Quote Originally Posted by sycld View Post
Well, I suppose that is your opinion. Still, these depicitions of naked youths and others like them have been enough to make Caravaggio's sexuality (as well as that of his patrons') a topic of academic debate.
Yeah, I'm familiar with the debate on Caravaggio's sexuality, and in fact I'd agree that his body of work, looked at in it's totality, suggests a preoccupation wwith naked boys. What I'm saying, hoever, is that the pictures you posted in the OP aren't, in and of themselves, "overtly and unashamedly erotic". They show naked figures, that's all; the figures aren't doing anything particularly suggestive, they're just standing there with their dicks showing. If that makes them inherently erotic, then a huge portion of art from that period (and others) is "erotic" too. Amor Vincit Omnia isn't any more erotic, in and of itself, than Michelangelo's David, or El Greco's Laocoon, or Perugino's Apollo and Marysas, or any other artistic work depicting nude figures with exposed genitals. After all, as I said earlier, painting figures in the nude was pretty standard procedure back then. It's only when you look at Caravaggio's whole body of work, and see that he seemed to have heavily favored adolescent boys as his nude models, that the sexual dimension at work there is suggested. I don't think that any reasonable person can claim that any given painting of those nude boys is inherently erotic, unless they are prepared to claim that ALL paintings of nude figures are inherently erotic.

Quote Originally Posted by sycld
I suppose I wanted to open this discussion beyond merely these laws about child pornography and all touch upon our prudish sensibilities regarding this topic, regarding anything that might be sexual with young children in it as "child pornography," but I guess I failed in that by not providing a strong enough first post.
I guess it seems to me that striving for broadness in that way is counterproductive, because it just makes the ensuing argument multi-directional and unfocused. I do see the connection you were trying to make, but to me, the issue of charging minors for child porn and the issue of whether 17th-century nude paintings can be called "child porn" aren't closely linked enough for it to be really effective. Just my opinion, of course. To me, the real point of this thread should be the debate over hitting minors with child porn charges for taking nude pics of themselves, adding in this extra layer of debate over possibly-erotic old paintings just confuses the issue.