Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? What insights that masterwork reveals about the rebellious genius
A youthful lad cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of you
Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in several other works by the master. In each case, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers 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 begins to untie the black sash of his robe.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.