Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [54]
Although Hibbard’s interpretation is, I believe, thoroughly misguided, it contains an element of truth. There is a link between the figure’s mood of sensual abandon and the luscious fruits that he bears, many of which – especially the figs, apples and pomegranate – had ancient sexual connotations. But the explanation for that lies not in the artist’s supposedly devil-may-care determination to flaunt his homosexuality. It lies in the words of an ancient Persian love poem, absorbed long ago into the Judaeo-Christian tradition and known as the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon, the most flagrantly erotic text in all of the Old Testament.28 It takes the form of a poetic dialogue between two lovers, the Bride and the Groom, who express their feelings for one another in imagery of a rich and fecund natural world.
The Groom compares his beloved to a garden: ‘A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits …’ (4:12–13). For her part, the Bride describes the Groom as ‘white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand. His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven … His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem’ (5:10–16). Finally, the Groom describes the fruition of their desires: ‘How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof; now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples; and the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak’ (7:6–9).
The iconography of Caravaggio’s painting is extremely close to that of the Song of Songs. The boy’s basket is filled with the fruits described in the poem, while the boy himself has all the attributes of the Groom, with his ruddy cheeks, his hair ‘as black as a raven’. So tender and languorous is his gaze that he might readily be imagined actually reciting the verses of the Song of Songs to his beloved. His lips are parted, as if to speak or sing.
The Song of Songs was a controversial religious text among Christians and Jews alike precisely because of its profound eroticism. In the first century AD one of the rabbis to argue most passionately for its inclusion in Jewish scripture, as the ‘Holy of Holies’, also condemned the secular practice of singing it in banqueting halls, which suggests that sacred interpretation of the text had long been shadowed by suspicion of its sensuality.29 By the time Caravaggio painted his Boy with a Basket, in the late sixteenth century, Christian Church fathers had spent considerably more than a millennium teasing out what they had come to see as the redemptive symbolism of the poem’s tale of love. The Groom’s passion for the Bride was held to express Jesus Christ’s boundless love for his holy mother, Mary. The metaphor of the Bride as an ‘inclosed garden’ was easily transformed into a symbol of Mary’s virginity.
But, to judge by the remarks of St Teresa of Avila, who wrote her own commentary on the Song of Songs in 1573, such forms of allegorical interpretation were not always easily understood by congregations in the world of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. As she noted, bawdy laughter at the sexual connotations of the poem’s language might easily interrupt even the most solemn, sacerdotal reflections on the Song of Songs: ‘Indeed, I recall hearing a priest … preach a very admirable sermon, most of which was an explanation of those loving delights with which the bride communed with God. And there was