Why sex should never be whitewashed from the art world

Jonathan Jones responds to prudish critics who accuse him of turning Renaissance art into a 'pornotopia' – and explains why you should always go to galleries with sex on the brain

Fleshy fascination … Blue Nude by Henri Matisse. Photograph: Francis G Mayer/Corbis/Succession H Matisse, Paris. Click to view full image

Is it merely prurient to want to know who a famous artist slept with? I don't think so. Personally I love to know what made the masters tick, and by tick, I mean get aroused. Many people see this kind of curiosity as superficial, sensationalist and irrelevant to the higher world that is art. I've even been told I see the Renaissance as a "pornotopia".

It seems trendy in conventional biographies to deny that artists slept with their models. We should not leap to conclusions just because their art seems massively sensual. That's why writer Hilary Spurling insists that Matisse never jumped into bed with the women he painted with such nakedly erotic pleasure, while Andrew Graham Dixon denies Caravaggio was gay just because he painted men with fleshly fascination.

Such prudishness seems like intellectual seriousness, but it is not. Art, like sex, is a human impulse. As the artist Robert Rauschenberg said, "Painting relates to both art and life." Bed, his combine painting, or painting/sculpture hybrid, is a masterpiece stained with sex.

The making of art happens not in a temple, but in the mess of real flesh-and-blood lives and loves. When it enters a museum, it is mythically removed from that tangle of human relationships and needs.

The longer the time between an artwork's fleshy making and our experience of it, the harder it is to feel that pulse of life in it – at least, it seems so if you believe textbooks and gallery captions that are oh so reverent, so hushed. Yet the traces of passion and danger, the stuff of life, can still be felt in old art if you look at it with a bit less reverence and a bit more blood in your veins.

Renaissance reveller… Bacchus (c 1595-96) by Caravaggio. Photograph: Francis G Mayer/Corbis

Caravaggio, for instance, put the truth of his life in his art. All he believed in was painting reality. He said as much in the few words by him that are documented in Roman court records. And he says as much in the paintings of his that constantly put sexuality in a startling light. From Cupid displaying his penis to an armoured knight whose page boy looks knowingly at the artist to John the Baptist lounging on comfy sheets with his nudity as fulsome as Cupid's, Caravaggio uses sex to provoke and discomfort and captivate the viewer.

A 17th-century visitor to Rome was told that Caravaggio's favourite model was "his owne boy or servant thait laid with him". At the time, a rival artist even portrayed Caravaggio as a sodomite devil trying to have his way with Cupid. I see no reason to doubt these sources, and it makes no sense to dismiss such details as irrelevant to understanding his art. If you look at Caravaggio without seeing sensuality in it, you miss half his power – and that, I believe, is true of a whole host of artists who contributed to the "pornotopia" of the Renaissance and baroque ages.

Sex is a bomb that can free great art from the prison of the museum. Next time you visit, say, the National Gallery, go armed with it.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/apr/24/sex-and-sexuality-in-renaissance-art