What was the black-winged deity of love? What insights that masterwork reveals about the rogue genius
The young lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of you
Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in two additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling overturned items that include stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately before the spectator.
However there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early works do make explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was recorded.
