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.
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 paint