Amor Vincit Omnia 2025
Caravaggio painted his Amor Vincit Omnia for a Cardinal who kept it behind a curtain, shown only to select visitors. The beautiful, knowing boy — modelled on the painter's young companion — was coded desire given sacred form, hidden in plain sight. Three centuries later, Bob Mizer was doing the same thing in a Hollywood studio: photographs of young men circulating quietly among those who knew how to read them.
The model is Richard DuBois, photographed by Mizer in the 1950s. The pose was already reaching beyond the frame — one finger raised, body in the arrested moment before flight. The embroidered wings complete what the photograph began: cells of thread worked in deep blues, greens, and warm bronzes, semi-abstract in execution, closer to stained glass than illustration. They give a body already coded with desire the iconography that was historically used to exclude or condemn him.
Love conquers all. It always found form — in the Cardinal's curtained painting, in the plain brown envelope, in the stitch.
The model is Richard DuBois, photographed by Bob Mizer for the Athletic Model Guild in the 1950s.
