Who exactly was the black-winged god of desire? What secrets this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A youthful boy screams while his head is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of you
Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost black pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned items that include stringed devices, a musical score, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there was another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's eye were everything but devout. What may be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed make overt erotic suggestions, 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 idea in consideration, viewers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.
