Little wonder that post-Stonewall gay popular culture has responded so warmly to Caravaggio's work. An in-your-face male sexuality that refuses to apologize for itself has made paintings such as Boy with a Basket of Fruit, The Musicians, Bacchus, and especially Victorious Amor increasingly popular in gay design.

In one of the most illuminating examples of historical gay intertextuality, poet Thom Gunn has fashioned several poems as responses to specific Caravaggio paintings. And in his film-meditation upon Caravaggio's life and creative processes (Caravaggio, 1986), director Derek Jarman presents the painter as the quintessential gay artist, the cursed poet whose brilliant yet unconventional artistic vision and intense personal life unsettle his contemporaries, making him a source of unease as well as fascination.

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When filming Caravaggio's painting David with the Head of Goliath, Jarman--in a gesture of gay and artistic identification--placed his own face on the head of the defeated giant, as Caravaggio had earlier placed his own.

From about 1590 through the first decades of the eighteenth century, Baroque artists challenged the decorum of Renaissance art; but the period was also a time of intolerance and persecution.

Since the 1960s, European film has included significant gay-themed films, many of them directed by openly gay and lesbian directors.

The history of the papacy's attitudes toward same-sex relationships is more complex than the virulently antigay pronouncements of the most recent popes would lead one to believe.

Patronage--the sponsorship of artists and the commissioning of artistic projects from them--is of central importance to cultural history.

It is not surprising, since the Bible insists that David be looked at and admired, that he should emerge in Western art as the incarnation of male physical attractiveness, especially as rendered by Michelangelo.

The Greek god of wine, revelry, and orgiastic delights, and the patron god of hermaphrodites and transvestites, Dionysus has been extremely popular as a subject of Western art.

Although the myth of Narcissus was originally intended as a moral fable against excessive pride, Narcissus has functioned in the arts as a symbol of same-sex passion, as well as of masturbation and effeminacy.

Throughout much of history, the nude male figure was virtually the only subject that could be used to articulate homoerotic desire in publicly displayed works of art, as well as those works of art intended for private "consumption."

The story of Psyche, a late addition to Olympian divinities, is often interpreted as an allegory of the human confrontation with desire and the divine; although universal, it has had particular resonance for glbtq people.

Although art historians have given very little attention to representations of sex workers, images of same-sex prostitution extend far back into history.

Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, a seventeenth-century Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was a bold and influential patron and collector of the visual arts.

One of the most innovative Italian painters of the sixteenth century, Corregio (Antonio Allegri) devised a highly original manner than anticipates the Baroque style of the seventeenth century.

England's supreme poet of heterosexual love in the late Renaissance, John Donne also wrote a series of homoerotic verse letters to a young man and a remarkable dramatic monologue in a lesbian voice.

One of the leading Italian painters of the seventeenth century, Guercino fused spirituality and homoerotic desire in his paintings of religious subjects.

The Anglo-American writer Thom Gunn was a major gay poet and a perceptive critic of gay poetry.

In both his films and his writings, Derek Jarman's explicit project was to celebrate gay sexuality and imagine a place for it in English culture.

The work of Canadian painter, sculptor, and installation artist Attila Richard Lukacs is provocative and frequently fetishistic, especially in its depictions of skinheads.

The most famous artist who ever lived, Michelangelo left an enormous legacy in sculpture, painting, drawing, architecture, and poetry; while the artist's sexual behavior cannot be documented, the homoerotic character of his drawings, letters, and poetry is unmistakable.

One of the most important cultural figures to emerge from post-World War II Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a versatile man-of-letters, but he was foremost a filmmaker.