Most disturbing to many of Caravaggio's viewers is the sexual, primarily homoerotic, energy that radiates from his canvases. The adolescent males whose tight musculature and radiant skin tones are so lovingly rendered in his paintings bespeak Caravaggio's fascination with the ragazzi di vita—those adolescent street boys, none of them handsome in the classical sense, who radiate a sexual energy that Caravaggio takes to be the very energy of life. –The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts