Ad's Caravaggio 2001 Gallery

a classic
gay-art gallery

Worked in Berlin this summer, but went back for some more queer culture.
And there is no better place for that this year than the capital city of a country that is now more tolerant than my own (NL) and also gives a contrasting relief compared to the prudish anglosaxon countries is their celebration, both in art as in real life of the naked body:
never saw so many statues with dicks as in Sanssouci, Potsdam. Unfortunately without tape in my cam, so I have to go there one more time . . . ;( . . . ?ż
The first thing that any gay visitor has to do is pay a visit to the Altes Museum on the museuminsel.
On the ground floor you find the vastest collection of old greek helenistic vases and plates with male nude and sexual activities of the world
On the first floor they have a Caravaggio in Preussen exhibition this year
WOW !
it shows a lot of the Giustiani Collection. Also the Michelangelo statue of a butnaked Jesus Christ is part of it. The website of the exhibition and the museum itself is here.
On this page I want to go straight to the most impressive images I saw:

the city is filled with this image on the main poster of the exhibition:

if this is not your typical nelly queen of the renaissance?
I don't know who is!
it is said Carravagio portrayed himself here.

This one is owned by the Metropolitan Museum NYC, so you US citizens can easily have a look at gay culture anno 1600 in its original scan

Nothing gay, nelly about this: just pure exuberant virtuosity although something funny is going on with the right breast of the murderer.

John the baptist of 1600

something weird with the belly again
if a model was a bit flabby, then so be it, he must have thought, even if for the rest the saint's dark face still looks like a guy to fall in love with here and now.

John the baptist of 1609
a different model
that much is certain

Willem Kok must have studied this painting when he was drawing his Romans.

and to finish off something completely different from the same amazing city:
In the post building at the OstBahnhof there was an exhibition of human conserved bodies and bodyparts. They had a procedure in which they replaced water molecules from human remains with a plastic, thus conserving them and enabling anatomy studies in a way not done before. It is a bit eery, maybe even scaryer than cloning. What u see pulled apart in a fencing pose here was a real living person only 20 years ago. Wondering if his children have made the same detailed study of his balls and dick as I.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
luckily has been dead and gone
for 4 centuries now
so no worries about
copyrights of his work!
back to the artists directory
and to the core artists
or to the corresponding page thumbnails
more great art links can be found here