A highly appreciative audience last Thursday heard world-renowned expert on Caravaggio Professor David Stone disprove a popular pop-art-history theory about the painting by Caravaggio, executed while he was in Malta, of Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, which is now at the Louvre.

The recent spate of interest and speculation about Caravaggio stemmed from purported links between his paintings and his not so latent homosexuality.

In particular, this interest was heightened by the fact that the Grand Master in this painting is portrayed as looking one way, and the young page looking out of the painting was recently described as both the painter’s and the boy’s intention to destabilise the painting honouring the Grand Master who had made Caravaggio a Knight of the Order.

But nothing could be further from the truth, Professor Stone argued: the painting is well in the mainstream of conventional portraiture as can be seen from so many other portraits.

No one knows the identity of the page boy, but noble families in Europe competed to get their children enrolled in the Order from a very early age, since this would matter greatly when seniority and postings were considered. From the around 100 young boys studying to become knights, the Grand Master would then choose 12 pages who would serve him at the palace.

The event, a second ‘Evening with Caravaggio’, was organised by the St John’s Co-Cathedral Foundation.