Who exactly was the black-winged deity of love? What insights that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
The youthful lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's neck. One definite element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black pupils – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master created his multiple images of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but holy. That may be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass vase.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings do make overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.
