Academics such as Posner, Frommel and Hibbard have drawn upon extant documents (principally the correspondence of Dirk van Ameyden) that suggest the strong likelihood that he was homosexual and this may have influenced his tastes in the art he commissioned (including those by Caravaggio), as well as damaging prospects of assuming the papacy. Van Ameyden mischievously painted a portrait of a man that seemed to display more than a paternal care for the boys in his charge. But Graham-Dixon argues that such accusations seem deliberately to have been cast by the pro-Spanish Ameyden against the pro-French Del Monte in order to discredit him, and bear little real scrutiny. Besides which, there is better evidence that Del Monte had courted women in his youth. In short, the most honest and impartial scholarly conclusion about Del Monte's sexuality is that just as we currently do not have grounds to prove his homosexuality, we likewise do not have grounds to absolutely exclude that possibility.