Sudden Death

Love That Doesn’t Speak Its Name

There is a painting from the early seventeenth century called The Death of Hyacinth. Though attributed for a time to Merisi, today it is believed to be the work of one of his disciples, probably Cecco del Caravaggio. In it, Hyacinth and Apollo are depicted at the moment of the former’s death. If Saint Sebastian in all his arrow-pierced ecstasy hadn’t become the patron saint of gay culture, it’s likely that Hyacinth would today be the emblematic mythological figure of male homosexuality.

Friend and lover of Apollo, Hyacinth was the son of Clio and a Macedonian or Peloponnesian king — depending on who tells the tale, he was either Macedonian or Spartan. The god, deeply in love with the hero, was training him in the stadium arts when he tossed him the discus with divine strength and inadvertently killed him. He wept so much and so vigorously that his tears transformed Hyacinth’s body into the flower that bears his name, which prevented Hades from carrying him away to the underworld.

In classical representations of the myth, which in ancient Greece was associated with the passage from adolescence to adulthood, Zephyr, god of the wind, rises up with Hyacinth to save him from hell. The specialist term for the posture in which they rise is intercrural coitus—that is, a kind of coitus in which there is no penetration, and orgasm is produced by the friction of the genitalia on the thighs of the two participants.

Cecco del Caravaggio was the most loyal of the Caravaggisti, painters who imitated Merisi until the star of his art faded. And he was the only one of them who worked in Merisi’s studio and accompanied him on most of the escapades that made him infamous as a man with a tendency for insubordination, for conduct that defied the norm of the city of the popes, and — inevitably — for crime. Cecco’s nudes depicting Love laughing raucously or Saint John the Baptist as a young man are still provocative in their frontal frankness.

In the painting of the death of Hyacinth — a subject later also taken up by Tiepolo — Apollo weeps for his lover. Instead of the discus of the original myth, he is carrying a racket in his hand. At the feet of the hero, a hyacinth blooms next to his own tennis racket — a fallen bird.