then ran off with her.

Judith with the head of Holofernes – the severed head is Cristofano Allori’s own.



Judith with the head of Holofernes – the severed head is Cristofano Allori’s own. Photograph: DEA/De Agostini via Getty Images

By Van Dyck’s day, secret love stories were seen as part of the pleasure and power of art. Connoisseurs enjoyed showing off that they knew the hidden meaning of Cristofano Allori’s Judith and Holofernes, in which a pale Judith in a sumptuous dress holds the severed head of a man. Contemporaries in the 1600s gossiped that Judith is Allori’s cruel mistress, Maria de Giovanni Mazzafirri. The severed head is, of course, his own. For good measure, Judith’s servant is Mazzafirri’s mother whom he blamed for wrecking their relationship.

Maybe Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was one of the many people who fell for Emma Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador to Naples and mistress of Nelson. This aristocratic artist and close friend of Marie Antoinette portrayed Hamilton four times, including in the nude. Her portraits capture the sexuality that seduced Nelson much more powerfully than any paintings by men.

Filippo Lippi portrayed his lover Lucrezia as the Madonna.



Filippo Lippi portrayed his lover Lucrezia as the Madonna. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

In modern times, Picasso coded every detail of his love life in his art, using it to celebrate and punish the women in his life. He even paid homage to the Renaissance cult of the art of love in a series of engravings of Raphael and his mistress La Fornarina. But in his violently carnal masterpiece, The Three Dancers, he tells a story of love gone wrong. Two of the figures represent his friends Ramon Pichot and his wife, Germaine Gargallo. The third is believed to be his youthful friend (and Gargallo’s lover) Carlos Casagemas, who killed himself over Gargallo. Frida Kahlo was just as painfully confessional: in her 1943 Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, she has the face of her difficult love Diego Rivera tattooed on her forehead.

If Van Dyck hid his affair with Isabella in her portrait, it is just one among many passionate stories hidden in the world’s greatest art.



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.