The bad boy mystique is simple. With talent comes temperament, and with temperament comes trouble. Talent, temperament and trouble together often mark a highly creative personality. The Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) and the American adult film star Ryan Idol (born 1966) have all three.
They live four hundred years apart, but their lives follow a remarkably similar path. Both talented, they rise to the top of their field almost at once. And both end up facing the gravest charges of their lives: Caravaggio for murder, Idol for attempted murder.
Genius is not limited to respected art forms. Caravaggio's genius is in staging the body for a viewer: choosing the model, setting the pose and lighting the moment. Idol's genius is in being that body, in knowing how to hold a viewer's attention and keep it. Both men practice the same art from opposite sides of the frame.
The Early Years
Both men start with nothing. Caravaggio is orphaned at 12, after plague and illness take his father and mother. Idol grows up in foster homes and never knows his father. Neither has a family to fall back on, and both learn early to depend on what they can make of themselves.
Each man's career begins at age 22. Around 1593, newly arrived in Rome and without money, Caravaggio paints Sick Bacchus, a self-portrait as the god of wine. Early biographers say he paints it in a mirror while recovering from an illness. He is his own first model. In February 1989, Idol appears as Playgirl's Man of the Month under his birth name, Marc Anthony Donais. He too begins by presenting himself.
The rise is fast for both. Within a few years Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte takes Caravaggio into his household. There he paints young men, partly undressed, looking straight at the viewer, for a private circle of collectors. In 1600 his Saint Matthew paintings are unveiled in the Contarelli Chapel, and he becomes the most talked-about painter in Rome.
Idol's first video, Idol Eyes, with Joey Stefano, comes out in 1990 and wins an award. His videos are made for gay men to watch in private. By 1994 he has won Best Actor and earns $50,000 a film. Idol's name is in the titles of his films, which is unusual for the period, and in the early 1990s his name on the box sells the video.
Both men's private lives include men and women. In about 1650, an English traveler records that the model for Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia is Cecco, Caravaggio's own boy, "that laid with him." Caravaggio's 1605 attack on a notary is over Lena Antognetti, who is called "Michelangelo's woman" in the record. Idol has an on-and-off relationship with Jeff McCourt, the founder of Windy City Times, while he also has a girlfriend.
Working the Theater
Caravaggio's paintings are built on theatrical presence: models in costume, lit from a single high source, caught at the most dramatic moment of the story. Idol takes his talent to the stage itself. After leaving video, he spends ten years as a stage actor. He plays a straight actor in gay porn in Making Porn, a rural gay man in love in Scent of Rain, and himself in his one-man show, Anatomy of an Idol. In 2007 he makes his Broadway debut in Terrence McNally's The Ritz. Very few adult performers reach Broadway.
Both build their fame on a small body of major work over careers of about 18 years. Caravaggio completes about two dozen major works, mostly large public commissions for churches. He works without a large workshop, and no drawings by him are known. Idol, from 1989 to 2007, completes about 16 major works, including films and stage productions.
Temperament and Trouble
Fame does not settle either man. In 1604 the writer Karel van Mander reports that Caravaggio works for two weeks, then spends a month or two walking the streets with a sword, looking for a fight. The Roman police records support this. He is arrested for assault and for carrying a sword without a license. He throws a plate of artichokes at a waiter and stones at the police. He is jailed for libel in 1603, and in 1605 he wounds a notary.
Idol's trouble starts before his fame. In 1987, while serving in the Navy, he is court-martialed for assaulting an officer and dishonorably discharged. After he leaves video, drugs and alcohol take over. In March 1998 he falls from a fourth-floor window in New York in a suicide attempt and survives. Months later he arrives 45 minutes late for a performance in Miami Beach, and the production ends.
Then each man commits the act that defines the rest of his life. In May 1606 Caravaggio kills Ranuccio Tomassoni in a sword fight in Rome. Accounts of the cause differ. He is sentenced to death, and the sentence means anyone may kill him on sight. He flees.
In September 2009 Idol attacks his former girlfriend in Sacramento with a toilet tank lid. He claims self-defense. He is convicted of attempted murder in 2011 and sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2012.
Caravaggio keeps painting while he is on the run. In Naples, Malta and Sicily he makes some of his greatest work. He is made a Knight of Malta, then jailed after a brawl, and he escapes. In Naples his face is slashed in an attack. He dies in July 1610 at Porto Ercole, at age 38, while traveling to Rome to receive a pardon.
Idol calls himself "the creation of Marc Anthony Donais." Ryan Idol is the star. For Broadway he is credited under his birth name, and Marc Anthony Donais is the man who serves the prison sentence. He is released in August 2022 and turns 60 in 2026.
For almost three hundred years after his death, Caravaggio's reputation is low. In the twentieth century it recovers, and today he is one of the most popular painters in the world. Idol's videos are not in museums, but they remain part of gay visual history.
Talent, temperament and trouble make both men famous, and they also bring real harm. Tomassoni dies, and Idol's girlfriend is badly injured. The story of each man includes both the genius and the damage.
— Behan
Sources:
Wikipedia, "Ryan Idol."
Box Turtle Bulletin, "September 28th, 2012."
Xtra Magazine, "Naked on Stage: Ryan Idol Bares His Soul."
Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (1604).
Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (c. 1620).
Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (1998).
Peter Robb, M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio (1998).
Galleria Borghese, Rome, collection record for Sick Bacchus.