He arrived in Rome from Milan in 1592 and, having trained under a succession of minor masters, painted a series of strange and erotic genre pieces featuring epicene boys and still-lifes – pictures such as Boy With a Basket of Fruit and Boy Bitten by a Lizard, both from 1593-94.
Two pictures by Caravaggio survive with a provenance that links them to the Cesari workshop: Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Self-Portrait as Bacchus (also called Sick Bacchus).
He also painted Boy with a Basket of Fruit a still life with religious sacramental associations, carried by the contrast between worm-eaten apples and grapes, symbols respectively of perishable flesh and the redemption of Jesus' blood in the form of holy wine.
For instance, Caravaggio's painting Boy with a Basket of Fruit, from which a youth looks at us woozily, his shirt artfully fallen to reveal a muscular shoulder, offering a luscious array of fruits for us to taste, is interpreted as an image of Christ's love whose apparent eroticism refers to the sacred love expressed by the Song of Solomon.
"Elio, with his curly hair, playing guitar and piano, biking through the Italian countryside, immediately reminded me of Caravaggio's Boy with a Basket of Fruit.
Alone with the Torah, I read the story of Moses' parents sending him down the Nile in a basket, desperately hoping their baby boy would somehow escape Pharaoh's death machine.
Before you exit the church, you leave your cotton balls in a basket being held by altar boys, so as not to dispose of the holy oil in a less than holy place.
Five men, himself included, run and converge on the spot It is a hot-air balloon: "At the base of the balloon was a basket in which there was a boy, and beside the basket, clinging to a rope, was a man in need of help".
Pre-concert, the boys are like a basket of setter puppies, nudging elbows and getting into shoving contests.
After a bear devours a basket of fish that Kenai carelessly tended, the boy pursues the scavenger with a vengeance.
