This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
Francesco Maria del Monte is within the scope of WikiProject Catholicism, an attempt to better organize and improve the quality of information in articles related to the Catholic Church. For more information, visit the project page.CatholicismWikipedia:WikiProject CatholicismTemplate:WikiProject CatholicismCatholicism articles
I've read the source mentioned in the material I deleted:
It was likely, although not conclusive, that he was homosexual and this may have influenced his tastes in the art he commissioned<ref>Howard Hibbard, "Caravaggio" (1983) ISBN 978-0-06-433322-1</ref>.
The source doesn't explicitly state that Del Monte was gay. Given that that's sort of a "controversial" statement, I would feel a lot more comfortable with it being a) more definitive (remove the 'likely though not conclusive'), and b) backed up by a more concrete source. -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs)02:54, 10 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate your concern to cite robust sources but should we really be worried with stating that Del Monte might have been homosexual because this is potentially "controversial"? Maybe as a Catholic cardinal it might arguably be controversial to state that he was 'actively homosexual' (although this is not historically uncommon), but I wouldn't have thought a big deal to say that he was simply homosexual by nature? In any case looking at the sources, Howard Hibbard was a respected academic and professor of art history so I think we should take what he says with some weight. We should also consider the views of Donald Posner. I've redrafted the section slightly - see what you think. I'm going to see if I can track down the primary sources too. Contaldo80 (talk) 11:43, 10 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It all began with the Caravaggio scholars, some of whom started arguing that C. was gay because of the early-period paintings of youths. Then other scholars came to C's defence, saying it was all the fault of the wicked Del Monte, who had ordered the paintings and whose taste, not C's, they reflected. And then of course Del Monte himself had to be defended. It was, and is, very much a case of an academic dog chasing it's own scholarly tail. The evidence for a homosexual content to the paintings is pretty solid and is based on their inclusion of common symbols/signs from the place and time - off-the-shoulder shirts, flowers in the hair, etc. To sheet this home to Del Monte rather than Caravaggio is rather more difficult. The primary-source evidence for Del Monte's homosexuality comes from a lawyer, Dirk van Ameyden, who was a contemporary. (Despite the Dutch name, he lived in Rome). Commenting in a letter on Del Monte's last and unsuccessful bid to be elected pope, Ameyden comments that the failure wasn't due to the hostility of the Spanish (Del Monte was pro-French), but because he "was attracted to intimacy with boys." In his earlier years he had concealed this, but in his old age, with no more hope of the highest office, he "relaxed all restraint...and openly indulged his tastes." Ameyden also comments that he believed the attraction not to have been "sinful". This comes from Peter Robb's biography of Caravaggio, "M". Ameyden's reliability has been attacked on the grounds that he was a personal enemy of Del Monte, but I can see no basis for this. Robb himself, however, is less than entirely reliable, and I'd also ask you to look at Catheine Puglisi's "Caravaggio" (Phaidon), page 99.PiCo (talk) 09:04, 13 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Puglisi is a standard recent (1998) critical biography of Caravaggio (by which I mean that she discusses the paintings as well as the artist). Talking about The Lute Player and "The Musicians shes says: "The seductive atmosphere of [these two paintings] recalls Caravaggio's earlier works and here too the sexual ambiguity of the male models has raised the issue of homoerotic intent. (Note that she talks of actual "intent" on the part of the artist, not merely later readings into the paintings). As Caravaggio was addressing a particular patron and ambience, Del Monte's personality has come under modern scrutiny, and his presumed homosexuality is repeatedly invoked as justification for the suggestive imagery. However, Del Monte's alleged taste for boys rests on insinuations made by a hostile contemporary who claimed that, as an old man, that is in the 1620s, Del Monte displayed more than paternal love for the boys under his protection. Less tainted evidence from two decades earlier exists for Del Monte's decidedly heterosexual behaviour. On more than one occasion he fondly reminisced with an old friend about the women they had courted in their youth. Once a cardinal, he did not abandon his former gallantries." She goes on to give some examples. She also raises the possibility that Del Monte enjoyed both boys and girls. She does not directly refute this possibility, but notes that there exists a separate report, from 1621, describing the 72 year old Del Monte as a "living corpse" given over to spiritual matters "perhaps so as to make up for the license of his younger days." Her next paragraph draws attention to the danger of interpreting the society and culture of Rome in 1600 as if it were identical to New York in 2000: she notes that at the time women were forbidden to appear as entertainers, with the result that female parts were played by boys: "Thus the often-cited report that Cardinal Del Monte attended a ballet in 1605 at which the dancers were young boys dressed as women records a special but hardly scandalous event, which has parallels in the contemporary Elizabethan and Jacobean stage where the heroines were also played by boys."PiCo (talk) 10:14, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I have just modified one external link on Francesco Maria del Monte. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).
If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.
