Who was the dark-feathered god of love? What insights this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful lad screams as his skull is forcefully held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in view of you
Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a music score, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his three images of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly in front of you.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That may be the very first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings indeed make overt erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this account was documented.
