What exactly was the black-winged deity of love? The insights this masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The young boy screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. A certain element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.
He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black eyes – features in several other paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial works indeed make explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.